Current Projects
Anti-Time and Ancestral Memory in Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
Jamaica Kincaid’s An Autobiography of My Mother (1996) responds to a temporal rupture caused by Carib genocide and chattel slavery in the Caribbean. Xuela Claudette Richardson’s mother dies during childbirth and is abandoned by her father. Carib, Scott, and African, Kincaid’s protagonist metonymizes a larger Caribbean history, marked by the violent encounter of three worlds: Indigenous, European, and African. Confronting silences in the archive, she retells her mother’s biography through her own autobiography. She invents a timeline outside the confines of Western imperial history: first through precolonial cyclical temporalities, which she recovers through her body’s menstrual cycle; second, through anti-temporality, which she seeks out through non-procreative sex acts, including abortions and masturbation. Her novel, moreover, is nonlinear and fractured and concludes with a temporal inversion: Xuela’s husband reverse ages and ceases to exist and her mother is reborn from Xuela’s death.
This paper reads the novel through postcolonial and queer studies. I borrow from Lee Edelman’s idea of anti-futurity and José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of queerness as always “not yet here,” to demonstrate how queer time operates in the novel as a reprieve from the suffocating imperial timelines of Western history. Édouard Glissant argues in Caribbean Discourse that Western progressivist history commits epistemic violence by homogenizing and silencing the multiplicity of histories. He advocates for relational, non-linear temporalities that allow subjective memory to counter single narratives.Kincaid actualizes an anti-futurist and utopic timeline from the confines of Western temporality by constructing a protagonist who resists being instrumentalized by national and colonial projects of futurity. Rather, Kincaid positions history not as linear inheritance but as layered, affective and ancestral memory. Kincaid’s narrative collapses linear temporality into a distinct Caribbean queer temporality. By entangling histories, Kincaid invents a subjunctive temporality in which a precolonial histories can be imagined.
Mutated Realisms and the Pesticide South
Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate portray pesticide-driven catastrophe in Global South plantation zones. In UFJ, a Chicanx child laborer at the US/Mexico borderlands is poisoned during a routine pesticide dusting and a family of migrant fieldhands performs syncretic spiritual practices to keep him alive. In DR, Amanda and her daughter Nina, while vacationing in the Argentine countryside, are poisoned by a soy plantation’s pesticide runoff and a neighbor solicits a shaman to perform a soul-splitting ceremony to keep Nina alive.
I argue that both novels exemplify what I call “mutated realism,” a genre that uses gothic and horror aesthetics to expose the racialized, classed, and chemically induced “slow violence” of plantation monocultures. I propose “mutated realisms” as a uniquely southern genre of environmental writing which rejects an environmentalism dominated by Global North forms of storytelling. By retelling the Anthropocene through chemically induced bodily transformations, both novels return to the plantation as an origin and ongoing actor that shapes human-nonhuman relationships. Two types of mutations occur: a material one that fuses body with ecosystem; a generic one that synthesizes realism with postcolonial epistemologies. Spiritual hauntings and curanderismo symbolically and materially suture bodies and souls with the landscape. The novels suggest that survival requires confronting colonial legacies while integrating pre- and postcolonial ways of knowing. Furthermore, mutated realism offers lessons in surviving the plantation’s death worlds by imagining futures made possible through mutation.
