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Terrestrial Humanism and the Weight of World Literature: Reading Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2020

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Abstract

Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel, Washington Black (2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves.

Keywords

Esi EdugyanWashington Blackworld literatureslaveryterrestrial humanismFrantz Fanon
Type
Articles
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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 1 - 23
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© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 In at least half of its efforts, this article therefore follows a general trend in the past decade to insist on the importance of postcolonial critique to the discourse of world literature. To name only a few significant contributions: Mufti, Aamir, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature,” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 458–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Robert, “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. D’haen, Theo, Damrosch, David, Kadir, Djelal (London: Routledge, 2014), 213–22Google Scholar; Burns, Lorna, Postcolonialism After World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nevertheless, I would not claim my approach as a strictly postcolonial analysis, even though I draw on two of the field’s foundational figures (Frantz Fanon and Edward Said). By pushing for a form of humanism, even one radically revised from its original Enlightenment associations, my approach might sit uncomfortably with some postcolonial work.

2 I’m referring in turn to the well-known definitions of David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and the Warwick Research Collective, respectively. Following, I take Damrosch and WReC with Franco Moretti as broadly representative of the field, although I recognize that there are many other equally influential and diverse modes of reading or writing world literature, advanced by Wai Chee Dimock, Giuseppe Coco, Djelal Kadir, Tiphaine Samoyault, Rebecca Walkowitz, Alexander Beecroft, and Pheng Cheah, to name only a few. (I return to Cheah’s work later in the article.) I do not mean to do a disservice to an exciting and sometimes explosive field, but rather to sketch a broad characterization against which I can position the rest of the article’s argument.

3 Apter, Emily, “Terrestrial Humanism: Edward W. Said and the Politics of World Literature,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds. Behdad, Ali and Thomas, Dominic (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 439–53Google Scholar (450). Apter includes the same article in part 3, chapter 3, of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, 2013). Due to the Covid-19 crisis I am only able to access an unpaginated ebook of Against World Literature, and so I reference the Companion in order to provide readers with exact page numbers.

4 Huggan, Graham, “The Trouble with World Literature,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds. Behdad, Ali and Thomas, Dominic (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 490–506, esp. 490–91).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Damrosch, David, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Huggan, “The Trouble with World Literature,” 494. See also Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January/February 2000): 54–68.

7 Huggan, “The Trouble with World Literature,” 494.

8 Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), 53 Google Scholar. The emphasis on the phrase “lower level” is mine.

9 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57–58. For a succinct overview of the many objections to distant reading, along with a sustained critique of it, see Ascari, Maurizio, “The Dangers of Distant Reading: Reassessing Moretti’s Approach to Literary Genres,” Genre 47.1 (2014): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 2006), chap. 8Google Scholar. See also Oliver, Kelly, Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 26–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for her commentary on Arendt’s terrestrial interests.

11 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University, 2015), 50.Google Scholar

12 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 9. See also Apter, Against World Literature, 64.

13 Deckard, Sharae and Shapiro, Stephen, “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An Introduction,” in World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, eds. Deckard, Sharae and Shapiro, Stephen (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 1–48 Google Scholar, esp. 21. This later description makes it even more difficult to characterize “world literature” as a way of writing, not reading, as the WReC had initially insisted.

14 Timothy Brennan has described this as a choice between “either an ensemble of books confected of an aesthetic dream of universal uplift, or a faceless network of systemic determinants whose ‘materialism’ makes literary trends appear as unconscious as volcanic eruptions or the migration of birds.” He prefers instead a more sustained engagement with “the real world of peoples and texts,” a perspective that I think terrestrial humanism gets us toward, though perhaps with a more explicitly political agenda. See Brennan, Timothy, “Cosmopolitanism and World Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, eds. Etherington, Ben and Zimbler, Jarad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 23–36, esp. 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 In centering the individual literary text, and the hermeneutic and creative work of the individual literary critic, my aim is not to do away with structural or systemic analysis, which is clearly imperative for building networks of solidarity and opposing neoliberalism’s fragmentation and marketization of everything—higher education included. But it is to ask what is being lost with such a dogmatic dismissal of close reading as some kind of ineffective liberal wash that is structurally complicit with neoliberalism: it can and should be so much more than that. An imperative and recently published guide here is Juan Meneses, who in his book, Resisting Dialogues: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), explores the many ways in which close reading promotes political literacy and fashions civic and community commitments, specifically in and against the post-political crisis of the neoliberal era.

16 See Chariandy, David, “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada,” Callaloo 30.3 (Summer 2007): 818–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For longer overviews of Black or African Canadian literature, see Walcott, Rinaldo’s Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003)Google Scholar, or Clarke, George Elliott’s Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clarke’s study has clear influences on Edugyan’s novel, as does his poetry more generally—part 3 of Washington Black is set in Nova Scotia, the “home” of Clarke’s “Africadian” literature. Dionne Brand’s work is of course also at the center of this recent history. Leslie Sanders offers a more recent survey in her article, “‘Maybe This Wide Country’: African Canadian Writing and the Poetics of Space,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 48.6 (2019): 610–25; and Isabel Carrera-Suárez also offers a comprehensive overview Black Canadian writing’s interest in themes of belonging and displacement from the perspective of diaspora and Afropolitan studies in “Negotiating Singularity and Alikeness: Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill and Canadian Afrodiasporic writing,” European Journal of English Studies 21.2 (2017): 159–73.

17 Edugyan, Esi, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2014), 6–7, 31–32Google Scholar. Edugyan’s title, “Elsewhere,” flags the influence of Édouard Glissant and other Caribbean poets and theorists on her work.

18 Carrera-Suárez, “Negotiating Singularity and Alikeness,” 171.

19 Edugyan, Esi, Washington Black (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019)Google Scholar. For the remainder of the article, I will reference page numbers from this edition of the novel in parentheses after the quotation.

20 As Titch remarks in a revealing and reluctant attempt to conceal his abolitionist politics while still on the plantation in the novel’s early pages: “No progress without blood, I suppose” (80).

21 Gikandi, Simon, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 4.Google Scholar

22 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, xvi.

23 For a thorough compendium of such narratives, see Taylor, Yuval, ed., I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, Volume One, 1770–1849 (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999)Google Scholar; see also Thomas, Helen, Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

24 Ganguly, Debjani, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 28.Google Scholar

25 Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 21.

26 Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Sbragia, Albert (London: Verso, 2000), 10.Google Scholar

27 Though posing as the “tendentially reformist” and “normative genre” that is the subject of Joe Slaughter’s critique, I will argue here that Edugyan’s novel has more earthly designs in mind. See Slaughter, Joseph, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), esp. 27–28 and 38–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, xiii. Gikandi acknowledges the obvious influence of Said, Edward’s work on “contrapuntal reading” in Gikandi, Simon, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).Google Scholar

29 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993).Google Scholar

30 In this pivotal moment for the novel’s plot, Edugyan is making a surreptitious and anachronistic reference to Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates, who disappeared into a snow storm during the 1910 to 1913 British “Terra Nova” expedition to the Antarctic (Titch’s name may even be a reworking of Titus, though Nova Scotia is of course in the Arctic, not the Antarctic). Oates’s famous words—“I am just going outside and may be some time”—are today regarded as a quintessential expression of male British imperialism’s culture of “heroic failure.” See Barczewski, Stephanie, Heroic Failure and the British (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 197–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Davies, Dominic, Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 187 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Titch’s balloon plays on the image of hot air balloon travel that has come to be associated with Jules Verne’s proto-globalization 1872 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). However, no balloon actually features in Verne’s original story—that is director Michael Anderson’s addition, who included the now iconic balloon flight in his 1956 film adaptation of the book.

32 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, xvi, 259–62.

33 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40, esp. 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 There is a nod to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe here, an obvious intertext for a novel so self-consciously interested in both the act of narration and the earthly dynamics of slavery and colonization. While stranded upon the island, Crusoe literally tries to reinvent the wheel, significantly for the purpose of a wheelbarrow that he might then use to build his new home. He is thwarted, however, because he finds “no possible way to make the iron gudgeons for the spindle or axis of the wheel to run in.” See Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 54–55.Google Scholar

35 McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxi.Google Scholar

36 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxvi, my emphasis.

37 For the philosopher Sylvia Wynter, McKittrick’s interlocutor, “demonic grounds” signify also “the absented presence of black womanhood,” which McKittrick then develops. Despite the novel’s absence of leading Black female characters, I think it is possible to read Esi Edugyan herself as an authorial “absent presence,” with the effect of constructing the world of the novel as an epistemological space that bears some resemblance to Wynter’s and McKittrick’s demonic grounds. See Sanders’ commentary on Wynter and McKittrick in ‘“Maybe This Wide Country,” 610–25, esp. 623, and also McKittrick, Katherine, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015).Google Scholar

38 In Demonic Grounds, McKittrick is rightly cautious both of a “geographic humanism” and “humanism” in general, which after all finds its most brutal spatial expression in the spaces of the plantation and the stately home. Nevertheless, McKittrick does rehabilitate a Fanonian humanism in relation to Wynter’s extensive work on “being human” to explore how “the body is necessarily part of a human struggle … and therefore signals that black geographies are human geographies, not simply skin.” McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 24. This interest in the human is central to Washington Black, as I explore in more detail following.

39 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36–37.

40 Byrd, Jodi’s The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a series of compelling detailed accounts of the imperial land grabs launched under the auspices of scientific discovery.

41 Blevins, Steven, Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 35.

43 Blevins, Living Cargo, 18–19.

44 Blevins, Living Cargo, 4.

45 Blevins, Living Cargo, 4.

46 Blevins, Living Cargo, 19. Blevins acknowledges that there are of course “all kinds of life forms that circulate as bio-cargo” that are not categorized as “human,” suggesting the relevance of the posthumanities to these concerns, though conceding these are beyond the scope of his study. See Blevins, Living Cargo, 303, fn. 37. Similarly, though, the posthumanities are clearly on the edge of my argument here; in the interests of space they must in this article remain beyond it.

47 Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 2.

48 Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 18, emphasis in original.

49 Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 18, emphasis in original.

50 Blevins, Living Cargo, 18–19.

51 There is no Corvus Peak in Barbados. There is, however, a Corvus Peak in Mt. Edziza Provincial Park on the western edge of Edugyan’s British Columbia, Canada—another curious twist in novel’s geography.

52 Quoted in Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 4. The full article is available here: Kant, Immanuel, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” in Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Reiss, Hans, trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60, esp. 54.Google Scholar

53 Oliver, Earth and World, 5.

54 This distinction allows Oliver to develop an “earth ethics”: “an ethics of sharing the earth even when we do not share a world. This earth ethics is based on our shared cohabitation of our earthly home.” Oliver, Earth and World, 5. There are strong overlaps here with Pheng Cheah’s normative theory of world literature, which reconceptualizes “world” as a temporal rather than spatial category. By tracing a similar philosophical genealogy as Oliver (Kant, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida), Cheah reconceives “world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds.” See Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. I will return briefly to Cheah’s work later in this article.

55 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 4.

56 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 8.

57 Quoted in Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 4. See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwaite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 110–11.

58 Washington’s acceptance of this Enlightenment ideal is not entirely uncritical, however, and he frequently considers the grim terrestrial realities of his own historical moment. As he reflects about one-third of the way through the novel: “It had happened so gradually, but these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I’d been born for a higher purpose, to draw the earth’s bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only—I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered” (165).

59 I have here had to gloss over some of the intricacies of the plot in the interests of space, but the general point—that Washington’s sketching enables his freedom, and thus confers upon him an Enlightenment version of “humanity”—still stands. Tanna herself is an aspiring artist, and though not so naturally gifted as Washington, she similarly equates the “progress” of her “drawing” with her “freedom of movement” (244).

60 The influence of Glissant is again palpable here, in his reflections on “the presence (and the weight) of an increasingly global historical consciousness,” and the role that literature can play in allowing “the weight of lived experience” to “slip in” to history, clearly informing Edugyan’s own work. See Édouard Glissant, “The Quarrel with History” and “History and Literature,” Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 61–66, 69–86.

61 Mercer, Kobena, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 4.10 (1990): 61–78, esp. 62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 Knocked unconscious by the blast, when Washington first comes around he describes an initial fear that he has been caught “between worlds, that my death had not been complete and I’d been left suspended and weightless, lost” (86); it takes him only a moment longer to remember that it was Philip’s “desire to eat” that has caused “pain like a sunrise in my skull” (87). As should by now be clear, I have not overemphasized the extent to which weight and weightlessness saturate the world of Washington Black. Although the metaphor is not used so abundantly that its meaning is lost, it is written—in yet another example of Edugyan’s extraordinary authorial control—so that the novel itself weighs heavy with images of weight.

63 The dramatic revelation of the inhuman face of Frankenstein’s monster occurs in the final paragraphs of Shelley’s novel, in his climactic confrontation with Walton. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 152. Articles discussing themes of humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism in Frankenstein are too numerous to mention here, but we might note Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the way in which Shelley’s novel destabilizes “Kant’s three-part conception of the human subject” in her influential article, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 243–361. For a poetic reflection on the anticolonial politics of the duppy, meanwhile, see Rebekah Lawrence, “The Third-World Duppy,” The Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5.3 (Summer 2008): 98: “If I were a duppy / I would hunt down Columbus, Cortez and de res’ ah dem so-called discovers / … And their descendants.”

64 Willard actually survives Washington’s defensive attack, only to be later caught for the murder of another freed slave in England and hanged. Washington learns of the hanging and goes to see it in person, catching a “fleeting” glance of “Willard’s face” before his death, though oddly, there is no mention of a scar or wounded eye (363). In a reflective passage, however, Edugyan weaves the hanging into the larger symbolic economy of her novel, gently reminding readers that it is Willard’s weight, and the sudden dropping of his body from a scaffold, that is the eventual cause of his death (365).

65 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), xviii.

66 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 5–6.

67 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 1, 3, my emphasis. The imagery of Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” lingers in this metaphysical architecture.

68 In his well-known introduction to the 1986 reissue of Black Skin, White Masks, Homi Bhabha acknowledges in a conspicuous footnote Fanon’s tendency to portray white women according to cultural stereotypes and his outright refusal to speak of women of color (“I know nothing about her”). Bhabha is satisfied that “Fanon’s use of the word ‘man’ usually connotes a phenomenological quality of humanness, inclusive of man and woman” and leaves the question of gender there. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xxxvi–xxxvii. Though a thorough response is beyond the scope of this article, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997) offers a more rigorous defense of Fanon’s rhetorical and political position on gender. She emphasizes that Black Skin, White Masks is “at once a clinical study and an experiential narrative,” excluding not only women’s experiences but several other subjectivities too. As Fanon himself concedes: “Many Negroes will not find themselves in what follows. This is equally true of whites.” See Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon, 12; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5.

69 Admittedly, Fanon is writing here about colonialism, rather than slavery per se, but he views the one as a continuation of the other, describing the colonized as “slaves of modern times.” See Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 34.

70 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5–6.

71 Cheah, What Is a World?, 195.

72 I am implicitly referring here to Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang’s influential article, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1.1 (2012): 1–40, which reminds us of the importance of physical territory in processes of decolonial world-making. As they write: “Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article). Land is what is most valuable, contested, required” (5). This is something that Fanon stresses, too, more explicitly in Wretched of the Earth than Black Skin, White Masks: “What [the colonized] demand is not the status of the colonist, but his place. In their immense majority the colonized want the colonist’s farm. There is no question for them of competing with the colonist. They want to take his place.” See Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 23, my emphasis. Let me add here, then, that although the humanism I’m sketching out is influenced by theorists of decolonization, I am not making the case for an exact synonymy between a “decolonial” or “decolonized” humanism and a “terrestrial” one. This would be to “metaphorize decolonization” and thus to “resettle theory” all over again, something Tuck and Wang warn sharply against. Although for Said and Fanon a terrestrial humanism would eventually enable some forms of decolonization, we should be cautious of assuming that the first somehow inherently forecloses or necessitates the latter.

73 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 31.

74 See Apter, “Terrestrial Humanism,” 451, and Said, Edward, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 7–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Apter’s argument also builds on Mufti, Aamir, “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 1–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Said’s Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), and After the Last Sky (London: Vintage, 1986), among others.

75 Apter, “Terrestrial Humanism,” 440–44. For an extended comparative discussion of Said, Fanon, and humanism, see Anthony C. Alessandrini, “Humanism in Question: Fanon and Said,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 431–50.

76 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 26.

77 Apter, “Terrestrial Humanism,” 451. See also Said, Edward, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 92.Google Scholar

78 I’m clearly writing under the influence of the fairly recent turn against symptomatic reading and critique advocated by Bruno Latour and Rita Felski, among others. Although I welcome Felski’s call for a more positive and productive approach to texts, I would not want to do away entirely with critique, as this article itself should evidence. With Said (and, for that matter, Raymond Williams), I believe the critic’s role as an active participant in the production of a text’s meaning in the world must be acknowledged. One way in which I am managing this nuance is by insisting, against figures such as Latour, on the place of the human in the act of reading and writing world literature. See Rita Felskis, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48; see also Burns, Postcolonialism After World Literature, 8–11, for a useful commentary on some of these tensions.

79 Edugyan’s desert might also be read in a philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through to Arendt and Heidegger, where the desert evolves as a metaphor for an “inhospitable region”—Robinson Crusoe’s desert island—to describe more generally a condition of “worldlessness” and “a lack of connection between people and peoples.” See Oliver, Earth and World, 29–38.

80 See Oliver, Earth and World, 43. Glissant is here again, too. As he writes: “Methodologies passively assimilated, far from reinforcing a global consciousness or permitting the historical process to be established beyond the ruptures experienced, will simply contribute to worsening the problem” (Glissant, “The Quarrel with History,” 61).

81 This metaphor is further extended when we account for the fact that the first Cloud-cutter, on which Titch and Washington escaped the plantation, is now a “wreckage” at the “bottom of the ocean” (137, 166).

82 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 5.

83 There is perhaps a case to be made—which do not have room to pursue here—that in this final scene Washington is looking toward the “territory” once occupied by his African ancestors. Here, at the end of the novel, he has stepped foot on the African continent for the first time in his life. In the novel’s opening scenes on the plantation, Big Kit plans the suicides of both herself and Washington with the aim of attaining their return spiritual return to West Africa: “She was of an ancient African faith rooted in the high river lands of Africa, and in that faith the dead were reborn, whole, back in their homelands to walk again free” (8). Washington’s new life, intimated here by the rising sun, might thus be read as the full recovery of Black life from the violent social death metered out by the slave trade and that is epitomized in the necropolitical space of the plantation in the novel’s first two chapters.

84 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 235.

85 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 237–38.

86 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 28.