Creolisation and Black Women's Subjectivities in the Diasporic Science Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson Jacolie

Haunting Temporalities: Creolisation and Black Women's Subjectivities in the Diasporic Science Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson Jacolien Volschenk This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, the Department of English, University of the Western Cape Date submitted for examination: 11 November 2016 Names of supervisors: Dr Alannah Birch and Prof Marika Flockemann i Keywords Diasporic science fiction, temporal entanglement, creolisation, black women’s subjectivities, modernity, slow violence, technology, empire, slavery, Nalo Hopkinson Abstract This study examines temporal entanglement in three novels by Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson. The novels are: Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and The Salt Roads (2004). The study pays particular attention to Hopkinson’s use of narrative temporalities, which are shape by creolisation. I argue that Hopkinson creatively theorises black women’s subjectivities in relation to (post)colonial politics of domination. Specifically, creolised temporalities are presented as a response to predatory Western modernity. Her innovative diasporic science fiction displays common preoccupations associated with Caribbean women writers, such as belonging and exile, and the continued violence enacted by the legacy of colonialism and slavery. A central emphasis of the study is an analysis of how Hopkinson not only employs a past gaze, as the majority of both Caribbean and postcolonial writing does to recover the subaltern subject, but also how she uses the future to reclaim and reconstruct a sense of selfhood and agency, specifically with regards to black women. Linked to the future is her engagement with notions of technological and social betterment and progress as exemplified by her emphasis on the use of technology as a tool of empire. By writing science fiction, Hopkinson is able to delve into the nebulous nexus of technology, empire, slavery, capitalism and modernity. And, by employing a temporality shaped by creolisation, she is able to collapse discrete historical time-frames, tracing obscured connections between the nodes of this nexus from its beginnings on the plantation, the birthplace of creolisation and, as some have argued, of modernity itself. Jacolien Volschenk ii Declaration I declare that Haunting Temporalities: Creolisation and Black Women's Subjectivities in the Diasporic Science Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university, and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. Name: Jacolien Volschenk Date: 11 November 2016 Signature: Jacolien Volschenk iii Acknowledgements I want to thank my supervisors, Miki and Lannie, without whom I would not have been able to complete this thesis. Their expertise, encouragement and hard work have been invaluable. I am grateful for the departmental research leave I received and the DVC-sponsored teaching relief that gave me time to focus on my thesis. I also want to thank my ever-patient husband, Peter, who kept me grounded and supported me throughout. Jacolien Volschenk iv For Jenaire who one day would have written her own doctoral thesis Jacolien Volschenk v Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Returning to the Point of Entanglement: Creolisation and Interlaced Temporalities in Nalo Hopkinson’s Fiction .......................................................................................................................25 Chapter 2 “Back-break ain’t for humans”: Root Identity, Land and Labour in Midnight Robber .................74 Chapter 3 Serving the Spirits: Relation Identity and Diasporic Spirituality in Brown Girl in the Ring ......137 Chapter 4 Sugar and Salt: Creolisation at the Crossroads of “forgetting and remembering” in The Salt Roads............................................................................................................................................179 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................256 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................269 Jacolien Volschenk 1 Introduction [M]odern life begins with slavery. [I]n terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with post-modern problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people a long time ago: certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and the need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad in order, as one of the characters says in [Beloved], “in order not to lose your mind.” These strategies for survival made the truly modern person. They’re a response to predatory western phenomena. You can call it an ideology and an economy, what it is is a pathology. Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They have had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true. − Toni Morrison (cited in Gilroy 221) In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy uses this statement by Toni Morrison to reveal the connections between slavery and modernity and to support his argument that “blacks . [were] the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” (221). He uses the image of the ship as an organising symbol for his project and for the traumatic Atlantic crossing and its equally destructive destination for the enslaved Africans. “The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro- political system in motion—is especially important for historical [reasons] . .” (4). But, considering Morrison’s statement, the plantation system serves as a more compelling and powerful signifier of “the historical experience of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean” than “Gilroy’s metaphor of the Black Atlantic’s Middle Passage as a ship” (Balutanski and Sourieau 5). The plantation signifies not only the inception of Western modernity, but it is also the place of origin of creolisation. Therefore, creolisation is an Afro-Caribbean reaction to the oppressive forces of Western modernity. Jacolien Volschenk 2 Creolisation, like Romanticism, is a response to modernity, but both have very specific contexts. There is a racial and diasporic specificity to creolisation which is still ongoing because the oppressive forces1 to which it responded are, though mutated, still present. Here I follow Lorna Burns’s definition where she states that: Rather than arguing that creolization displays a ‘historical specificity’ unique to the Caribbean or Caribbean colonization . [it] has been theorized as a concept that is contingent to the specificities of the given historical context in which it occurs. In this way, creolization may be specific to the particular historical experience of colonialism in the Caribbean, but its principles may also be extended to other areas without diluting the historical specificity of its Caribbean form. (Creolizing the Canon 10) In Poetics of Relation (1997), Édouard Glissant uses the plantation as a metaphor to connect modernity and slavery: “Within this universe of domination and oppression. on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies of our modernity begin to be detectable” (65). Glissant’s idea of modernity encompasses racialised labour, economic and political power relations and structures, but it can be extended to also refer to the development of modern science and technology as related to the plantation. In a doctoral thesis entitled “Enlightened Institutions: Science, Plantations, and Slavery in the English Atlantic, 1626-1700,” Eric Otremba examines how “Enlightenment ideas on reason, order, and progress . [influenced] the simultaneous expansion of slave-based work regimes,” and vice versa (iii). He goes on to explain that the discourse of the natural sciences (particularly in England) shared common roots with slavery and the Enlightenment and these ‘roots’ were plain to see in the “dual categories of knowing and dominating” that were part of an ethos which “advocated using new discoveries and innovations 1 These oppressive forces include exploitative capitalism, racialised political structures and Eurocentric notions of science and technology. Jacolien Volschenk 3 to streamline artisanal industries and to more thoroughly organize English labor routines, all for the sake of national plenty and profit” (iii).2 Thus, Caribbean plantations were understood as an “example of th[e] period’s strivings towards moral, natural, and economic improvement— hallmarks of early Enlightenment thought” (iii). Members of the British Royal Society, who were “experimental philosophy’s reformers and natural scientists portrayed the sugar plantation as a modern innovation par excellence, and the equivalent to other recent marvels such as gunpowder and the magnetic compass” (30). The plantation as

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