Millennium Odysseos vol 47 no 3 2019 for SRO.pdf (461.7 kB)
Stolen life’s poetic revolt
Joining the discussion of revolution and resistance in world politics, this article puts forward the idea of poetic revolt as a necessary companion to these terms, one which centres attention on the ongoing reverberations of transatlantic slavery – what have been called its ‘afterlives’ (Saidiya Hartman, Édouard Glissant). Engaging with contributions to poetics, black studies and black feminist thought, it first develops a theoretical orientation of the ongoingness of slavery as a ‘grammar of captivity’ (Hortense Spillers) that ‘wake work’, a term proposed by Christina Sharpe, aims to disrupt. The article calls for methodological attention to the fugitive and wayward arts and acts of living, that is, what Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten call the ‘sociopoetic’ practices of enslaved and legally-emancipated populations to illuminate the simultaneity and entanglement of structuring violence and poetic revolt. Second, drawing on Spillers’ scholarship on homiletics – the study of and participation in sermons – in particular United States contexts, it identifies and discusses three aspects of poetic revolt: ‘fabulation’, world-making otherwise and resignification, through which such communities developed a critical and insurgent posture aimed at rupturing this grammar of captivity and at forging critical, futurally-oriented sociabilities. Third, in conclusion, it discusses the links of poetic revolt, in its specificity in Atlantic slavery, to wider systemic critique. Pluralising our thinking on revolution and resistance, poetic revolt, it argues, is best seen as a critical meditation on futurity.
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Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
MillenniumISSN
0305-8298Publisher
SAGE PublicationsExternal DOI
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3Volume
47Page range
341-372Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2019-06-07First Open Access (FOA) Date
2019-06-07First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2019-06-06Usage metrics
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