The “Poetics of the Hold” in M. NourbeSe Philip’s "Zong! as Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng"

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22456/2236-6385.156105

Abstract

Fabienne Kanor, in La poétique de la cale (2022), proposes reclaiming the slave ship’s hold as a site of memory – a spectral space. In a transnational dialogue with the Shoah and state terrorism in the Southern Cone, the author seeks a memory that restores the humanity stolen from the victims of the Middle Passage. In Zong! (2008), M. NourbeSe Philip challenges the archival silence regarding the anonymous bodies cast into the sea, attempting a memory of the unrepresentable. This work explores the “poetics of the hold” that Philip traces within a traumatized text, encoding the horrors of the ship and the marine space to conjure its spectres and, thus, “not tell the story that must be told.”

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Paula Aguilar, Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos

Profesora en FHAyCS, Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos. Doctora en Letras por la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, investigadora del Centro Regional de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CRIHCS), integrante del Grupo Internacional de Investigación “Océanos, desplazamientos y resistencia en la Literatura Contemporánea”. Universidad de Playa Ancha, Chile

Published

2026-06-15

How to Cite

AGUILAR, Paula. The “Poetics of the Hold” in M. NourbeSe Philip’s "Zong! as Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng". Cadernos do IL, [S. l.], n. 70, p. 156–169, 2026. DOI: 10.22456/2236-6385.156105. Disponível em: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/cadernosdoil/article/view/156105. Acesso em: 8 aug. 2026.

Issue

Section

Artigos de estudos literários