Parasiting Setting: Occluded Archives, Description, and Abolition Ecology
Thursday, October 29, 2026 | 5PM
302 Philosophy Hall
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A guest lecture with Monique Allewaert, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This talk introduces the letters a free black woman and an enslaved man penned for a colonial projector in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ostensibly vehicles for colonial natural history, these letters also spark with residues of the labor, knowledges, and experiences of the racialized writers who scribed them. The talk foregrounds moments where the letters describe the West Indian landscape. By reading these passages, as well as the materiality of the letters, against their "bias grain" (Marisa Fuentes), I seek to turn description-once the colonial naturalist's tool for manufacturing a univocal nature-into an instrument of decolonial placemaking. This method of (re)description feeds on the letters' own energies to disclose para-sites: places and powers surviving at the edges of plantation enclosure.
Presented by The Early Americanist and 18th-Century British Colloquia. Co-sponsored by the Center for American Studies, the Institute for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
