'Uncertain Voyages of Signification': Salvage Poetics of the Caribatopia. (September 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Thomas, Cathy
• Is Part Of: Comparative critical studies. Volume 19:Number 3(2022)
• Page Start: 315
• Page End: 340
• Publication Date: 2022-09
• Subjects: Caribbean futurity -- salvage poetics -- comic books -- atopia -- water -- Afro-Caribbean traditions; Comparative literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809
• DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2022.0451
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-1854

Abstract

Abstract : This essay considers how two comic books, Nalo Hopkinson's House of Whispers (2018–2020) and Matthew Clarke and Nigel Lynch's Hardears (2021), use a poetics of salvage to produce visually and textually rich speculative narratives that problematize Eurocentric versions of futurity. My argument is that the comic books conserve and preserve, through salvage, a diverse racial, spatial and historic archive from narratives that constantly remake bodies (human, animal, plant, metaphysical) alongside places and cosmologies within their larger imaginative geographies. They entangle nature, technology and ritual, and give rise to a Caribbean atopia, or what I term as 'the Caribatopia', the paradoxical qualities of an unconfined utopia or an inhospitable place marked by unusualness . These comic books by Caribbean creators augment the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the region, allowing these narratives to become allegorical and political sites producing fantastic atopic settings for representations of resistance and worldbuilding in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic life.