Abstract
In their book Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds, Pugh and Chandler (2021) demonstrate the relevance of islands for developing relational ontologies, which they argue are central to debates about the Anthropocene. In The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene, they offer a different mode of critique through the figurative ‘world as abyss’, one that is non-relational and of refusal. They contend that disruptions offered by the ontological and relational turns in critical thought do not adequately address the ongoing violence of the ‘world’ (i.e., the modern world) and ‘world making’. In concert with critical postcolonial scholars, they present the world as inseparable from coloniality and the violence that continues to constitute it. Drawing on Black studies, they argue that the world is inseparable from the violence of chattel slavery and racial capitalism. At the time I started reading the book, I could not help but engage the island across from me in the Indian Ocean. This island has been unavailable to the modern world. It is home to the Sentinelese tribe that has long refused contact with anyone who has tried to approach the island, that which coloniality renders as a territory of India. It made me wonder if the material specificity of the island and the surrounding sea was engaged in their refusal of the world. As it became clear that the world as abyss, even if figurative, is historically but also materially grounded in the Caribbean, it reinforced for me the potential relevance of the ‘matter’ of geography for a radical politics of refusal. Thus, it came to influence what I try to think through in this response on how particular ways of engaging the Caribbean and the world as abyss intersects with how geographers engage refusal, and island and sea materialities elsewhere.
The world as abyss draws on Édouard Glissant's (1997) poetics of the abyss. Glissant discusses the abyss in relation to the Middle Passage. He locates the abyss in three places: (1) material hold of the slave ship; (2) the depths of the sea; and (3) the unknown ahead of the ship's bow that projects a ‘reverse image of all that has been left behind’ in ‘blue savannas of memory or imagination’ (Glissant, 1997: 7). His account of the abyss suggests that the material terrains across the sea hold the torment of the three places of the abyss, but also the first encounter in the island (i.e., in the Caribbean) as a place of exchange. This exchange is of ‘not just a specific knowledge, appetite, suffering, and delight of one particular people, not only that, but knowledge of the Whole’ (Glissant, 1997: 8). Here, difference, as I understand, is experienced not by ‘living on exception’ or as ‘things that are foreign’, i.e., not through the medium of subjects, but in its singularity as ‘shared knowledge’; this is irreducible ‘Relation’ that does not give birth to a ‘modern force’ (Glissant, 1997: 8). Glissant furthers that in this way, ‘the experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss’; and the woven ‘veil’ makes way not for the land left behind, but for Relation (Glissant, 1997: 7, 8). These poetics of the abyss, as I understand, inform the figurative assembling inside the world as abyss, such that the ontological violence of modern world-making takes place outside (55), and the inside is a hold of unknowability, of ‘suspension’, where violently forged subjects of modernist time become visible and are held off – The World as Abyss calls this ‘hold time’ or ‘time of refusal’ (69, 62). It also locates refusal, as ‘abyssal sociality’, in the Caribbean through practices of carnival and marronage, which it argues activate unavailability to the world for ‘ontological clarification’ (45). The book's concern with ontology becomes clear through its engagement with several key thinkers in Black studies, including Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira da Silva, but for the purpose of the figurative world as abyss itself, perhaps more so with Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo's book The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. In The Repeating Island, the Caribbean is seen as a central site of the production of the global color line that presupposes who counts as ‘subject’ and ‘being’ in the world (27). The World as Abyss engages the metaphor of ‘the repeating island’, which denotes the repetition of this process of producing subjects in the world, to expose the ontological basis of ‘the division of the world, between colonizer and colonized, between human and non-human, between reason and irrationalism, between aid producer and aid receiver’ (28). Furthermore, through Benítez-Rojo's discussion of carnival, it argues that carnival defers these divisions by holding differentiations in ‘play’, in suspension (30) and in this way, deconstructs the ‘veil of being’ (45).
The figurative world as abyss thus rendered is deeply geographic. It is time and space held together by the materialities of memory/land, the boat, the sea, and the island, all of which at once mark the ontological violence and refusal of the ‘world’. As such, it decenters the starting place for a critique of modernity and the Anthropocene to be around the question of how to be in, and engage with, the world. Instead, it invites considerations of how the ‘world’ and the ‘human’ are forged in the first place as well as the ontological and racialized basis of their construction. This call for attention to the centrality of racialization in the making of the modern world resonates with critical scholarship in geography. For instance, scholars have asserted that anti-Blackness is a pre-condition, rather than an effect, of global capitalism (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019). For geographers who draw on Indigenous and Black scholarship for their critique of the Anthropocene, ‘the structures of domination and the wake of the slave ship are contemporary issues, not plot points in some grand history of Europe’ (Curley and Smith, 2024: 16). Thus, through a mode of critique that engages island and sea materialities, and for which the stakes are particularly ontological, the book contributes to ongoing efforts in geography to un-world the world. It invites questions of refusal in geographic work on islands and oceans, where scholars are increasingly turning to the Caribbean for critical thought. For instance, in his study of social movements across Caribbean and Pacific Ocean islands, Sasha Davis (2012) draws on The Repeating Island to locate repeating islands of resistance; he finds that while islands can be enrolled as stand-alone entities to replicate militarized landscapes, they can also be engaged in their multiplicity to build connections of solidarity. Philip Steinberg (2022) draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of ‘tidalectics’ to illustrate the ocean's rendering of a non-linear notion of time, which he shows can have critical purchase in political geography. There is also scholarship across disciplines, including Black studies, geography, and island studies, where islands and oceans are seen as generative sites to think from, about, and against coloniality. Lines of critique extended from some of these engagements include relational entanglements, as discussed in Anthropocene Islands; and modes of refusal, as taken up by scholars who think with Caribbean-based practices and the ocean more broadly.
In Black geographies, marronage has been theorized to critically read landscapes for how they can be enrolled in acts of refusal to resist oppressive racializing structures (Wright, 2020; Winston, 2021). These literatures engage marronage as ‘more than a relic of the past’ to locate the possibility of a radical politics of refusal beyond the spatial and temporal specificity of the Caribbean (Wright, 2020: 1143). They show how place can be made outside racialized structures, not for survival alone, but also for ‘consolidation of radically alternative norms and ethics’ (Winston, 2021: 2193). In such modes of place-making might also lie a response to what I identify as abyssal work's provocation of locating modes of existence that don’t map onto, and are unavailable to, a colonial rendering of space or an essentialized rendering of space for coloniality to redeem. In thinking with and through sea materialities, Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020:112) locates refusal as praxis in being seen ‘without being known’. In her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, she problematizes notions of recognition by engaging marine mammals that are hard to identify (Gumbs, 2020). In addition, her writings elsewhere that engage the ocean through non-linear registers of spacetime, disclose the violence and refusal of racialization in ways that appear to bear resonance with abyssal sociality and hold time (Gumbs, 2018; Gumbs and Sharpe, 2022). The World as Abyss locates a lack of ontological security across Gumbs work (77). Perhaps what might distinguish abyssal thought from these engagements is its positionality of the impossibility to be in the world in a redemptive capacity. It does not, thus, see refusal as redemption but more as ‘holding differentiations together in ways that are strange, paradoxical, even, frightening’ (31). Here, I wonder how might abyssal thought encounter liberal notions of redemption or freedom that are inverted for a production of space otherwise. With this, I am thinking of possible intersections with work in geography that re-orient what is at stake for a notion of freedom, such as in abolition geography (Gross-Wyrtzen and Moulton, 2023; Goffe, 2024). Abyssal thought also likely differs from geographic work that too foregrounds the past–present–future of colonial violence and disrupts world-making (and saving) endeavors that leave structural violence intact (Gergan et al., 2024; Curley and Smith, 2024), in that it does not appear to engage anticolonial futurity. For instance, in their critique of a ‘futurity overdetermined by trauma’, scholars have activated multiple futurities of refusal, repair, recovery, liberation, and sovereignty of marginalized groups (Gergan et al., 2024: 8). The world as abyss, as I understand, does not activate futurity as it ‘does not provide an imaginary of a beyond’ (80). Here, I wonder how might ‘futural properties’ that are not ‘essentialized' be encountered in abyssal thought (53)?
In this reflection, engaging The World as Abyss served as a reminder that the ‘matter’ of geography is perhaps also a ‘matter’ of methodology, such that the materialities with which one thinks with in one place, can involve, and offer disruptions in, multiple places. While the book left me wanting for more insights on work in geography that resonate with abyssal work's call to end the world of ongoing colonial violence, it offers important disruptions that further this engagement. It brings together key works in Caribbean and Black studies to offer a distinct mode of critique that problematizes notions of ‘subject’ and ‘being’ in the world that is ‘veiled as natural’ (69). It shows how engaging spacetimes as places of refusal, and from where a poetics of material geographies can arise, poses a challenge to the availability of geographies, such as the island across from me in the Indian Ocean, to a domain of knowable subjects, in singular totalizing categories of world-making, or to thought itself (Grove, 2023). By centering the violence of the world of ‘entities and laws’ almost always at the risk of becoming available for coloniality (61), the book invites considerations of spacetimes outside prescriptive frameworks of ontology and epistemology. Here, I am reminded of the anonymity, and narratives of the underwater world in resistance to the Middle Passage, as offered by electronic music duo Drexciya (McKittrick, 2021). Scholars have posited Drexciya's world as a place to think from about more-than-human ontologies (DeLoughrey, 2023) and the sound-labor of its music as disruptive of dominant ways of engaging knowledge (McKittrick, 2021). Perhaps Drexciya's world in the ocean is also of refusal, of suspension, in the abyss of the sea where pregnant women were made to drown, but where the descendants of the drowned live in fluid indeterminacy, unavailable to the world that renders life possible only through the infrastructures of racial capitalism.
