Against The Silence/The Violence of the Archive: Re-Writing Slavery from Fiction/Imagination and in The Feminine (Adelayda Fernández Ochoa, Fabienne Kanor and Évélyne Trouillot)

Authors

  • Karen Genschow Universidad Goethe de Frankfurt

Keywords:

slavery, women, archive, fiction, rewriting, Caribbean, gender perspective

Abstract

The article analyses three novels (two French-language, one Spanish-language) written by women authors, that deploy a gender perspective on the experience of women subjected to slavery between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The three, all written in the 21st century, reflect a new impulse to recover this/these history/histories within the Caribbean space (in which they are set, or at least linked to). The narratives relate to the archive in different ways, each one specifically resolving the silences and violences included in it in order to complement it through fiction and imagination and at the same time questioning its scope in order to account for these experiences. They thus propose a re-reading and re-writing of a part of the violent history of the Caribbean that is absent from the archive.

Author Biography

Karen Genschow, Universidad Goethe de Frankfurt

Ph.D. from Humboldt University of Berlin. She has been a lecturer and researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2013. Her research focuses on Latin American and Francophone Caribbean literature, film, comics, and television series from the 20th and 21st centuries, approached through the lenses of collective memory, colonialism/coloniality, and gender.

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Published

2025-06-17

Issue

Section

Monographic: Afro-Caribbean Sea Letters