The climate of theory: Hurricanes,skeletons of the enslaved,tidalectical archives

Abstract

Skeletons of enslaved Africans were exhumed by Hurricanes Iris, Luis, and Marylin in 1995 in Guadeloupe, and by Hurricane Dean and Hurricane Gamède in 2007 in Martinique and in Réunion respectively. In the case of the Caribbean Island of St Eustatius, bones of enslaved Africans were not unearthed by the ocean, hurricanes, and climate change, but were discovered in 2021 near an airport on the site of a former plantation. Thus, this article proposes a transoceanic analysis of the ways in which an emotional landscape and archeological studies trigger a different understanding of enslavement, mourning, and ancestral anxiety for the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. The article unpacks how memory communities, activists, and grassroots organizations create new memorializing grammars and work through the resurfacing trauma of slavery by unsettling entangled archives and silences of history, crafting symbolic burial ceremonies, envisioning new oceanic epistemologies of refusal and transforming tortured geography into decolonial therapeutic spaces. Forging the notions of “tidalectical archives” and “climate of theory”, the author crosspollinates trauma and resilience, implicated archeologists, implicated descendants, embodied experiences, creative spiritual art, critical fabulation, and geopolitical re-appropriations of the skeletons of the enslaved. The author further posits a reimagination of epistemological platforms and methodologies to assess the entanglements of climate crises in social and geographical contexts where historical trauma is caused by the enslavement of nature and the enslavement of people through nature.