Graduation Year
2019
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Politics and International Relations
Second Department
Africana Studies
Reader 1
Dr. Myriam J. A. Chancy
Reader 2
Mark Golub
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
This thesis explores the work of M. NourbeSe Philip, particularly her seminal work, Zong!. In Zong!, language, once a tool for captivity, becomes a tool that transforms through its “anti-narrative lament” (nourbese.com). Philip works within and out of interstitial Space within English language as slave ship to build a written text that, through creating a new social Space, not only irrevocably disturbs the legal story of Gregson v. Gilbert, but also the Zong event and its historical meaning itself. This thesis argues that Zong!, through its journey into poetic, pure utterance, reverberates through the English language—English as slave ship—our written and spoken, legal and poetic use of it, and transforms an always-already broken structure, one that cages, one of anguish, into an opportunity for a language that, in recognizing humanity's immensity, is whole.
Recommended Citation
Goode-Allen, Alicia, "M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!: A Poetic Lexicon That Makes Possible A New World" (2019). Scripps Senior Theses. 1522.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1522
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
