ENG252Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Scientific Racism, Blood Residue, Aporia
Document Summary
During the transatlantic slave trade slaves were regarded as chattel. S: there"s an oscillation between affirmation and questioning. It"s the idea that you"re both this but not that. It"s a trope that reappears throughout post-colonial literature. This trope appears a lot through the black diaspora. Part of the project of post-colonial literature of philip"s expression of black subjectivity is to be able to carve out some sense of empowerment. Philip conceptualizes language as a living body hence all of these references to the bodily organs that mediate the production of speech. By invoking these bodily metaphors she registers the ways in which colonial english participated in the commodification of black bodies. She also suggests that language has the same self-organizing capacities that the living breathing body has. Language is inherently fluid and isn"t just a grammatical phenomenon it is also grounded in the body. These speech acts create unexpected openings in grammatical english.
