奴隸制的前世今生：布蘭德《月亮盈缺之時》中的死亡政治、離散創傷與種族殘缺敘事

Slavery and Its Afterlives: Necropolitics, Diasporic Trauma, and the Narrative of Racialized Maiming in Dionne Brand’sAt the Full and Change of the Moon

本文分析千里達出生的加拿大 作家布蘭德的離散小說《月亮盈缺之時》。此跨代長篇小說是關於十九世紀千里達女奴烏蘇勒的傳奇以及她開枝散葉至北美洲歐洲的子孫故事。小說橫跨近兩百年，召喚出大西洋販奴史、黑人離散印度裔的中間航程；地理空上遷徙路徑則始自十九世紀初千里達蔗糖墾殖園、黑奴莫戎地，延伸至二十世紀末的紐約、多倫及阿姆斯特丹。論文第一部分援用哈特曼所謂「批判性杜撰」來闡述作家如何用幻設補足官方歷史檔案中的匱缺，進而想像女奴的受暴及抗經歷。第二三部分則運用黑人性主義、生命政治理論、後殖民生態批評來檢視小說家筆下所刻 畫的種族化逃逸路線及黑奴／人們壯美 抵抗持續性受役、剝權失能慢死狀態中的別身體／生命商品化亡及跨越與重構「人」這個概念等議題。 論文的最後則透過夏普對“ wake ”這個字多層意義的爬梳，來彰顯小說倫理涵提醒我們奴隸制餘波盪漾及新自由主當代的生命／死亡政治議題。亡者雖逝，其靈猶在緊隨後是招魂、創造與修復關鍵字。

This paper analyzes Trinidadian-Canadian writer and activist Dionne Brand’s diasporic novel At the Full and Change of the Moon(1999), which traces the lives of a Trinidadian slave, Marie Ursule, and her descendants. The novel spans the historical and spatial geography of the Transatlantic Slave Trades and the African and Indian Diasporas, from the early nineteenth century to late twentieth century, from Trinidad’s sugar cane plantations and maroon camps, to the urban streets of New York City, Toronto, and Amsterdam. The first part of the paper draws on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” to highlight Brand’s epic attempt to redress the violence and the archival irrecuperability of captive black females. The second and third parts employ black feminism, bio/necropolitics, and postcolonial ecocriticism to examine issues of slavery, gender, fungibility, fugitivity, and different notions of the human in relation to the novel’s lyrical and haunting exploration of racialized lines of flight and the slaves’ sublime resistance against dehumanization, the commodification of Black life, and the everyday forms of debilitation, slow death, and death making. The final part uses Christina Sharpe’s exploration of the multiple meanings of “wake”—the track left on the water’s surface by a ship, a vigil kept for mourning the dead, the awakening of consciousness—to affirm the novel’s ethical call for an engagement with the afterlives of slavery, (post)coloniality, Black resistance, remembering, mourning, haunting phenomena, consciousness, and a consideration of the possibility for living, caring, and healing in the enduring disaster of precarity and necropower.