Tempestuous temporalities. The Joola’s last voyage and its memorialization in Fatou Diome’s Les Veilleurs de Sangomar

The Environmental Humanities Research Group invites you to a lecture by PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, Louis-Emmanuel Pille-Schneider.

Moored in Fatou Diome’s novel Les Veilleurs de Sangomar, this article brings critical ocean geographies into dialogue with Black (Atlantic) Studies in the work of Christina Sharpe, with a detour through Caribbean literature in the writings of Kamau Brathwaite. The Joola was a passenger ship that shuttled between Ziguinchor, in Senegal’s Casamance region, and Dakar, capital city. On the night of September 26 2002, the Joola capsized off Gunjur, at the southern oceanic border between Senegal and The Gambia, killing 1863 people. Against the slow oblivion of the Joola, we ask, how can the wreck and its memorialization as textualized by Diome in her novel help us, as a contemporary, ongoing, ship-born event impacting African Black lives, further enrich theorizations of Atlantic Ocean space and blackness? We argue that in bringing into circulation an entanglement of Senegalese African historicity, oceanity, and spirituality, the memorialization of the Joola by Diome textualizes Senegalese Black identities and subjectivities. Identities and subjectivities which, borne by the excessive oceanity of the Senegambian Atlantic and its temporalities, complexify blackness by exceeding its dominant US-centered framing, amidst scholarly debates in social and cultural geography around the co-constitutive construction of Atlantic Ocean space and blackness.

Anyone interested is welcome!