Radical Animism and the Geontological: An Ecocritical Reading of Patrick Chamoiseau's Le vieil homme esclave et le molosse

Abstract

Simultaneously addressing the human, the non-human, and the ecological on the island of Martinique, author Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man is a complex eco-narrative. In addition to exploring diverse human viewpoints, non-human subjectivities including the animal, the vegetal, and the inanimate constitute an animist ontology from which a coherent ecological vision can arise. A renowned créoliste, Chamoiseau’s text explores the links between human communities past and present, drawing an ontological connection between the White colonial presence, the African diaspora, and the genocide of the Amerindian through the imaginative act of assemblage. In conversation with the animist and the indigenous aspects of my reading, Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of the geontological, which focuses on the agency of the non-human anchors my analysis.