“Act Third Scene/ Circe Argues with Eve/ about Eden”: Zong! and the Drama of the Unruly Fug(ue)Itive

Zong! is history, cultural exposé, experimental poetry, prose and drama-- a genre-defying work that employs all the aforementioned. I deal particularly with its dramatic potential, and how NourbeSe Philip capitalizes on this dramatic element via digital global-communal, impromptu, syncopated readings that counter current global epidemics of loneliness; depredation; and online white-supremacist hate/populism.

Zong! contests the orthodoxy of 18th Century Enlightenment values underpinning the global trade in Africans, as well as our current neo-liberal globalization; and the North's attitudes toward African extraction, and African migrations to Europe/the Americas.

While Philip has been called an "experimental" or "LANGUAGE" poet, Zong!'s use of language and drama works against white mainstream "experimental" poetry in its refusal of LANGUAGE poetry's tenets that "Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. . . the endless radiating of denotation into relation." (Lyn Hejinian, https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-language-poetry) Zong! eschews this endless Derridean "différance" in favor of a vision much more powerful and socially relevant.

After the revolutionary Black Lives Matter movements of 2013 and 2020 (police murder of George Floyd) Black theorists are more attentive than ever to the integral relationships among form, aesthetics, and political relevance. How can Zong! be read as literature considered experimental but resistant to neoliberal modes of (non)meaning?

Zong! has been translated into Italian with problematic results. While we may challenge the notion of literary, linguistic, cultural and temporal borders, I also embrace the fact that defying such borders must be executed with radical care; as we explore works challenging perimeters and exhuming neglected archives, how do we sustain awareness of the great imbalance among cultures and cultural translations? When do translations become careless appropriations? How do race and Zong! complicate avant-garde work, and what exists in the digital spaces across America, Africa, Europe?