Monique Allewaert Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2013, 254 pages, $25 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8166-7728-3. $75 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8166-7727-6.

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Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

(from Ariel’s song, William Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Shakespeare’s Tempest character Ariel has been central to a number of critical engagements with colonialism. A spirit being of ambiguous gender and power relations, Ariel has alternately served as a signifier of contented (political, sexual) submission (e.g. in Octave Mannoni’s The Psychology of Colonisation) or of non-violent transformative resistance (e.g. in Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of The Tempest). Monique Allewaert’s book pursues and extends the latter direction, unfolding an intriguing materialist reading around the character that seeks to destabilize dominant notions of personhood. Bringing together themes from the discourses around "new materialism" and "postcolonial ecologies," Allewaert weaves her narrative around the colonial anxiety that Europeans would become "a different kind of organization of matter and thus a different kind of being" in more extreme climates (2013: 4). In this she is guided by the human-nature interplay in Ariel’s song (especially the "Full Fathom Five" stanza), which serves as a prompt for reinterpretations of references to bodily dismemberment, intrusion and convergence as a potential for resistance to imperialist and capitalist projects.

Any potential for human agency seems to vanish into the passive tense of Ariel’s song, which breaks men’s bodies into parts so as to make men and other creatures into media through which a mysterious sea change effects its inexorable difference. However, what Ariel describes is not the disappearance of human agency but an emerging minoritarian colonial conception of agency by which human beings are made richer and stranger through their entwinement with the operations of corals and, over the course of the play, other colonial climatological forces as well as plant and animal bodies (2013: 1).

By entering into a different, more intimate relationship with natural forces and entities, humans do not become hybrids, but (re)negotiate intimacies as a response to a kind of violence that depends on the exchangeability of bodies and objects as separate entities (see 2013: 99). Unlike the majority of theoretical writing on relationality which seems to relativise or level specific interactions and associations, Allewaert emphasises the relation’s capacity for recalcitrance to taken-for-granted relating and exchange: while animals and inanimate matter may make up the cosmos, their political currency results from the particularities of their assemblages and not from flattening or convergence. Here, she is in conversation with Stengers’ "cosmopolitics" and its attention to disharmonious, but potentially generative relations. Other concepts that shape her materialist thinking include Glissant’s poetics of relation and Deleuze and Guattari’s human-animal-matter-virtuality relations. This combination allows Allewaert not only to call into being her own "parahuman" assemblage, but also to unfold alternative material histories in her readings.

In terms of structure, Allewaert traces the resistant potential of bodily human-nonhuman relations across examples of eighteenth-century literature from the Americas. The examples she chooses range from European and American botanists such as Alexander von Humboldt and William Bartram to writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Leonora Sansay and Matthew Lewis. Her choice of predominately marginal figures or lesser known works is purposeful: the goal is to diversify "key" sources and images of American history. With this, Allewaert joins authors across academic disciplines such as Susan Buck-Morss, Sybille Fischer and Doris L. Garraway and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. While some of these authors focus on expanding histories through reworking the existing conception of Enlightenment, for instance, through aligning it with the Haitian Revolution, Allewaert remains wary of this kind of approach. For her, the frequent adherence to Enlightenment human-nature relations feels limiting in that the transformation tends to happen in one direction only: the nonhuman is rarely recognized as an agent (2013: 49). This omission, in her opinion, affects the potential of what subjectivity and personhood can be. By contrast, Allewaert’s aim is not to argue for a recognition of subjectivity (in the Enlightenment sense), but to put the current ideal of subjectivity into question.

The author herself notes that this approach is problematic in that it grates against the postcolonial project of criticizing and counteracting the (continued) dehumanization of colonial subjects (2013: 138). Her proposal that the colonies gave rise to a counter-subjectivity that she calls "parahumanity," characterized by a "recalibrated" relationship with the nonhuman, could indeed fall into the trap of dehumanization by singling out diasporic Africans as the exclusive producers of this identity. After all, she initially connects parahumanity to the routinely mutilated and dismembered slaves’ bodies (such punishments were prescribed in slavery regulations), which could additionally give the impression of a mere reactive move. To complicate the distribution of the parahuman, Allewaert turns it into a systemic rather than racial or even cultural category. In her examples, she stresses that White Americans and other groups, too, could become "parahuman," at the price of social marginalisation. The "disappearing subjectivity" of William Bartram is presented as one such case. Yet while Bartram appears to have hit upon the revolutionary capacity of material associations during his botanical explorations, Allewaert acknowledges his hesitation and eventual refusal of parahumanity.

Moreover, drawing on Agamben, she distinguishes between a blind and an "aware" relation to parahumanity (2013: 102). One is indeed reactive, while the other recognize the "horizontal relation and mutual dependence of life-forms’ as an active ‘departure from the colonial economic and cultural engine" (2013: 110). In both instances, the projection of nonhuman attributes onto slaves becomes a coping strategy for colonials:

The two routes through which humanity verges on parahumanity suggest that human beings’ parahumanity was a general eighteenth century problematic, not one exclusively experienced by subaltern persons. However, in response to this general problematic, colonialism allowed a roundabout through which the problem could be bypassed (2013: 102).

As Bartram’s reaction shows, parahumanity is frightening and undesirable for most humans, including slaves, as it prevents people from fitting in with the dominant order. While Allewaert’s argument that the European idea of subjectivity is dependent on the production of non-subjects (slaves, subhumans, nonpersons, nonhumans, noncitizens etc) and lies at the heart of the Western/capitalist socio-economic system is not necessarily new, her experimentation with nonhuman alliances to move away from victimization without agency is thought-provoking. In her account, collaborative agency proves to be limiting in capitalist society, yet it is not limiting to one’s becoming with the world outside of this system (2013: 50). Comparisons could perhaps be drawn with the work of Guadeloupean author Daniel Maximin who maintains in Les Fruits du Cyclone (2006) that nature has never been a mere backdrop or symbol, but a protagonist. Whereas Maximin also suggests that Caribbean engagements with a cataclysmic nature pose a geopoetics of imbalance against a dysfunctional and unrealistic Euro-American geopolitics of "balance," Allewaert’s materialist analysis uncovers the already existing imbalance within the assumed ‘balanced’ ideal. Here, the European illusion of balance could perhaps be traced and dismantled further, building, for instance, on work that attacks the ‘closed’ body (Bakhtin on Rabelais springs to mind as well as Allewaert’s own starting point of Poe’s evocation of "Anglo-European animism" (2013: 178)).

A question that remains in this context is whether only the Americas "gave rise to an alternate materialism of the body" (2013: 3). Given that the parahuman appears as a colonial phenomenon, it seems likely that other geographical areas produced similar (or different) counter-materialism. For Allewaert, the focus on the Americas serves the "production of a countermythology" (2013: 80) to colonialism, American history and, by extension, to quasi-colonial practices today. Parahumanity very clearly emerges as an identity that is not limited to the eighteenth century. One could name entrepreneurialized refugee, terrorist and prison detention as contemporary examples, as well as the more productive attempts to include nonhumans in legal and political processes. Similarly, the "tropical anxieties" resonate in a lot of recent writing from climate change to geopolitics (The Clash of Civilisations, The Coming Anarchy, Tropic of Chaos). In the face of not only persistent imperialist rhetoric, but also hyper-militarized conflicts that keep on uprooting and dismembering humans, does Allewaert’s proposal of "another species of men" (she also relates parahumanity to Fanon’s project) to counteract systemic violence, come across as naïve? Wouldn’t a parahuman framing make populations more vulnerable to being framed as, to use Judith Butler’s vocabulary, "destructible," because they are cast as "threats to human life" (2010: 31)?

Perhaps not. If one looks at the economic dimension of imperialism, a very particular subjectivity seems to be needed for it to continue. As Fanon suggested, "underdeveloped" people present such an obstacle, as only development means creating and maintaining a suitable market (2004: 60). In more than one way, useful parallels between resistance to (the quasi-imperialist form of) "development" and "parahuman" strategy could be drawn. Secondly, one could argue that the effectiveness of new understandings of personhood in altering social, economic and (geo)political relations depends on the level at which they are implemented, distributed or taken up—by individuals, movements, educators, politicians. This could take the form of ‘making perceptible’ the new identity (as proposed by e.g. Bennett, Césaire) and/or the reimagining and remodelling of institutions (as advocated e.g. by Butler, Glissant). Although they may never completely be replaced, seemingly established historical and geopolitical narratives keep being subverted through such tactics (especially when they dominant narratives have led to crises) and Ariel’s Ecology joins the wider project of "decolonizing the imagination" with sufficient (de)constructive anger.

Overall, the book offers a refreshing materialism that engages with power inequalities (race, gender, class, nonhuman hierarchies) and does not rely on matter to do the political work for humans. As much as the revolutionary nature of the nonhuman is implied, it is the (para)human recognition of—and struggle over—its potential for a more benign coexistence that is in the foreground. Ariel’s Ecology will be of interest to postcolonial and feminist scholars and activists as well as to anyone interested in establishing a non-deterministic dialogue between the geography, the nonhuman and politics. To return to the Shakespearean theme of the book, the Ariel that frames the narrative is quite far from the image of the submissive servant, even farther than Aimé Césaire’s trickster. While Allewaert’s Ariel shares the project of Césaire’s Ariel, who sets out to change Prospero to tackle the problem from the root: the representation of human-world relationships, hers seems more violently oppositional. Not squeamish about tearing up bodies and exploding mountains, Ariel’s ecology provokes a search not only for "suppressed dialogues between partial orders" (Allewaert quoting Wilson Harris, 1983: 26) but for uncomfortable alliances, rejections and compromises between the inhuman and the human. 

References

Butler J (2010) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.

Césaire A (1992) A Tempest. Translation by Richard Miller. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications.

Fanon F (2004) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Harris W (1983) Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Maximin D (2006) Les Fruits du Cyclone: Une géopoetique de la Caraïbe. Paris: Éditions Seuil.