The 18th Century British Colloquium and Early Americanist Colloquium are excited to welcome Professor Monique Allewaert for a lecture on “Parasiting Setting: Occluded Archives, Description, and Abolition Ecology”. This talk, followed by a Q&A and light reception, introduces the letters a free black woman and an enslaved man penned for a colonial projector in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Ostensibly vehicles for colonial natural history, these letters also spark with residues of the labor, knowledges, and experiences of the racialized writers who scribed them. The talk foregrounds moments where the letters describe the West Indian landscape. By reading these passages, along with the letters' materiality, against their "bias grain" (Marisa Fuentes), I seek to turn description—once the colonial naturalist's tool for manufacturing a univocal nature—into an instrument of decolonial placemaking. This method of (re)description feeds on the letters' own energies to disclose para-sites: places and powers surviving at the edges of plantation enclosure.
