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Zong!

M. Nourbese Philip

2008211 pagesabout 3–5 hours
2008
first published
  • 2008Wesleyan University Press · 211 pages · ENGISBN 9780819568762
  • 2011Wesleyan University Press · 224 pages · ENGISBN 9780819571694
  • 2012Wesleyan University Press · ENGISBN 9780819572455
  • 2014Wesleyan University Press · ENGISBN 9781283409933

"In November 1781, thee captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert - the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves - Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten." --Book Jacket.

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Content notes

  • Racismmoderateunreviewed
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