Cannibalizing the Plantation, Crafting a Caribbean Ecofeminist Aesthetic-Ethic
Résumé
This article examines how Caribbean women writers and artists use the cannibalization of the plantation as a decolonial and ecofeminist aesthetic strategy. Cannibalization is approached not literally, but as a critical and poetic method of cultural resistance and reappropriation. Drawing on Indigenous ritual cannibalism, the legacy of Martinican philosopher Suzanne Césaire, and the foundational work of French ecofeminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, the paper analyzes the work of three Jamaican ecopoetesses—Lorna Goodison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Olive Senior—to argue that Caribbean female subjectivities are interwoven with the land, resisting patriarchal, colonial, and environmental exploitation. These women writers reclaim the plantation as both a space of trauma and poetic resistance. Through metaphors of sugarcane, banana fields, and corporeal landscapes, they articulate a relational ecology that challenges extractivist logics and reimagines the Caribbean as a site of collective memory, resilience, and intersectional ecology.