Earthquake Aesthetics and Incommensurate Necrologies in and around José Martí’s “Terremoto en Charleston”

• In Event: Eco-Criticism and Ruptured Natures

Abstract

José Martí’s 1886 chronicle “Terremoto en Charleston” describes the aftermath of an intense earthquake in what had been the capital of the United States slave trade in the wake of the Civil War. Martí’s chronicle realizes not the shoring up of an imperial subjectivity through characterization of perceived periphery, but rather how a “marginal” subjectivity captures, orients, and broadcasts a paradigmatic model of late 19th century empire to lettered Latin American cities at a moment of nascent international networked press and stuttered articulations of sovereignty. After contrasting Martí’s chronicle with contemporary 19th century accounts as well as more recent historical interventions, I seek to excavate the pernicious wake of the Transatlantic slave trade and the plantationoscene as amplified by what is often termed a “natural” disaster. Martí’s comparatively buoyant intimations of racial harmony should be read as an alternate imaginary of how tragedy might look. He has projected onto the ob-scene of accumulating black death the scene of a possible future in which the pernicious legacies of racism and colonization have ceased being immediately relevant frames. This paper seeks to parse the ethical infrastructure of utopian and apocalyptic imaginaries and to think alongside the logic of the earthquake, whose aftershocks upset conventional temporalities and whose occasion represents an upsetting of colonial, cartesian notions of territoriality as land literally redraws itself. Furthermore, given the ongoing inventory of “natural” disasters that only ever compound colonial and racial inequalities, I propose a catachresis that willfully confuses colonial, racial, and geologic faults and fault lines.

Author

• Lucas Urbain