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Paper Details


Title
Songs of Salt and Ruinate Sugar: Ecofeminism, Magical Realism and Post-Plantation Resistance in Monique Roffeys The Mermaid of Black Conch

Author
Mohammad Rahmatullah,

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Abstract

This article offers the first full-length, theory-driven reading of Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) at the nexus of post-colonial ecofeminism and Caribbean magical realism. Mobilizing Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchal ownership, Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Stephen Slemon’s model of magical realism as post-colonial discourse, the essay argues that Roffey’s mermaid romance re-members Taíno genocide, plantation slavery and neo-colonial extraction through a single hybrid body. Aycayia’s declaration — ‘Land is not to be owned’ — unhinges residual planter hierarchies, while David Baptiste’s epiphanic shift from possession to care rehearses an alternative, relational masculinity. Polyphonic form (Creole diary, Taíno verse, third-person chronicle) constitutes a counter-archive that restores Indigenous and more-than-human voices to Caribbean historiography. The novel’s open ending, in which the merwoman returns to a recuperating reef, models Donna Haraway’s ‘making-kin’ ethics and imagines coral regeneration as a metaphor for social repair. By entwining gendered defiance, ecological memory and mythic method, Roffey crafts an ‘ethic of regenerative refusal’ that reframes Caribbean futures beyond plantation modernity.


Keywords

Journal or Conference Name
Romance Studies

Publication Year
2026

Indexing
scopus