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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 40–53

Chapter 3
Transforming the colonial scene of writing

Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat

Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat (2014), a literary archaeology of the histories of the oppressed, deconstructs the anthropological scene of writing that inscribes the native, the formerly enslaved and the dispossessed as the inferior others. This chapter argues that Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat is a transformative text that crosses the epistemological boundaries between literary, anthropological and historical discourses and rewrites the colonial past to contribute to a richer and more democratic conceptualization of the human against race thinking.
Keywords: Erna Brodber, Sylvia Wynter, “genres of being human,” Caribbean literature, decolonial thought, transformative text, ethnographic writing
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