Environmental Humanities Colloquium: Colonial Semiotics

Monique Allewaert (Wisconsin-Madison) will talk about the Kongo-born slave-turned-maroon François Makandal, focusing on the fetish artifacts he produced in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 1750s. Drawing on African and West Indian anthropologies, as well as Peircian semiotics, Allewaert will explore the indexical signs at stake in these artifacts. She seeks to show how colonial and black studies that attend to indexical signs might advance emergent modes of literary reading that trace the interfaces between the physical world and language.

Allewaert is a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English for Spring 2018, and the author of “Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood and Colonialism in the American Tropics.”