"The Suicide Archive explores how aesthetic works help us to recognize self-destruction as a practice of freedom and fugitivity in extremis while grappling with the difficulty of writing about this profoundly tragic act. Doyle D. Calhoun reads archival materials, scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings together with literature, film, and oral history, theorizing a notion of "suicide archives" as plural, fungible formations that keep alive unscripted histories of loss. Throughout the book, Calhoun shows how enslaved Africans reclaimed their stolen bodies through suicide, articulating a demand for Black freedom at and beyond the moment of their death. At the same time, the book shows how literary and visual art addresses the inherent inexpressibility of suicide and the limits of "entextualization." Ranging from the eighteenth-century French Atlantic to modern-day North and West Africa, the study charts a genealogy of anti-colonial suicidal resistance from Caribbean to Maghrebi"--
Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.
Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and postcolonialism through African and Afro-Caribbean literature, film, and oral histories.
