Zonbi Anti-Ontology, Zonbi Ecology: Marie-Célie Agnant and Marie NDiaye beyond the Living

This study argues that Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le Livre d’Emma and Marie NDiaye’s La Femme changée en bûche set up a zonbi ecology that stems from an anti-ontological analytics of power, by way of an aesthetic practice of éclatement , or splintering, that this article refers to as Black baroque. Firstly, from the standpoint of Blackness and Black (non-)life, the two novels denaturalize the categories of the living and the non-living, and politicize these categories, which until then had appeared to be entirely neutral and objective. In so doing they offer us an analytics of power: a zonbi anti-ontology. The article then argues that Le Livre d’Emma and La Femme changée en bûche establish a relational network, and relational forms, that no longer rely on the ontological opposition between the living and the non-living, but rather allow these elements to interrelate, moving beyond the need for a complete understanding between them: a zonbi ecology. Agnant and NDiaye thus extend the spirit of Édouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation beyond the onto-political category of the living. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .