Gendered Mattering: The Bridge of Beyond and the Nonhuman Turn

This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (The Bridge of Beyond), positioning the novel as a vital archive for decolonizing the so-called ontological turn. In addition to narrativizing the stakes of disavowing the human, the novel situates gendered embodiment at the heart of these concerns, asking whether a movement toward the nonanthropocentric subject is always a movement away from how gender matters, and, significantly, how gender matters alongside race.