Quantum Particularity: For Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand

Abstract

This essay brings together the writing of Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand and their responses to their visits, decades apart to the dungeons of Elmina. The essay proposes that Elmina Castle and the other forts used for the purposes of trading enslaved Africans can be understood as particle accelerators because of their reduction of key components of communities into individuals for sale. The word “particular” in the writing and speaking of Lorde and Brand offer us a poetics beyond individuality.