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Book Title

Zong!

Subtitle
As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng
Author 1
m. nourbeSe philip
Body
Zong! is a haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.
 
In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
 
This fifteenth-anniversary edition features a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and revered works of twenty-first-century literature, this new edition of Zong! will ensure this staggering work’s enduring legacy.

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List Price
$20.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-304-9
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
264
Trim Size
Trim Size
7 x 9.25
Keynote
A new and expanded edition of one of the essential works of twenty-first-century literature

About the Author

m. nourbeSe  philip
Credit: Photographer Credit / Gail Nyoka
m. nourbeSe philip is a renowned poet, essayist, and playwright, and practiced law for seven years before becoming a writer. She received the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Born in Tobago, she lives in Toronto.
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