Coloniality and gender in Maryse Condé’s novel I, Tituba: black witch of Salem

Abstract

This study seeks to understand experiences of coloniality or, more precisely, what María Lugones (2008) characterizes as coloniality of gender upon reading the novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (2019). As a necessary depiction of the literary text, this study starts with a specific examination of the narrator-protagonist Tituba, from passages in which she observes her displacement between (physical and imaginary) borders of a European modernity newly arrived in the Caribbean islands of the late 17th and early 18th century. We assume that the black woman, once reduced to animality, forced sex, and enslavement, proves to be a constitutive part of a regime of violence specific to the colonial/modern gender system. Thus, it would be relevant to examine how gender and its relations are constructed in a hegemonic way from Tituba's experiences in the context of the first modernity. This work is based on the theoretical premises of the notion of coloniality of gender by María Lugones (2005; 2008; 2014).