ABSTRACT
Recent feminist theory has employed the idea of the “body-in-place“ as an alternative to both essentialism and social constructionism – a body dependent on the affirmation of others on earth, while new materialists like Alaimo (2008) have put forward the idea of “transcorporeality,” or the reciprocal interdependence and co-becoming of the human body and the material environment, in which the body/mind dualism does not exist and the body itself is in transit between the unstable inner self and the non-othered environment. In tune with Baumann’s (2000) “liquid modernity” countering the “solid structures of the past” and promising less rigid or hierarchical relations and value systems, transcorporeality may be seen as a way to cope with complex issues, from personal traumas to historical, political and environmental problems, as explored in Moque Roffey’s novel Archipelago (2012), set in a post-2008 hurricane Caribbean region. Traversing the complex regional history of slavery, and renegotiating the issues of his personal self as relational and transitional, the main character Gavin eventually achieves the healing of his personal trauma and an awareness of the physical environment as rhizomatic and multidirectional, co-becoming with the self that is not rigidly defined but balancing between notions of man/human/more-than human/oceanic/mermaid, mythological and material. The chapter expands on the ideas of transcorporeality and Transmodernity, proposing such further notions as “transanimality” and “transfluidity” to explore the borders of self, the body and the environment within the transmodern paradigm.
