ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several critiques of capitalist imperialism through consideration of narrative fictions featuring images of female water-spirits. It focuses on texts from the Caribbean, in particular the Guyanese writer Pauline Melville's short story "Erzulie". The chapter also focuses on the disaggregation and restructuring of ecological relations that took place with the transition to the neoliberal regime of accumulation, beginning in the 1970s. The irrealist qualities of Erzulie, while grounded in the contradictions of a specific, peripheral experience of capitalist modernization, simultaneously point beyond the reality and project the possibility of organizing nature in ways other than that imposed by the logic of the commodity form. Melville's invocation of the irreal, folkloric presence of the watermamma- like Erzulie can be seen as a literary analogue to some responses. Melville is not the only Caribbean writer whose use of the watermamma motif functions to register and contest the violence entailed by capitalism's periodic reconfigurations of human and extra-human nature.
