Onus

This part explores the concept of tabanca—a form of longing—with specific attention to its potential as an emancipatory device. Consisting of three historiographic essays—“Onus,” “Conscientia,” and “Textus”—the series extends the interpretation of the term with ekphrastic analyses of three artworks designed by the author. The artwork Onus uses an eighteenth-century sketch by William Blake of “slave punishments”; Conscientia uses a nineteenth-century sketch of another torture scene and tells a story of Louisa Calderon and Thisbe, two of the many victims of Lord Picton, and their significance in the development of Caribbean feminine subjectivity; and Textus approaches tabanca as part of an integrated process of breaking and making that occurs against the tide of love, loss, fallibility, and ingenuity. The essays go beyond the mere suggestion of resilience as the typical responses to trauma and instead make room for the creative and emancipatory possibilities of loss.