Unfinished Business: In Search of Other Women, Other Worlds

This response essay engages the three book discussion essays by Shanna Jean-Baptiste, Grace Sanders Johnson, and Tobias Warner on the author’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020). Building on the speculative and archival methods undertaken by the three respondents, Joseph-Gabriel returns to underexplored primary sources to stage an encounter between the Haitian writer Marie Vieux Chauvet and the Martinican writer Suzanne Césaire. The resulting conversation considers alternate possibilities for reading disorder, defiance, and imagined new worlds in Black women’s literary production and political thought.