This article argues that M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! reshapes language and the page on which it appears as alternate black spaces that expose and disrupt hidden power systems. To do this, Philip creates alternate spaces within the poem which function as what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. However, deflecting Foucault’s concept through the racialized theories of scholars such as Alexander G. Weheliye, Ian Baucom, Christina Sharpe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva shows that Philip creates specifically black heterotopic spaces in Zong! These spaces accomplish two major points, one critical and one reparative: they expose language’s role in normalizing inequitable power relations, and they also provide an imaginative space where the story of the murdered Africans can exist in an alternative, disruptively non-normal form.
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