In unrest in the nebulae, Gitan Djeli wields prose poetry to archive five hundred years of exploitative colonization, ecocide, extinction, militarization and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood, postcolonial plantation structures, and apologist histories. Writing in a queer anticolonial poetics, and using lines of Kreol, Gitan Djeli mines the tension that emerges between colonialism and language, disarticulating the myth-making aesthetics of the colonial world. She tells the story of the ‘other slavery’ in the Indian Ocean and its histories of enslavement and indenture through a subversive, fragmented poetics, and often from the perspective of its geologic witnesses—a misnamed ocean or the range of mountains within it or the volcanic idea of islands. In a charge of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity, unrest in the nebulae takes seriously Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to engage “a new science of the word.”

Gitan Djeli is a London-based Mauritian writer, editor, and scholar of cultural studies whose creative writing has appeared in Poetry, The Funambulist, adda, and Doek!, among others.

"Gitan Djeli masterfully pays femmage to many scholars, artists, writers, activists, to those who walked ahead of us, acknowledging that no body of work occurs in vacuum or appears out of thin air. Her work is a powerful and innovative contribution to the long history of Mauritius in its oceanic context, using the prism of colonialism and its ecocidal project to mark evolutions, changes and things that have sadly not changed in the course of our volcanic, colonial, and post-colonial timelines."
-- Island Pieces

shaping ground together  vii
travelling worlds  77
imagine otherwise with  78