Noxious Life: Figuring Vermin and Environmental Health in the Early Caribbean

This project explores the consolidation of “vermin” as a literary and scientific category in the Greater Caribbean. It examines how colonizers, Afrodiasporic peoples, and Indigenous peoples used narrative to theorize ambivalent models of ecological relation with non-domesticated animals. It follows what it calls “vermin narratives” across the Anglophone archive, bringing together colonial literature, natural histories, plantation manuscripts, agricultural manuals, medical treatises, and vernacular texts from English, African, and Indigenous traditions. This project proposes that vermin narratives were culturally hybrid forms—born out of Black and Indigenous knowledge—that served as the foundation for an emergent conceptualization of environmental health. At the same time, these narratives challenged colonial understandings of pestilence by articulating holistic, even spiritual, connection with the environment at sites of plantation disease, insurrection, and death. With chapters structured around classic pest figures—rats, snakes, insects, vultures—the project argues early Caribbean vermin narratives nuance contemporary theories of ecological relation like “kinship” through their focus on the human body’s enmeshment with animals. These narratives illustrate vermin’s paradoxical ability to generate health and harm across species and, as archival figures, to reveal systems of care and violence between people.