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 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.

“Can you read a kreol text without colonizing it? As I read unrest in the nebula, I experienced the beauty of refusing to consume or colonize language while finding myself at the edge of geological layers, and compacted histories of earth. These prose poems document a conversation far too old for any one lifetime, charting violence and possibility, rupture and healing. This book is reteaching me how to read.”
-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony