Where will dido rest?

The name Dido means wanderer. Her story is one of wandering, and her story has itself wandered through the Western literary tradition, assuming a variety of forms. Those wanderings are the subject of this article, which considers them both as a lens through which to understand the experience of mobility, and as a way of exploring the rhetorical forms that move narratives through time. It examines a series of engagements with the figure of Dido from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading up to M. NourbeSe Philip’s twenty-first-century poem, Zong! This account of Dido’s transit through a chain of identities—exile, settler, indigene—allows us to examine the claim that regimes of mobility are also always regimes of representation. All three of these identities emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a way of articulating both the affective and juridical bases of movement in an expanding imperialist state. To gain some purchase on these interlocking and entrenched categories, the article introduces a condition that provides a counterpoint to these three identities: being at rest. To rest in a place is to be neither indigene, settler, nor migrant. With its implications of impermanence and recuperation, rest disrupts a discourse of mobility structured by binaries of indigeneity and settlement, of exile and return, or of conquest and defeat.

Duke Scholars

Author Charlotte S. Sussman English