Blue Caribbean/Black Pacific: Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Publishing Practices Open Access
Starr, Marlo (Summer 2018)
Published
Abstract
Challenging views of island and tropical spaces as ahistorical, “Blue Caribbean/Black Pacific” crosses two disparate geographies and areas of postcolonial study. By interweaving Indigenous Oceanic voyages with Caribbean trajectories and following black Atlantic discourses into the Pacific, this dissertation interrogates the willed lacuna between African diasporic and Indigenous experiences. The comparative literary frame addresses entrenched views of gender and geography that push women and “natives” into the background in both nationalist discourses and transnational literary circuits. By mapping water as connector rather than divider, theorists from each region link islands and coastal spaces into federations. Putting these supposed peripheries into direct dialogue rather than through a metropolitan center creates a meta-archipelago across the Global South. By focusing exclusively on women’s poetry, this study contributes new directions to comparative archipelagic studies by considering models of Indigenous and locally grounded feminisms. The women poets explored here challenge masculine literary prestige and patriarchal nationalisms through the formal aesthetic of weaving, which evokes communal senses of identity and interrelationship with the environment. The Caribbean poets under analysis, including Grace Nichols and Mahadai Das from circum-Caribbean Guyana and Olive Senior from Jamaica, recuperate Amerindian epistemologies to articulate relationships to place beyond settler colonial frameworks. Meanwhile, Pacific poets such as Hawaiian Haunani Kay Trask, i-Kiribati Teresia Teaiwa, and Marshallese Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner critique belittling views of islands used to justify colonial violence, from military occupation to atomic weapons testing. Whereas the Caribbean was once conceived as a virginal space awaiting European discovery, the Pacific Ocean is seen as an empty basin for depositing nuclear waste. Juxtaposing different types of exploitation exposes continuities between European imperialism of the past and American colonialism in the present. In bringing women’s poetry from the Caribbean and Pacific into critical conversation, the dissertation aims to show how gendered logic dictates which stories are told and which remain unheard—in popular consciousness, in the global literary market, and in academic conversations. Through Indigenous approaches and poetry’s imaginative potential, these women writers create visions of resistance and survival based on a shared sense of origins and stewardship of the planet.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Weaving the Archipelagic Imagination ………………………………………………….…..1
Chapter One
Little Magazines and Island Networks: The Politics of Place in Women’s Publishing Practices…………………………………………………………………………………...26
Chapter Two
Islanders and Outlanders: Gendering Settler Colonialism………………………………….69
Chapter Three
Feminine Epics: Re-Charting the Oceanic Voyage………….…………………….........….114
Chapter Four
Paradise and Apocalypse: Critiques of Military and Nuclear Imperialism……………...….175
Coda
Woven Text-Isles………………………………………………………….……………..222
About this Dissertation
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