Abstract
This paper explores how poetic engagements with the oceanic, such as Philip’s collection Zong!, emerge as crucial practices of ritual and wake work. My thesis traces what I term an oceanic poetics through the poetry collections of Craig Santos Perez, Lehua M. Taitano, and M. NourbeSe Philip. I explore formal qualities like poetic fragmentations, repetitions, and the use of space. My research directly engages with Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work and Judith Butler’s explorations of mourning to explore how this wake work reimagines more-than-human relations, engages with alternative temporalities, and speaks to and through underwater spirits and ancestors. The oceanic humanities emerges as a critical lens for exploring Black and Indigenous writings on loss; I draw from Jennifer Nash’s How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, particularly her argument that writings on Black loss are not only an affective practice but also a pedagogical one. I argue that oceanic poetics as wake work open up the possibilities for exploring mourning as a political, ontological, and epistemological project. This literary analysis at the intersections of ecologies and decolonial and postcolonial studies is essential in our ongoing climate and political crisis for thinking through the potential for literature to imagine and enact alternative ontological and ecological orientations.
Presenters
Eleanor MacagbaStudent, Decolonial Ecologies and Speculative Fiction, New York University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ecology, Environment, Oceans, Literature
