Archipelagic aesthetics in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory

Abstract

Scholars have often noted a poetics of fragmentation in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory and have interpreted it in terms of an adaption of modernist aesthetic. Building on this work, this article argues that, while Perez’s poetry may be adapting familiar modernist poetics, more significantly it presents an aesthetic that is rooted in the relationship between landscape and colonization and therefore in the historical and material reality of what Epeli Hau‘ofa called ‘the sea of islands’: an archipelagic aesthetic. This article further proposes to understand this archipelagic aesthetic, first, as the combined affordances of two forms, the bounded whole and the network. In from unincorporated territory, this archipelagic aesthetic allows Perez to explore interdependence on different temporal and spatial scales because, second, the archipelago is also more than the form of the network and the whole: it is a landscape that has been shaped by colonialism as well as by geology, and it therefore affords a temporal scale that reaches beyond human record into deep time. Furthermore, as a chain of islands, the archipelago affords a relationality that goes beyond continental and territorial categories into the submerged realities of planetary ocean flows.