Abstract
This essay will explore the complex relationship between Pacific Islander Literature and the “Blue Humanities,” navigation traditions and canoe aesthetics, and Chamoru migration and diaspora. First, I will chart the history, theory, and praxis of Pacific voyaging traditions; the colonial history of restricting indigenous mobilities; and the decolonial acts of seafaring revitalization in the Pacific (with a specific focus on Guam). Then, I will examine the representation of seafaring and the ocean-going vessel (the canoe) as powerful symbols of Pacific migration and diasporic cultural identity in the context of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey termed, “narrative maritime legacies” (2007). Lastly, I will conduct a close-reading of the avant-garde poetry collection, A Bell Made of Stones (2013), by Chamoru writer Lehua Taitano. As I will show, Taitano writes about the ocean and navigation in order to address the history and traumas of Chamoru migration and diaspora. In terms of poetic form, I will argue that Taitano’s experimentation with typography and visual poetry embodies Chamoru outrigger design aesthetics and navigational techniques. In the end, I will show how a “Blue Humanities” approach to reading Pacific Islander literature highlights how the “New Oceania” is a profound space of Pacific migration and diasporic identity.
Highlights
This essay will explore the complex relationship between Pacific Islander Literature and the “Blue Humanities,” navigation traditions and canoe aesthetics, and Chamoru migration and diaspora
I will conduct a close-reading of the avant-garde poetry collection, A Bell Made of Stones (2013), by Chamoru writer Lehua Taitano
Chamorus are the indigenous Pacific Islanders of the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific region known as Micronesia
Summary
I examine the poetry book A Bell Made of Stones (2013) by award-winning diasporic. Any Blue Humanities and World Literature project must do more than merely mention the Pacific in a superficial academic gesture; instead, scholars must rigorously and critically engage with the histories and cultures of the Pacific Islands, the insights of Pacific Studies, and the traditional knowledge and emerging scholarship of indigenous Pacific Islanders who have lived with the ocean for millennia, but who have already been here theorizing how the ocean shapes our knowledge and literature. I turn to Taitano’s A Bell Made of Stones, a vessel that navigates oceanic cultural identity from a migratory and diasporic perspective
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