Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Special Issue Articles

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): American Studies as Vulnerability Studies

From Crisis to Cata/Strophe: Prepositional Poetics as Decolonizing Praxis

Submitted
July 7, 2023
Published
2022-12-30

Abstract

This article shows how Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria (2016) and Raquel Salas Rivera's while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019) turn the ongoing catastrophe of coloniality into a visual grammar of/for loss. Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria offers a prepositional poetics to visualize the catastrophe of Mediterranean migrant crossings within the spacetime of an oceanic coloniality that joins Mediterranean to Atlantic and Caribbean. Raquel Salas Rivera's poetic response to Hurricane María invokes prepositional relationships to reveal and contest the United States' existing hierarchies of colonial-imperial power. Through form, their poetry visualizes how witness, survival, and mourning become decolonizing tactics of resistance. In the two texts, I identify a prepositional poetics that, by signaling movements through space and time, locates the specific catastrophes of displacement and climate change disaster in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean as part of a continuum of coloniality that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present.

References

  1. "Interview with Aracelis Girmay." The Poetry Foundation. Accessed October 10, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aracelis-girmay.
  2. Bonilla, Yarimar, and Marison LeBrón. "Introduction: Aftershocks of Disaster." In Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marison LeBrón, 13-32. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Kindle ed.
  3. Butler, Judith. "Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics." AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4, no. 3 (2009): i-xiii. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.040303e.
  4. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, ed. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  5. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. "Precarious Writings: Reckoning the Absences and Reclaiming the Legacies in the Current Poetics/Politics of Precarity." Current Anthropology 62, no. 5 (2021): 511-38. https://doi.org/10.1086/716721.
  6. Chokshi, Niraj. "Trump Waives Jones Act for Puerto Rico, Easing Hurricane Aid Shipments." New York Times. September 28, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/us/jones-act-waived.html.
  7. Christoforo-Mitchell, Rose. "The Heritage and Culture of Puerto Ricans." Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. February 6, 1991. https://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1991/2/91.02.06.x.html.
  8. Deloria, Philip J. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Mark Neil Trahant, Lorent Frank Ghiglione, Douglas L. Medin, and Ned Blackhawk, ed. "Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century." Special issue of Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 147, no. 2 (2018).
  9. DeLoughery, Elizabeth, and Tatiana Flores. "Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art." Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 132-66. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142242.
  10. Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.
  11. Ferdinand, Malcolm. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022.
  12. Girmay, Aracelis. The Black Maria. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2016.
  13. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
  14. Hersher, Rebecca. "Climate Change Was The Engine That Powered Hurricane Maria's Devastating Rains." NPR. April 17, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/17/714098828/climate-change-was-the-engine-that-powered-hurricane-marias-devastating-rains.
  15. Joseph, Samantha Rivera, Caroline Voyles, Kimberly D. Williams, Erica Smith, and Mariana Chilton. "Colonial Neglect and the Right to Health in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria." American Journal of Public Health 110, no. 10 (2020): 1512-18. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2020.305814.
  16. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020.
  17. Kressner, Ilka, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli, ed. Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. London: Routledge, 2019.
  18. Lugones, Maria. "The Coloniality of Gender." In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Harcourt, 13-33. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  19. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. "Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe." In Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, ed. Yarimar Bonilla and Marison LeBron, 386-98. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Kindle ed.
  20. Maneval, Stefan, and Jennifer A. Reimer, ed. Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art & Literature. Berlin: Falschrum, 2022.
  21. Martinez, J. Michael. Interview by Craig Santos Perez. Jacket 2. June 14, 2011. https://jacket2.org/commentary/talking-j-michael-martinez-about-his-new-book-%E2%80%98heredities%E280%99.
  22. Mercer, Harriet. "Colonialism: Why Leading Climate Scientists Have Finally Acknowledged Its Link with Climate Change." The Conversation. April 22, 2022. https://theconversation.com/colonialism-why-leading-climate-scientists-have-finally-acknowledged-its-link-with-climate-change-181642.
  23. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
  24. Muñoz, José Esteban. "Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2006): 675-88. https://doi.org/10.1086/499080.
  25. Noonan, Eamonn, and Ana Rusu. "The Future of Climate Migration." Strategic Foresight & Capabilities Unit. European Parliamentary Research Service. March 2022. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/729334/EPRS_ATA(2022)729334_EN.pdf.
  26. Perez, Craig Santos. Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022.
  27. Reimer, Jennifer A. "Precarity & the Practice of Chicano/a Poetry: Javier Huerta's American Copia." Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 45, no. 1 (2020): 109-132. https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.2020.45.1.109.
  28. Reimer, Jennifer A. "Tarfia Faizullah's Poetics of Testimony and Transnational Feminist Praxis." AmLit: American Literatures 1, no. 1 (2021): 29-45. https://doi.org/10.25364/27.1:2021.1.3.
  29. Reyes, Barbara Jane. "Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes." Interview by Craig Santos Perez. Jacket 2. May 10, 2011. https://jacket2.org/commentary/talking-barbara-jane-reyes.
  30. Roberts, Brian Russell. Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
  31. Salas Rivera, Raquel. while they sleep (under the bed is another country). Minneapolis: Birds LLC, 2019.
  32. Schultermandl, Silvia, Katharina Gerund, and Anja Mrak. "The Affective Aesthetics of Transnational Feminism." WiN: The EAAS Women's Network Journal, no. 1 (2018).
  33. Sullivan, Laura. "How Puerto Rico's Debt Created a Perfect Storm Before the Storm." NPR. May 2, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/607032585/how-puerto-ricos-debt-created-a-perfect-storm-before-the-storm.
  34. Trisos, Christopher H., Jess Auerbach, and Madhusudan Katti. "Decoloniality and Anti-Oppressive Practices for a More Ethical Ecology." Nature Ecology Evolution, no. 5 (2021). 1205-212. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01460-w.
  35. Wilkins, Jan, and Alvine R. C. Datchoua-Trivaudey. "Researching Climate Justice: A Decolonial Approach to Global Climate Governance." International Affairs 98, no. 1 (2022): 125-43. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab209.
  36. Willison, Charley E., Phillip M. Singer, Melissa S. Creary, and Scott L. Greer. "Quantifying Inequities in US Federal Response to Hurricane Disaster in Texas and Florida Compared with Puerto Rico." BMJ Global Health 4, no. 1 (2019): e001191. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001191.
  37. Yu, Timothy. "Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s." Contemporary Literature 52, no. 4 (2011): 818-51. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2011.0040.
  38. Zambrana, Rocío. Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Similar Articles

11-20 of 110

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.