Routes and Roots

Pacific islands studies / Caribbean studies / literary studies / cultural studies DeLoughrey (Continued from front flap) ROUTES and offers an innovative and interdisciplin- “In this first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island Routes and Roots is the first compara- ary approach that places postcolonial literature, Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of tive study of Caribbean and Pacific Island islands in a dialogue with each other the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to literatures and the first work to bring as well as with their continental coun- destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that ROOTS indigenous and diaspora literary studies terparts, engaging with writers such as have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging together in a sustained dialogue. Taking Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, John of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned Navigating Caribbean and the “tidalectic” between land and sea Hearne, Epeli Hau‘ofa, Albert Wendt, as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the Keri Hulme, Jamaica Kincaid, and DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The Pacific Island Literatures Michelle Cliff. Overall, this book navi- history in her exploration of how island gates uncharted spaces in postcolonial research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this writers inscribe the complex relation be- studies by historicizing the ways in which nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature tween routes and roots. The first section indigenous discourses of landfall have invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island looks at the sea as history in literatures mitigated and contested productions of literature.” and ROOTS ROUTES of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific transoceanic diaspora. The result is a —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i Island voyaging, theorizing the transoce- powerful argument for a type of post- anic imaginary. The second section turns colonial sovereignty that is global in to the land to examine indigenous epis- scope yet rooted in indigenous know- “Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, temologies in nation-building literatures. ledge of the land. Both sections are particularly attentive and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show to the ways in which the metaphors of the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, routes and roots are gendered, exploring Routes and Roots engages broadly with opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized how masculine travelers are naturalized history, anthropology, and feminist, post- cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial through their voyages across feminized colonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary readers in an age of transnational migrations.” seas and lands. This methodology of and cultural studies. It traverses diaspora —Paul Sharrad, University of wollongong, aUstralia charting transoceanic migration and and indigenous studies in a way that will landfall helps elucidate how theories and facilitate broader discussion between people travel, positioning island cultures these often segregated disciplines. in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these Jacket art: Lingikoni Vaka‘uta, No‘o ‘Anga (Tied shark). (Courtesy of the tropical island cultures helped constitute Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture, Suva, Fiji) the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey is Jacket design: Santos Barbasa Jr. an associate professor of postcolonial Routes and Roots moves beyond restric- literatures in the Department of English tive national, colonial, and regional at Cornell University. She is coeditor of frameworks and makes a compelling Caribbean Literature and the Environ- University of Hawai‘i Press argument to foreground how island ment: Between Nature and Culture. histories are shaped by geography. It Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey (Continued on back flap) www.uhpress.hawaii.edu jack mech.indd 1 2/5/07 5:33:23 PM Routes and Roots Routes and Roots Navigating Caribbean and Pacifi c Island Literatures Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu © 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book has been published with the aid of a subvention from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. The author’s royalties will be contributed to the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture, Suva, Fiji. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and roots : navigating Caribbean and Pacific island literatures / Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3122-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Caribbean literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Pacific Island literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN849.C3D45 2007 860.9’9729— dc22 2006035364 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group For Lizzy Murphy and Duke DeLoughrey Contents Preface: Genealogies of Place ix Note on the Text xv introduction Tidalectics: Navigating Repeating Islands 1 I The Sea is History: Transoceanic Diasporas chapter 1 Middle Passages: Modernity and Creolization 51 chapter 2 Vessels of the Pacific: An Ocean in the Blood 96 II Indigenous Landscapes and National Settlements chapter 3 Dead Reckoning: National Genealogies in Aotearoa / New Zealand 161 chapter 4 Adrift and Unmoored: Globalization and Urban Indigeneity 196 chapter 5 Landfall: Carib and Arawak Sedimentation 229 epilogue 269 Notes 273 References 297 Index 325 Preface Genealogies of Place he comparative literary geographies mapped in this book are unique and this has generated some interest in the origins of this project T and my own particular relationship, as a white woman from Bos- ton, to the Caribbean and the Pacifi c Islands. On the one hand, it is gratify- ing that the structures of western academic thought provide for a prefacing acknowledgment in which one may outline an ancestral and academic gene- alogy, a narrative whakapapa in accordance with many of the indigenous epistemol ogies engaged in this book. On the other hand, this surprise about my own investment in this project and my accountability to these contexts may also signal assumptions about these literatures’ lack of translatability, their profound localness, and, most worryingly, their lack of signifi cance to global discourse that is, presumably, concerned only with the literatures produced by northern metropoles and continents. Here I would like to outline my own genealogical connections to these texts and contexts, particularly as they have contributed to my own shifting understanding of space and place. My initial encounters with Caribbean literatures came through the aegis of anglophone postcolonial, feminist, and African-American studies, and it was the signs of orality in these texts, such as the broad language registers of the creole continuum, the self-deprecating humor, the naming practices, the nonstandard English, the trickster stories, and the sinews that connect language, ethnicity, and class that seemed immediate and familiar to my own upbringing. Although the racial and historical geographies explored here are radically different from my own, I recognized these tropes of orality and the historical silences they often stood for in my own extended family. My readings in Pacifi c Island literatures broadened these links between language and power and also helped me understand, on a more global and comparative scale, the ways in which geography was so vitally important to history and by extension, its literary representations. As a shore dweller from the North Atlantic, a product of an altogether different history of island dias- ix PREFACE pora, I came to recognize the seascapes of both regions’ literatures and, over time, my own historical and spatial connection to these antipodean x archipelagoes. I grew up with a distinct sense of regional and white ethnicity inherited from the working class Irish and Scottish Catholic sides of my family; both were late nineteenth-century migrants to New England and carried their own histories of dispersal and settlement through Nova Sco- tia, Prince Edward Island, and the greater Boston area. These legacies are necessarily in fragments, but my work on the British empire and its global reaches has helped me to understand why these genealogical narratives were substituted by an emphasis on the present and the silences produced by the process of emigration and assimilation. Through the lens of postcolonial scholarship, I have been able to frame the incomplete and perhaps wishful narratives of these legacies of dispersal; rumors of a deported Irish ancestor for union agitation, reputed involvement in the Easter 1916 rebellion, and insinuating connections to the IRA. On the Scottish side, with roots in the Canadian Maritimes, there are remnants of songs, a

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