Towards an anticolonial geopoetics

Keywords: Writing, Anticolonialism, Racism, Colonization, Geohumanities
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Geopoetics refers to the worldbuilding potential of language. Textual metaphors, vocabulary and grammars take material form as the social relations, systems, and infrastructures that condition our everyday lives. In the context of accumulating planetary crises, this mimetic potential of text calls for greater attention to language. How do we narrate the ways in which colonization and racism are layered into our worlds, transforming soil, air, water and life? What genres and forms may increase our capacity to face the overwhelming horrors of this world, while reaching towards relations that sustain and nurture abundance? In this presentation, I engage poetics as a mode of liberatory knowledge production and reflect on the role of poetry in my manuscript in progress. Written as a catalyst rather than critique, my book, entitled A Toxic Alchemy, experiments with language that mirrors and refracts the ecological and bodily devastations of colonial-racial capitalism, prompting a reconsideration of the inevitability of our current reality. In conversation with anticolonial scholars, I consider how the tools of poetry – imagery, line break, verse, inversion, and sound – may provide openings to re-examine materiality and meaning. In doing so, I ask: how might re-engaging political theory and social science as expressions of an anticolonial geopoetics allow us to imagine and build a world otherwise?