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Lot: Poetry Against Coloniality’s Logic in Archives about Haida Gwaii
Topics: Historical Geography
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Keywords: Poetry and Geopoetics, Coloniality, Historical Geography, Haida Gwaii Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract Day: Monday Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) Room: Virtual 58
Authors:
Sarah de Leeuw, UNBC/UBC
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Abstract
Anchored in growing calls to politicize and critically emplace geography’s creative re/turn, and drawn from a forthcoming book of poetry entitled “Lot,” this poem-paper takes up poet and essayist M. Nourbese Philip’s cautionary that, when it comes to histories of colonial violence and contemporary states of coloniality, “There is no telling this story.” Phillip “deeply distrusts” the tool of language, noting that efforts to weave logic, sense, or linearity from the sheer senselessness of colonialism is, always, an act at risk of “doing a second violence.” One answer? Language that pushes against logic, predictability, or orderliness: expressions that refuse the comprehensible. In short, poetry – with all its unpredictably and capriciousness. Located in geographies of Haida Gwaii, this poem-paper reliniates key colonial documents, including the 1913 McKenna McBride Report, the 1908 Jesup North Pacific Expedition edited by Franz Boaz, and early geological taxonomies of Haida Gwaii. The poem-paper highlights both how concepts of white-settler supremacy narrated northwest coast spaces and how those narratives might be unsettled through poetics.
Lot: Poetry Against Coloniality’s Logic in Archives about Haida Gwaii