Kaitlin Tayler Moore
Published: 2024
Total Pages: 0
Get eBook
My dissertation considers how poetry by Indigenous writers across Pacific Oceania can sketch relations between human and nonhuman matter, land and ocean, time and space, and planet and cosmos that are attentive to dynamic material configurations, processes of change and emergence, and diverse communal entanglements. The dissertation prioritizes in its analyses work by self-identified Indigenous artists of Pacific Oceania, including Keri Hulme, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Phil Kawana, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, and Craig Santos Perez, whose poetic forms run the gamut from anthologized collections to performance art to virtual reality media projects. In reference to Pacific Oceania, a term understood as referring to the geographical regions of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, much has been written on the ways poetic forms contend with concepts which include: Indigenous identity and diaspora; the effects of colonialism; the large and diverse array of positions regarding the integrity and vitality of nonhuman nature; and the impact of climate change on Pacific ecologies. I argue that the multitudinous perceptions, relations, and subjectivities within and across these concepts can be better understood by reading these poems in reference to cosmology. The term accounts for branches of the astrophysical sciences as well as for the world systems circumscribed by the cosmologies of individual Indigenous communities across the Pacific. More, by cosmology, I refer to plural articulations of experience and sensation that encompass both worlds of the very large and the very small, within which the human has come to be situated not as isolated from, but as an integral part of the environment. To this end, this dissertation contributes to the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities by focusing on poetry and poetic forms responsive to cosmological mediations, reading from them modes of active engagement with and immersion in the connections that exist between and across human and nonhuman persons and environments, the knowledge embedded in each of these connections, and how this knowledge is valued. In effect, this dissertation adds a cosmological extension to environmental humanities scholarship, as well as to the fields of Indigenous studies, archipelagic studies, and spacetime studies. I draw on cosmology as an animating concept, a thematic throughline, and an illustrative tool. This dissertation becomes a cosmological object even as it studies cosmological poems: using analyses mediated by descriptive practice and astrophotographic interludes, the dissertation sanctions an understanding of multiple cosmological world systems whose frameworks both within themselves and in relation to each other are informed by hybridity. Using experiments in illustration and visualization to produce a research project contoured by art and creative description, this hybrid dissertation will consider how cosmology's plural articulations, as well as their representations in poetic practices and forms, invest agencies, both human and nonhuman, with ways to disclose their sense of place in the universe.