Week 5: Poetic Archipelagos & These Are the Boats That Made Us
KINSHIP: World as Archipelago Online Event with Craig Santos Perez, David Gange
This is Week 5 of advaya’s course: KINSHIP: World as Archipelago curated by Hannah Close.
Tuesday 28th February 2023, 6:00pm–8:00pm UK Time Zoom
Poetic Archipelagos: On Writing Pacific Islander Worlds, with Craig Santos Perez#
In this talk, Dr. Craig Santos Perez will discuss the metaphors of archipelagos and islands in Pacific Islander literature and culture. He will highlight what these metaphors teach us about kinship, genealogy, traditional environmental knowledge, indigeneity, and decolonization. Lastly, he will perform selections of his own poetry that addresses the theme of ‘world as archipelago’.
These are the Boats that Made Us, with David Gange#
From the Caribbean Basin or Mauritius to Venice or South Connemara, island spaces have been woven together not by the big ships of commerce and diplomacy, but by little family boats that have often rested in shallow noosts along the shore. Uniquely adapted to local land- and sea-scapes, as well as to philosophies or life and stores of story, these diverse small craft reveal immense possibilities for ways of being beyond the growth-based economics and urban values of our present. This talk uses four distinctive rowed and paddled boats, and the localised island cultures they made possible, to explore the range of options for rejecting the values of growth-based economics that coastal pasts provide us with. It asks, too, how the practice of building boats and of travelling, today, the inter-island searoads used by past communities, can be sources of knowledge to rival books and archives.
Tuesday 28th February 2023, 6:00pm–8:00pm UK Time Zoom
KINSHIP: World as Archipelago
Craig Santos Perez #
Craig is an indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is a poet, scholar, editor, publisher, essayist, critic, book reviewer, artist, environmentalist, and political activist.
David Gange #
David is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. He has appeared on BBC2 and Smithsonian television as well as at the Hay Literary Festival and in the TLS. Recently, he held a research fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He works on the histories of coastlines, oceans, and the communities that rely on them, and likes to explore the past by ‘doing’ as much as reading, taking small boats out to sea to research the culture and heritage of shorelines, and encouraging students to use built and natural environments to understand how past people lived.
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