Poetics in Transit: Indigenous, Diasporic, and Settler Women’s Contemporary Writing in Canada

My dissertation examines writing that responds to and reimagines the genre of travel poetry by Indigenous, diasporic, and settler women writers who reside in Canada to illuminate the differential stakes of mobility within and beyond the nation. These works variously reveal and challenge the ways that different forms of travel are foundational to the projects of settler colonialism and decolonization. My focus on “poetics in transit” opens up a new archive through which to consider travel. Poetics, I contend, can offer unique ways of perceiving the Indigenous land on which Indigenous people, people of colour, and settlers live and travel and imagining futurities that enable solidarities between different groups. I put into dialogue Double Negative (1988) by lesbian white settler poets Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) by Black diasporic writers Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Dionne Brand, respectively, and Indigenous writers Louise Bernice Halfe’s/Sky Dancer’s (Cree) Blue Marrow (2004) and Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) Talking to the Diaspora (2015), along with poems by Indigenous writers Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinaabe), Marilyn Dumont (Cree and Métis), and Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg). In doing so, I consider how mixed-genre poetics can challenge colonial heteropatriarchal constraints on intersectional women’s movement and be used to chart solidarities with Indigenous peoples on whose lands the poets move. I analyze the ways writers of different positionalities emphasize or undermine Indigenous relationships to their lands and exemplify the multiplicity of ways travel can damage or respect Indigenous sovereignty. By putting into conversation Indigenous and diasporic women’s poetic accounts of travel within Canada and to other settler colonial nations, I participate in scholarly debates about Indigenous–Black allyships and consider how travel poetry may resist settler colonial goals of Indigenous erasure, even while registering histories of violent displacement.

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