Navigating CHamoru Poetry

Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization

Craig Santos Perez

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780816535507
  9780816542925
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816544301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez brings critical attention to a diverse and intergenerational collection of CHamoru poetry and scholarship. Throughout this book, Perez develops an Indigenous literary methodology called "wayreading" to navigate the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and Native aesthetics. Perez argues that contemporary CHamoru poetry articulates new and innovative forms of indigeneity rooted in CHamoru customary arts and values, while also routed through the profound and traumatic histories of missionization, colonialism, militarism, and ecological imperialism.

This book shows that CHamoru poetry has been an inspiring and empowering act of protest, resistance, and testimony in the decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice movements of Guåhan. Perez roots his intersectional cultural and literary analyses within the fields of CHamoru studies, Pacific Islands studies, Native American studies, and decolonial studies, using his research to assert that new CHamoru literature has been—and continues to be—a crucial vessel for expressing the continuities and resilience of CHamoru identities. This book is a vital contribution that introduces local, national, and international readers and scholars to contemporary CHamoru poetry and poetics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: From Unincorporated Territory
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. On Being Chamorro Guamanian CHamoru: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization
• 1. Taotao Tåno’: Sacred Land, Banyan Tree Aesthetics, and CHamoru Ecopoetics
• 2. The CHamoru House of Story: Guma’ Åcho’ Latte and Na(rra)tive Architecture in the Poetry of Peter R. Onedera
• 3. The Flying Proa: Outrigger Aesthetics, Migration, and Diasporic Indigeneity in Lehua Taitano’s A Bell Made of Stones
• 4. Singing Forward and Backward: Kåntan Chamorrita, CHamoru Intertextuality, and Spoken-Word Poetry
• Conclusion. Prutehi yan Difendi: CHamoru Literature as Decolonial Activism
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index