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Water Rights and Decolonization: A Lecture and Poetry Reading with Craig Santos Perez
October 29, 2019, 7:00 PM
Free
Craig Santos Perez is an award-winning poet and professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. In his words, “My work is deeply influenced by Chamorro aesthetics in particular, and indigenous aesthetics in general, in which much art, architecture, weaving, tattooing, etc., employ symmetrical and repeating patterns. The same is true for many indigenous oral narratives. At the same time, there are also moments of variation within the repeating patterns.
“Much of my eco-poetry is engaged with ‘solastalgia,’ which refers to a nostalgia for a place that is being environmentally degraded. So it’s not about desiring an ideal nature, but instead a mourning and desire to protect our lands and water from further desecration. In terms of my political poetry, I think it is more so grounded in witness, protest, and resistance. What this work desires is not a past ideal political situation, but instead it longs and advocates for a decolonized, sovereign, and indigenous future.”
Cosponsored by the Environmental Studies Program, the Oak Institute for Human Rights, the French and Italian Department, the English Department, and the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
FMI: Amya Bhalla ’19, oakhr@colby.edu