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Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures
Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean ('tidalectics') to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along--at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. --Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai'i
Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of 'native' identities and rights and their grounded opposition as 'indigenous regionalism' to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations. --Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia
Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the tidalectic between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.
The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity.
Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of 'native' identities and rights and their grounded opposition as 'indigenous regionalism' to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations. --Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia
Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the tidalectic between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.
The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity.
Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
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37 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
4 books3 followersElizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor at UCLA who teaches postcolonial and Indigenous literature courses on the environment, globalization, critical ocean studies, and the Anthropocene and climate change, with a focus on the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (2007), and co-editor of the volumes Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011); and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015). Her latest (open access) book, Allegories of the Anthropocene, examines climate change and empire in the literary and visual arts and was published by Duke University Press in 2019. She is an advisory member of The Living Archive: Extinction Stories from Oceania Project and with Thom Van Dooren, was co-editor of the interdisciplinary open-access journal Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship has been supported by institutions such as the ACLS, NEH, Rockefeller, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, Rachel Carson Center (LMU, Munich), the UCHRI, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 15, 2019
Things I appreciated:
* DeLoughrey attempts to situate herself as a white women academic not just as a performative gesture - but as an invitation to mark why she has come to her work.
* Her attending to masculinist readings of Carribean (more on this is in bit).
* Positioning Black Caribbean/Native writers as the theoretical scaffolding of her project - not ancillary.
Things I had trouble with:
* Still, the tired discourse that somehow indigeneity has never been accounted for by anyone other that somehow Native and/or White scholars (i.e. to think that a conversation of indigeneity is also bound up in a conversation about the Black diaspora).
* the overdetermined romance of the sea as something libratory that effaces race/gender/origin/class (thinking about Tinsley's critique of the watery metaphor from "Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic)
* DeLoughrey's section on the Caribbean literature seems to position women writers outside the same theoretical sphere she affords Brathwaite, Glissant, and Walcott.
* DeLoughrey attempts to situate herself as a white women academic not just as a performative gesture - but as an invitation to mark why she has come to her work.
* Her attending to masculinist readings of Carribean (more on this is in bit).
* Positioning Black Caribbean/Native writers as the theoretical scaffolding of her project - not ancillary.
Things I had trouble with:
* Still, the tired discourse that somehow indigeneity has never been accounted for by anyone other that somehow Native and/or White scholars (i.e. to think that a conversation of indigeneity is also bound up in a conversation about the Black diaspora).
* the overdetermined romance of the sea as something libratory that effaces race/gender/origin/class (thinking about Tinsley's critique of the watery metaphor from "Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic)
* DeLoughrey's section on the Caribbean literature seems to position women writers outside the same theoretical sphere she affords Brathwaite, Glissant, and Walcott.
June 23, 2011
well-written and intriguing. deloughrey deals with much of what interests me about literature: its connections to history, geography, and space; its place in identity, ethnicity, and nationalism; its intertextuality. i could keep going but i won't. this is the type of scholarship that i would like to be doing myself.
October 13, 2025
4 “Like Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant reminds us that the “island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea” (1989, 139). This “openness” reflects a tidalectic between routes and roots, a methodology of reading island literatures that structures this book. Thus the first section examines the literature of maritime routes and what I term the “transoceanic imaginary,” exploring Derek Walcott’s maxim that the “the sea is history.”’
24 ‘This comparative tidalectic also allows for the emergence of historical and social contrast, such as the tension between diaspora and indigeneity, which highlights the distinctiveness between and within the regions’ literary production. This book seeks to highlight the ways in which the process of migration and settlement produces diasporic and indigenous subjects in an active relationship with the land and sea’
57 ‘The attempts to claim ocean space as territory caused multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maritime battles and generated legal debates over whether the ocean was essentially a closed (national territory) or open (internationally shared) space. A new legal grammar of the “freedom of the seas” ironically facilitated the passage of slave ships, contributing to the ways in which the Atlantic became a primary space of the dialectic between European colonial sovereignty and African subjection.’
129 ‘By the mid-1970s, the first creative writing journals, novels, poetry collections, Pacific Island anthologies, and a regional literature conference were established.49 The vaka, and the transoceanic imagination that it represents, are key to placing these emergent literatures in history. As Paul Sharrad has shown: “Polynesian navigation has supplied what has perhaps become a master trope for Pacific literary production” (1998, 97).’
269 ‘Diaspora and globalization rely on a discourse of fluidity and flows, a gendered grammar of the oceanic that I have connected to the recent territorialism of the Law of the Sea’
24 ‘This comparative tidalectic also allows for the emergence of historical and social contrast, such as the tension between diaspora and indigeneity, which highlights the distinctiveness between and within the regions’ literary production. This book seeks to highlight the ways in which the process of migration and settlement produces diasporic and indigenous subjects in an active relationship with the land and sea’
57 ‘The attempts to claim ocean space as territory caused multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maritime battles and generated legal debates over whether the ocean was essentially a closed (national territory) or open (internationally shared) space. A new legal grammar of the “freedom of the seas” ironically facilitated the passage of slave ships, contributing to the ways in which the Atlantic became a primary space of the dialectic between European colonial sovereignty and African subjection.’
129 ‘By the mid-1970s, the first creative writing journals, novels, poetry collections, Pacific Island anthologies, and a regional literature conference were established.49 The vaka, and the transoceanic imagination that it represents, are key to placing these emergent literatures in history. As Paul Sharrad has shown: “Polynesian navigation has supplied what has perhaps become a master trope for Pacific literary production” (1998, 97).’
269 ‘Diaspora and globalization rely on a discourse of fluidity and flows, a gendered grammar of the oceanic that I have connected to the recent territorialism of the Law of the Sea’
January 14, 2024
This woman is a genius. Too bad I don't work with Caribbean/Pacific Island literature.
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October 25, 2013860.99729 D362 2010
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews