Adrift on the Earth: Caribbean Romanticism and Geopoetics

Kir Kuiken argues for the existence of a geopoetic literary genre extending from the late eighteenth century to the present and addresses its legacies through works of European Romantic authors and contemporary Caribbean writers. Framed by its origin in geology, geopoetics unfolds the aesthetic and political consequences of the Earth's independence from human existence alongside the realization that this fundamentally independent Earth is also the foundation of all human society. Highlighting this notion of an indifferent Earth, each chapter in this boundary-pushing new book offers an analysis of a Caribbean author--Édouard Glissant, Erna Brodber, Jacques Roumain, Olive Senior, Patrick Chamoiseau, Frankétienne, and Daniel Maximin--as a lens through which to view a Romantic counterpart: William Wordsworth, Friedrich Hölderlin, John Clare, and Karoline von Günderrode. The book invents the term "Caribbean Romanticism" to index an undercurrent in Romantic literature that becomes visible only once the poetic and philosophical experiments to which its themes and forms have been harnessed are made explicit in the context of the present: in the perdurance of neo-colonialism, its role in the acceleration of global warming, and the continued aftermath of the racial hierarchies that scaffolded European colonial expansion. These contemporary problems, anchored in the Romantic era, are addressed directly in much Contemporary Caribbean literature. Adrift on the Earth therefore also suggests how contemporary geopoetics continues to address present-day neo-colonialism, offering a set of ideas about new ways of relating to the Earth for the age of the Anthropocene.