Land, Water, and Stars: Relationality in Anishinaabe and Diasporic Literature
Land, Water, and Stars: Relationality in Anishinaabe and Diasporic Literatureexamines how relationality is encoded and portrayed in poetry, short stories, and novels by Anishinaabe and diasporic authors, Elizabeth Acevedo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gerald Vizenor, and Mohsin Hamid. Through engagement with select works by these writers, the thesis contributes to critical discussion about relationality, a concept that posits that all existence is relational and asserts that no human being is outside this state of being. A generative, complex concept for analyzing responses to displacement and dispossession, critiques of power, and visions of just and balanced co-existence, relationality provides a useful analytic lens through which to consider and assess literary frameworks for imagining connections between Indigenous and racialized diasporic communities. Through close readings of Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths(Acevedo), “nogojiwanong” (Simpson), Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57(Vizenor), and Exit West(Hamid), I analyze the significance of two pivotal themes for unfolding relationality’s potential: (i) the concept of decolonial love and (ii) the concept of constellations, as conveyed in the representation of land and stars. The first section examines the relational aspects of decolonial love as taken up in works by Black Dominican-American poet Elizabeth Acevedo and Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Through engagement with these works, the thesis demonstrates how decolonial love might conjure attraction, intimacy and care, which colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism have damaged. The second section explores the significance of stars and constellations for unfolding relationality in novels by Anishinaabe theorist, Gerald Vizenor and Pakistani-British writer, Mohsin Hamid. This section illuminates the innovative ways that these writers draw on star knowledge to produce cross-hemispheric novels and reveals their insightful strategies for grappling with rootedness, migration, conquest, and displacement. Taken together, the thesis provides a critical description of the ways that literature might imagine, express, and enact relationality.
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