From Deleuze and Guattari’s essay on “Minor Literature” to Alfred Arteaga’s work on Chicanx poetics, theorists have studied the relationship between power and language, describing how creative writers find inventive ways to interrogate monolingual and nationalist logics.[1] Often, personal as well as historical conditions shape an author’s linguistic choices. My interest here lies in how poets use citation and translation as craft techniques in forging poetic languages that challenge powerful configurations and histories.
On theorizing Caribbean space: History and linguistic diversity in the Caribbean
Coolitude poetics from the Caribbean
In order to understand Caribbean Coolitude poetics, one might review the local poetics to illuminate context. Coolitude uses Caribbean poetics — broadly created by and maintained by black intellectuals. Coolitude would be nowhere without its ancestor and kin, Négritude. A question arises: is the Caribbean as one geopolitical space and how have the histories of different colonizers’ languages created disparate yet united experiences in the Antillean archipelago?