Adrift on the Earth - by Kir Kuiken

About the Book

"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 - âEdouard Glissant, Erna Brodber, Jacques Roumain, Olive Senior, Patrick Chamoiseau, Frankâetienne, and Daniel Maximin - as a lens through which to view a Romantic counterpart: William Wordsworth, Friedrich Hèolderlin, John Clare, and Karoline von Gèunderrode. 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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Adrift on the Earth fills in so many stories and gaps that most of us could never fill. This book will be indispensable for teachers of Haiti's intellectual tradition and transformative for English literary studies. Incredibly important and unique." --John Drabinski, University of Maryland

"Adrift on the Earth offers a temporal tour de force, not only reading Caribbean literature anew through European Romanticism, but more crucially revealing how the region's vulnerable, archipelagic position reframes Enlightenment thought and reshapes our understanding of the Anthropocene."--Valérie Loichot, Emory University

About the Author

Kir Kuiken is Associate Professor of English, University at Albany, SUNY. He is author of Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism (2014) and coeditor, with Deborah Elise White, of Haiti's Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution (2022).