Description: For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.
Review Quotes: "This book takes the reader on a transoceanic journey, ranging from Guåhan to the heart of the American empire and to the many seas that the poets of the CHamoru diaspora have sailed. Weaving together groundbreaking archival research, subtle literary analysis, and decolonial Indigenous methodologies, Craig Santos Perez demonstrates how CHamoru poets have transformed their experience of cultural colonialism into weapons of resistance. A must-read for everyone invested in fighting for decolonization, demilitarization, and Indigenous sovereignty."--Anaïs Maurer, author of Oceania First: Climate Warriors and Post-Apocalyptic Nuclear Stories
"As the first book-length study of CHamoru poetry, this is an essential resource for any student, scholar or general reader wishing to understand the formal properties of CHamoru literature, as well as the cultural and historical circumstances underpinning it. Craig Santos Perez is himself an internationally renowned CHamoru poet and offers valuable insights into a wealth of material by contemporary CHamoru authors, situating their work within centuries-long aesthetic and cultural traditions."--Michelle Keown, co-editor of Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter "Perez contributes arguably among the most comprehensive and deep analyses of CHamoru indigeneity, aesthetics, and decolonization, building on the genealogy of CHamoru literature and synthesizing multiple genres and generations of CHamoru literature. This groundbreaking work moves CHamoru articulations beyond the established discourse of political status and self-determination into a rising CHamoru renaissance, creatively and dynamically triangulating multiple discourses of indigeneity, historiography, cultural identity, and decolonization, in the spirit of perpetuating CHamoru indigeneity."--Michael P. Perez, American Indian Culture and Research Journal