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Publications by Sally Anderson Boström, PhD

Uppsala University, 2022

This dissertation focuses on three authors who came of age in the 1980s, Earl Lovelace, Mil-ton M... more This dissertation focuses on three authors who came of age in the 1980s, Earl Lovelace, Mil-ton Murayama, and Ntozake Shange, reading their novels set respectively on Trinidad, Hawai'i, and the Sea Islands, as postplantation expressions. My definition of the postplantation builds upon the work of Édouard Glissant, especially “Closed Place, Open Word” where he delineates three phases in literary production from the Plantation: the first is chiefly oral and appears as an “act of survival,” the second is an attempt to justify the Plantation system and is marked by “delusion,” and the third phase is written by descendants of the Plantation in a “passion of memory.” It is this third phase that I call the postplantation. Here, several generations after the system’s collapse, writers return to the plantation as a way to process its legacy. An integral part of this process for the authors studied here is the use of Creole languages developed on the plantation and still spoken today. This dissertation’s specific contribution is to show how the history of the plantation is central to contemporary island discourse. My comparative study of novels about Trinidad, Hawai‘i, and the Sea Islands untangles the effect of the plantation in each of these locations: the legacies of racial and sexual trauma, poverty, and the power structures that continue to replicate the plantation, but also the culture and language that emerged in triumph from this dehumanizing system. My readings of the post-plantation illustrate how despite writing about three seemingly very different locales, Lovelace, Murayama, and Shange are engaged in similar efforts to reclaim a local culture, language, and history denied in the plantation’s violent trajectory. The emerging field of island studies, archipelagic approaches to literature, and studies of vernacular in world literature speak to the significance of this doctoral study.

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I kno... more The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I know it, the island, the voice of the island singing … the voice of our island singing. ' 1 So writes Maxine Hong Kingston in Hawai'i One Summer, a collection of personal essays recording the author's life during the summer of 1978. 2 Though the title seems to indicate a short sojourn on the isles, Kingston lived in Honolulu for nearly two decades. In the 'Preface to the Paperback Edition' , written in 1998, she recalls: 'I wrote these essays during the middle of our seventeen-year stay in Hawai'i. ' 3 Ever careful in her diction, Kingston does not call Hawai'i home. Relegating seventeen years to a 'stay' she implies that despite this length of time and being endowed a 'Living Treasure of Hawai'i' in 1980, 4 she was only ever a visitor. Kingston's trepidation around her status on the islands reflects how the literature of Hawai'i operates within a dichotomy of exclusion and inclusion. Questions of who gets to write this literature, where it is written, and what language it is written in, dominate debates that began in the mid-twentieth 4

Karib - Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2018

This concise and comprehensive biography of Earl Lovelace reads as a celebration of the man, both... more This concise and comprehensive biography of Earl Lovelace reads as a celebration of the man, both as author and local figure in Trinidad & Tobago. Aiyejina wastes no words praising the man committed to telling the stories of Trinidad’s rural and urban communities, who has become beloved both locally and abroad. Emerging at the end of Earl Lovelace’s life (now aged 82) there is a sense of urgency about this biography, a palpable desire to pay tribute to the author within his lifetime. But scholars of Caribbean literature will find the biography carefully researched and a welcome addition to the field. Anyone involved in Lovelace scholarship will know the difficulties in accessing the slim and often out-of-print resources available on the author, including Aiyejina’s own compilation of Lovelace’s essays and lectures Growing in the Dark, which to my knowledge is only available at one European library. Fortunately for us, Aiyejina has long been dedicated to collecting written and spoken records of the author.

...

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018

In Waves of Knowing, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll offers an alternative to land-based discourse with a... more In Waves of Knowing, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll offers an alternative to land-based discourse with an ocean-based critical theory. This so-called “seascape epistemology” draws upon the local knowledge of indigenous Hawaiians (Kãnaka Maoli). The book is carefully constructed and at times poetic; metaphors of the sea work in critical juncture with oceanic literacies to encourage the flow of ideas as something fluid, adaptable, and reflective.

Ingersoll’s point of departure is a literal dive beneath the waves of the Pacific.

Papers by Sally Anderson Boström, PhD

Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 2017

How does current scholarship on literary translingualism and the “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin ... more How does current scholarship on literary translingualism and the “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin Yildiz) reflect on the richly multilingual setting of the Caribbean? Drawing on Edgar Schneider’s dy ...

Books by Sally Anderson Boström, PhD

Kelsay Books, 2021

Sally Anderson Boström invites us into a brief but evocative collection here, “harvesting” as it ... more Sally Anderson Boström invites us into a brief but evocative collection here, “harvesting” as it were, subjects that seem universal yet specifically personal and confessional: love, hurt, rebellion, identity and self-questioning. Her imagery is both sensuously familiar and startlingly fresh. It often achieves what I most seek in poetry—attentiveness to the immediate specificity of the world as it is experienced, and that rare ability to find the words, images and sounds that can conjure that experience for the reader. Her verse moves through rhythms that are unforced, at times conversational, yet carefully crafted.

This is poetry that makes us want to reread directly—for the layered meanings, for the subtle musicality, and for our own feelings the poem evokes. Anderson Boström’s new collection has some of the most vital verse I have read of late by a contemporary poet.

-Paul Schreiber, Poetry Editor, Two Thirds North

Uppsala University, 2022

This dissertation focuses on three authors who came of age in the 1980s, Earl Lovelace, Mil-ton M... more This dissertation focuses on three authors who came of age in the 1980s, Earl Lovelace, Mil-ton Murayama, and Ntozake Shange, reading their novels set respectively on Trinidad, Hawai'i, and the Sea Islands, as postplantation expressions. My definition of the postplantation builds upon the work of Édouard Glissant, especially “Closed Place, Open Word” where he delineates three phases in literary production from the Plantation: the first is chiefly oral and appears as an “act of survival,” the second is an attempt to justify the Plantation system and is marked by “delusion,” and the third phase is written by descendants of the Plantation in a “passion of memory.” It is this third phase that I call the postplantation. Here, several generations after the system’s collapse, writers return to the plantation as a way to process its legacy. An integral part of this process for the authors studied here is the use of Creole languages developed on the plantation and still spoken today. This dissertation’s specific contribution is to show how the history of the plantation is central to contemporary island discourse. My comparative study of novels about Trinidad, Hawai‘i, and the Sea Islands untangles the effect of the plantation in each of these locations: the legacies of racial and sexual trauma, poverty, and the power structures that continue to replicate the plantation, but also the culture and language that emerged in triumph from this dehumanizing system. My readings of the post-plantation illustrate how despite writing about three seemingly very different locales, Lovelace, Murayama, and Shange are engaged in similar efforts to reclaim a local culture, language, and history denied in the plantation’s violent trajectory. The emerging field of island studies, archipelagic approaches to literature, and studies of vernacular in world literature speak to the significance of this doctoral study.

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I kno... more The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I know it, the island, the voice of the island singing … the voice of our island singing. ' 1 So writes Maxine Hong Kingston in Hawai'i One Summer, a collection of personal essays recording the author's life during the summer of 1978. 2 Though the title seems to indicate a short sojourn on the isles, Kingston lived in Honolulu for nearly two decades. In the 'Preface to the Paperback Edition' , written in 1998, she recalls: 'I wrote these essays during the middle of our seventeen-year stay in Hawai'i. ' 3 Ever careful in her diction, Kingston does not call Hawai'i home. Relegating seventeen years to a 'stay' she implies that despite this length of time and being endowed a 'Living Treasure of Hawai'i' in 1980, 4 she was only ever a visitor. Kingston's trepidation around her status on the islands reflects how the literature of Hawai'i operates within a dichotomy of exclusion and inclusion. Questions of who gets to write this literature, where it is written, and what language it is written in, dominate debates that began in the mid-twentieth 4

Karib - Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2018

This concise and comprehensive biography of Earl Lovelace reads as a celebration of the man, both... more This concise and comprehensive biography of Earl Lovelace reads as a celebration of the man, both as author and local figure in Trinidad & Tobago. Aiyejina wastes no words praising the man committed to telling the stories of Trinidad’s rural and urban communities, who has become beloved both locally and abroad. Emerging at the end of Earl Lovelace’s life (now aged 82) there is a sense of urgency about this biography, a palpable desire to pay tribute to the author within his lifetime. But scholars of Caribbean literature will find the biography carefully researched and a welcome addition to the field. Anyone involved in Lovelace scholarship will know the difficulties in accessing the slim and often out-of-print resources available on the author, including Aiyejina’s own compilation of Lovelace’s essays and lectures Growing in the Dark, which to my knowledge is only available at one European library. Fortunately for us, Aiyejina has long been dedicated to collecting written and spoken records of the author.

...

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018

In Waves of Knowing, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll offers an alternative to land-based discourse with a... more In Waves of Knowing, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll offers an alternative to land-based discourse with an ocean-based critical theory. This so-called “seascape epistemology” draws upon the local knowledge of indigenous Hawaiians (Kãnaka Maoli). The book is carefully constructed and at times poetic; metaphors of the sea work in critical juncture with oceanic literacies to encourage the flow of ideas as something fluid, adaptable, and reflective.

Ingersoll’s point of departure is a literal dive beneath the waves of the Pacific.

Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 2017

How does current scholarship on literary translingualism and the “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin ... more How does current scholarship on literary translingualism and the “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin Yildiz) reflect on the richly multilingual setting of the Caribbean? Drawing on Edgar Schneider’s dy ...

Kelsay Books, 2021

Sally Anderson Boström invites us into a brief but evocative collection here, “harvesting” as it ... more Sally Anderson Boström invites us into a brief but evocative collection here, “harvesting” as it were, subjects that seem universal yet specifically personal and confessional: love, hurt, rebellion, identity and self-questioning. Her imagery is both sensuously familiar and startlingly fresh. It often achieves what I most seek in poetry—attentiveness to the immediate specificity of the world as it is experienced, and that rare ability to find the words, images and sounds that can conjure that experience for the reader. Her verse moves through rhythms that are unforced, at times conversational, yet carefully crafted.

This is poetry that makes us want to reread directly—for the layered meanings, for the subtle musicality, and for our own feelings the poem evokes. Anderson Boström’s new collection has some of the most vital verse I have read of late by a contemporary poet.

-Paul Schreiber, Poetry Editor, Two Thirds North