Poethica Pantesca: Liminagraphy as Decolonial Feminist Practice for Cultivating Knowledge with the Island of Pantelleria

Abstract

This research project responds to the call for a ‘decolonial island studies’ (Nadarajah and Grydehøj 2016) by proposing liminagraphy (Sheik 2021) as an epistemic practice to be adopted within the field. Through a consideration of literary and philosophical texts set on islands, I argue that islands collapse the divide between geographies of the earth and geographies of the mind and reveal a Western desire to define and possess. To avoid reproducing discourses of conquest and colonial tropes in the study of real islands in real seas, it is urgent to shift away from the intent of making knowledge of and about islands and islanders, and towards cultivating knowledge with them (Baldacchino 2008). To this end, I explore the epistemic and ethical implications of activating the decolonial feminist practice of liminagraphy – which foregrounds a relational notion of subjectivity, the involvement of the body in the process of theorising, and the urgency of decolonising the senses – in the Italian island of Pantelleria. Between 1 and 9 March 2024, I visited Pantelleria – a volcanic island situated in the Strait of Sicily, between Italy and Tunisia – in the intent of cultivating knowledge with it through a practice of liminagraphy. In this thesis, I frame my encounter with the island through Édouard Glissant’s concepts of poetics of Relation, the slave ship and the plantation as matrixes of modernity, opacity, and aesthetics of (relating to) the earth (Glissant [1990] 2023). Following Glissant’s call to develop a poetic attitude toward the world, I engage in poetic writing to reflect on the processes which led to the emergence of knowledge and on the implications of practicing an ethics of relational accountability (Wilson 2008) during my time on the island. Seeking to move away from the colonial subject/object construction (Quijano 2007) and plunge into the island’s relational field, I flesh out my experience of becoming sensually attuned to the particularity of Pantelleria and to the sensing capacities of my body. Through this process, I come to perceive the presence of the past as inscribed in Pantelleria’s landscape, reckon with colonial impulses, and feel the ethical demands of desire.