RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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(2) because all landmasses, strictly speaking, are islands, even North America, or, in
Snyder‘s reinhabitory nomenclature, Turtle Island. In order to revise the traditional
cartographic hierarchy of island spaces, postcolonial authors of the Caribbean turn to
alternative theories of history and geography for ―exploring the complex and shifting
entanglement[s] between sea and land‖ (2). DeLoughrey looks at Kamau Brathwaite‘s
theory of ―tidalectics,‖ an ―alter/native‖ historiography that ―resists the synthesizing telos
of Hegel‘s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement
and rhythm of the ocean‖ to articulate a ―feminized vision of history‖ (2). If the linear
progression of a discrete subject or nation defines a masculine chronotope, a cyclical
model of moving and moved subjects defines a feminine chronotope. 26 ―Alter/native‖
history does not find that isolated island spaces are behind the progress of continental
civilizations; it finds both spaces engaged with cyclical and similar historical patterns. If
history is a Hegelian progress toward freedom, those places without a written version of
history appear primitive because they lack evidence of progress. The term ―island‖
confers a-historical status to the native peoples, making them primitive in relation to
continental civilizations with deep-seated written records. Since the Turtle Islander
Snyder writes a sense of place according to a cyclical, recurring view of history, he
islandizes the continent to create equity. The ―Sainte Lucie‖ (Walcott, Collected Poems
314) native Walcott similarly writes an ―alter/native‖ historiography.
26 Mikhail Bakhtin defines the chronotope as a term that refers to ―the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in
literature‖ (Dialogic Imagination 84). He contrasts the ―constitutive category‖ of
literature with the inherent forms of human cognition which Immanuel Kant argues for in
his Critique of Pure Reason. For Bakhtin, the chronotope is not transcendental, instead it
refers to ―forms of the most immediate reality‖ and is suited to a literary purpose (85).