Reading Space for New Worlds in Jordan Abel's Un/inhabited

• Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look beyond what readings Un/inhabited creates the conditions for to ask what reading practices it affords. The poem’s experimental form presents a challenge to readers as it resists attempts to read using conventional strategies. Taking a cue from the book's title, I ask what happens when readers enter the space of the poem as reader-discoverers, and how they can be helped to engage with it in meaningful ways. Guided by Abel’s decolonial poetics and his play on the metaphor of text as landscape, I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of nomadology and smooth, striated, and holey space to suggest that Un/inhabited’s own spaces invite anti-settler, nomadic modes of reading. These render texts porous, undermining their capacity to determine the shape of the worlds they narrate. Approaching texts in this way enables readers to shift from passive recipients of information to world shapers.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Jordan Abel

Un/inhabited

Indigenous literature

experimental poetry

the western

decolonisation

spatiality

Literature

Litteraturvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)