Chapter 14 - Sanctuary: Literature and the Colonial Politics of Protection

Summary

This chapter argues that human and environmental sanctuary, operating within liberalism, is a constituent aspect of US colonialism, not an exception from it. The chapter offers a cultural genealogy of sanctuary as a justificatory logic of US settler expansion through a reading of Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). Against this, the chapter turns away from the canon of white American nature writing in order to center literary and material practices of survival that do not depend on international, colonial orders of protection. Here, the chapter reads Joan Naviyuk Kane’s collections of poems, The Straits (2105) and Milk Black Carbon (2017), written in the aftermath of the King Island Diaspora, as poetic and social experiments in thinking beyond colonial state sanctioned modalities of safety, return, and kinship.