ABSTRACT
Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez (b. 1980) writes both the presence and erasure of his homeland, Guam, into American literary history via highly visual “poem maps”: words, diagrams, and drawings that depict a spatial re-orientation of Guam’s history, natural environment, and archipelagic reality to challenge both its colonial status and also prosaic US continental thinking. In from unincorporated territory (2008–2017), Perez reimagines Guam by unmapping the usual coordinates of such stories to realign definitions of the insular, the territorial, the archipelago, and the US continental body; he makes the literature alive to the local and the planetary in deep time.
