Emily Eyestone

My work explores the role of geophysical disaster in shaping the cultural identity, literary expression, and postcolonial political trajectories of islands in the Francophone Caribbean. I am interested how anticolonial poetry enlists hazards endemic to the tropics (hurricanes, earthquakes, eruptions, etc.) to explode imperial illusions of domination and control, and to articulate an authentic cultural consciousness anchored in the region’s dynamic geoclimate. I also explore the way that poet-writers like Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Edouard Glissant anticipate contemporary insights from disaster studies, showing that “natural” disasters are never simply accidents of nature, but the result of social and ecological vulnerabilities rooted in plantation slavery. Some of my other research interests include music, sound studies, postcolonial theory, ecofeminism, tourism studies, and geology. My work has been published in The Journal of Island Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, as well as in several edited collections.