A fictional poetic archive

: the resistance of feminist decolonising memory-imaginaries to Nicaraguan patriarchal coloniality and British entanglements

Abstract

This practice-based doctoral thesis traces Nicaragua's layered histories, including its entanglement with Britain, while examining resistant memory-imaginaries, using a feminist decolonising lens to reflect on these. In the experimental poetic fictional text multiple voices and stories weave around a young Nicaraguan-British feminist’s experiences. The text challenges common single story linear narratives and binary political accounts of recent Nicaraguan history, while juxtaposing and exposing fragments of the British colonial archive from the Mosquitia -now Nicaragua's Caribbean Shore- that are 'vandalised' by unidentified poetic voices. Overall, the thesis contributes to an examination of patriarchal coloniality and how this has played out in the political culture of contemporary Nicaragua, exploring how memories of resistance contribute to the enactment of feminist imaginaries and transformative social change movements in the present. It also explores how feminist decolonising memory-imaginaries from Abya Yala offer pathways to counter patriarchal coloniality's historical narratives by unearthing othered epistemologies and cosmovisions that reframe temporalities and human interrelations through the body and land. Finally, it experiments with narrative, taking on these perspectives through poetic, fictional and archival forms to bear witness to unspeakable violence while shedding light on the enacted imaginaries of feminist decolonising collectivities.

Date of Award	Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Jessica Moriarty (Supervisor), Jason Lim (Supervisor) & Anita Rupprecht (Supervisor)