Abstract
In an era of accelerating environmental crisis, the concept of archipelagicity offers a crucial paradigm for reimagining reading, interpretation, and cultural critique. Beyond its geographic referent, archipelagic thought resists continental, land-based epistemologies that privilege stability and singular narratives, instead foregrounding relationality, fluidity, and interconnectivity. Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean archipelagraphic studies, and Paul Carter’s epistemological scholarship, this paper explores how archipelagic reading destabilizes dominant frameworks in cultural studies. By focusing on the Atlantic dimension, and engaging with literary, visual, and theoretical texts through an archipelagic lens, we propose to uncover emergent modes of interpretation that foreground fragmentation, circulation, and ecological precarity. In an age where climate change disproportionately affects island communities, the archipelagic framework resonates with urgent ethical, aesthetical, cultural and political stakes. This paper examines how contemporary writers, artists, and theorists from the Macaronesia archipelagoes of the north-eastern Atlantic invoke archipelagic sensibilities to articulate forms of resistance, survival, and epistemological renewal. Furthermore, archipelagicity offers a compelling intervention in the humanities, challenging extractive methodologies and fostering a fluid, interconnected approach to knowledge production. How does archipelagic thinking reshape the way we engage with texts? How can it foster new solidarities in cultural studies? This paper argues that by embracing archipelagic reading, we cultivate interpretive practices attuned to the entangled vulnerabilities and resistances of our ecological and cultural moment, and how, by doing so, we are invited to rethink methodological and epistemological approaches to comparativist work itself.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Archipelagicity, Reading, Comparativism, Oceanic epistemologies
