Gigi Adair, Kylie Crane, Nicole Waller

Critiquing Origins in the Mode of the Archipelago 

Archipelagic thought evokes the currents and connections engendered through the motif of ‘scattered islands’ to suggest the slow (geological, biological, cultural) forms of shifts and change. By drawing attention to the movements and (un)settlements that belie uni-directional narratives, the archipelago suggests a network, connected by currents, considered within a specific horizon. It brings “submerged or displaced relationalities into view” (Shih 2008: 1350), disrupting dualistic assumptions and articulations of identities along axes of belonging and disenfranchisement. Archipelagic thought helps to articulate relations in degrees rather than absolutes, and allows for angles of approaches rather than re-iterating structures of origins and originality.

This panel will bring three papers together to re-think (narratives of) diaspora, belonging and origins in Anglophone literatures and cultures. It follows Clifford Geertz’ call to “address the splinters” in “a splintered world” (Geertz 2012: 221): Instead of foregrounding the land, or other privileged sites, as a point of origin, a shift of perspective emerges: a ‘sea of islands’, to borrow Epeli Hau’ofa’s phrasing (Hau’ofa 1993). The proposal is for a panel with three papers. Short abstracts are included below.

“Reversing the Currents: Reconceptualizing an Archipelagic African Diaspora” (Gigi Adair, University of Potsdam) 

Much has been written about the African presence in Caribbean writing. The premise of this paper is that we also need to account for the Caribbean presence in contemporary African writing, for example in works that use Dominican vudu to understand Igbo spirituality, or which rewrite the trope of the “door of no return”. The currents of literary and cultural influence do not only flow in one direction, and some recent writing from Africa and the African diaspora demands a reconceptualization of African diaspora—one which considers the ramifications of diasporic return, which accounts for the possibility of African diasporas within Africa, and which understands the African mainland as also an island of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

“Crusoe Archipelagoes: Influence and Confluence, 300 years later” (Kylie Crane, University of Potsdam) 

Robinson Crusoe occupies a prominent position in English literary histories, even now, 300 years after its first publication. Michael Seidel, for instance, notes that the story of the “castaway merchant-adventurer [...] is amongst the most widely recognized” particularly as, he stresses, “those who have never read the book seem to know something of what is in it” (Seidel 2008: 182). This paper examines the ways through which Crusoe generates, or assembles, meanings, using archipelagic thought to critique notions of origins, originality, or singularity (be it as ‘the first novel in English,’ as a mythical story, or as paramount to the canon). This shift in conceptualisation reveals different, non-hierarchical and non-linear, ways in which knowledge is generated and circulated. Rather than ‘derivative,’ intertextual relations become ‘intra-textual’ relations (adopting Barad 2007), suggesting the co-constitutive way in which texts generate meaning and are received by readers, that is, with other texts: a shift from models of influence to a model of confluence, which, it is argued, creates a site for intersectional critique.

“The ‘Postcolonial Arctic’? Conceptualizing the Canadian Arctic Archipelago” (Nicole Waller, University of Potsdam) 

This paper focuses on the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as a site from which to think about current disputes over sovereignty in the Northwest Passage (which weaves through the Archipelago) and the larger Arctic oceanic world. In many of the debates led by the governments of nation-states and transnational organizations, the Archipelago, the Passage, and the wider Arctic Ocean appear as sites of melting ice that give rise to fantasies of increased accessibility and transit. Concentrating on the sovereignty dispute around the Northwest Passage, I trace how the debates on transit through the Passage have produced new conceptions of ‘overlapping’ and ‘layered’ sovereignty in ice-covered waters. Despite the development of such a new international oceanic governance regime, however, most of these debates follow familiar colonial patterns of exploration and exploitation and ignore or sideline Indigenous conceptions of Arctic space and sovereignty. My contribution attempts to relate selected Canadian Inuit views of archipelagic space and the wider ‘Inuit Sea’ to these mainstream debates. I aim to show how Inuit activists, writers, and scholars have articulated crucial interventions into the contemporary theorizing of the Arctic via a specific take on the archipelagic. Inuit interventions posit the Canadian Arctic Archipelago both as a specific material site of land, water, and ice and as a reminder of the necessity of decolonizing the Arctic and centering Inuit conceptions of stewardship and sovereignty. Placing Inuit thought on the archipelagic within the wider debate of Caribbean and Native Pacific conceptions of archipelagic relation and postcolonial futures, I trace how Inuit conceptions of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago derail mainstream Arctic debates over ‘origins’ and the fixed borders of settler colonial nation-states while simultaneously insisting on the Archipelago and the wider Inuit Sea as an Inuit space of use and occupancy in a different register. 

Works Cited
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantam Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Geertz, Clifford. “The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century”. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 218-263.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 1993.
Seidel, Michael. “Robinson Crusoe: Varieties of Fictional Experience”. In: John Richetti (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 182-199.
Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction”. PMLA. Vol. 123 No. 5, 2008. 1347-1362.