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DeLoughrey Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her explorat...
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... have argued that migration theories of the Pacifi c, from Heyerdahl and Sharp to Finney and Davis, often refl ect more about regional shifts in the socioeconomic power of the writers' contexts than the past they wish to inscribe. To this end I would like to turn to a paradigmatic image of migra- tion in the eastern Pacifi c (Figure 4). Taken in Davis's novel, the limbs of the octopus stretch to the far corners of the Polynesian Triangle, connecting Aotearoa, Hawai'i, and Rapa Nui into one unifi ed body rather than an abstract geometric symbol. ...
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... This work follows a recent upsurge in interest in which the ocean is prefigured as significant to planetary futures, and where it is seen as a more central actor in geopolitical formations. Such a turn towards 'critical ocean studies' (Deloughrey 2017) within social thought across the world has sought to foreground the unique ontological (Steinberg and Peters 2015) and postcolonial (Gilroy 1993;Deloughrey 2007) provocations wrought by the sea. These welcome efforts to bring the ocean into political view have aimed, on the one hand, to decolonize its epistemologies and ontologies (i.e. to think about moving beyond euro-centric ways of knowing and constituting the ocean). ...
The Blue Economy concept is being embraced enthusiastically in Africa, both internally and externally. However, this new framing creates and calls for new understandings of how actors and places relate to one another, control, and create meaning and value. Thus, understanding the ocean - and its conceptual and material fabric - in this context, is a matter of political ecology, raising a number of questions that extend across geographies, spatio-temporalities, and political actors, both human and more-than-human. In this article, we flesh out these questions. An understanding of historical efforts to legally secure oceanic space can help contextualize the emergent African blue economy, one which we propose rests predominantly on the notion of 'security.' We demonstrate how resources are economically, environmentally, and politically 'secured' as they are first constructed as economic objects of accumulation, then militarized as matters of geopolitical security, and finally controlled through technologies of monitoring, surveillance, and resistance. The 'security' of the blue growth agenda and its effects operates across different temporal and spatial dimensions and are realized in different ways across the continent as explored in the six articles in this Special Section.
Keywords: blue economy, deep sea mining, political ecology, oceanic space, security
... This does not necessarily indicate a previous lack of theorization. The early concept of 'Archipelagraphy' as presented by DeLoughrey (2001DeLoughrey ( , 2007 already identifies it as an alternative historiography, considering chains of islands as a more appropriate metaphor for reading into island realities. It involves a process of dislocation and de-territorialization, constituting a new viewing platform that perceives them anew (DeLoughrey, 2001(DeLoughrey, , 2007Stratford et al., 2011, p. 114). ...
... The early concept of 'Archipelagraphy' as presented by DeLoughrey (2001DeLoughrey ( , 2007 already identifies it as an alternative historiography, considering chains of islands as a more appropriate metaphor for reading into island realities. It involves a process of dislocation and de-territorialization, constituting a new viewing platform that perceives them anew (DeLoughrey, 2001(DeLoughrey, , 2007Stratford et al., 2011, p. 114). A complementary definition also sees the process as an exploration of alternative cultural geographies and alternative performances, representations and experiences of islands (Stratford et al., 2011). ...
This article seeks to advance the current debate on the ‘archipelagic turn’ described by island studies. It does so by answering the call for further analysis of island-to-island relations (Stratford et al., 2011) through applying existing historical methodology with the identification of island movements (Pugh, 2013) between archipelagico islands. Firstly, it proposes the application of an adapted method by combining Fernand Braudel’s historical durations (Longue Durée) (1972) with an original attempt of island movements’ classification; this is done to conceive a triple-level historical analysis (Long, Medium and Short Term) of islands belonging to archipelagos. Secondly, this article hints at the possibility for island territories inside the European Union to translate archipelagic visions into viable policies by means of European Territorial Cooperation strategies as provided by the European institutional framework. Such arguments are then supported by comparative analysis proving the existence of an archipelago between the islands of Sicily and Malta. In our case study, we both apply the triple-level methodology and suggest that the exploitation of European Cross-Border Cooperation instruments and strategies (such as the Euroregion) could be highly useful for the recovery of a Sicilian-Maltese Archipelago vision.
... Although in different ways, much of this work schematically falls under what is now often called 'thinking with the archipelago' (Pugh, 2013a, p. 9;Bongie, 1998;DeLoughrey, 2001;Glissant, 1997b). This is illustrated by, among other influential publications, Glissant's (1997a) Poetics of Relation; Bongie's (1998) Islands and Exiles; Brathwaite's (1999) tidalectics; DeLoughrey's (2007) Routes and Roots;Hau'ofa's (2008) We are the Ocean; Sheller's (2009) work on 'mobilities'; Stratford et al.'s (2011) 'archipelagic turn', and Hayward's (2012a) 'aquapelago'. In various ways in this literature, islands are constituted as "relational spaces" (Stratford, 2003, p. 495) that unsettle borders of land/sea, island/mainland, and problematize static tropes of island insularity, isolation, dependency and peripherality (Grydehøj & Hayward, 2014;Pugh, 2005;2013b;Rankin, 2017); all of which amounts to what I have called a 'relational turn' in island studies (Pugh, 2013a;. ...
... One particularly appealing way has been through increasingly engaging and contributing to the contemporary 'oceanic turn' in the wider social sciences and humanities today; foregrounding island relationalities through an extending interest in oceanic materialities, currents, volumes, depths, mobilities, tides and swirls, but also watercraft, vessels and ships (Teaiwa, 2014;Blum, 2013;Bremner, 2016;DeLoughrey, 2001;Hayward, 2012a;Pugh, 2016;Rankin & Collins, 2017;Steinberg, 2001;Steinberg & Peters, 2015). From Hayward's (2012) 'aquapelago', to DeLoughrey's (2007 Routes and Roots, such debates now consistently bring to the fore how oceans are not a simple medium of transport between islands, or from A to B, but rather material, social, political and affective spaces themselves that play into island relationalities (DeLoughrey, 2007;Hayward, 2012a;Pugh, 2016;Steinberg & Peters, 2015). These kinds of connections are perhaps most obviously drawn out in contemporary research on shifting ice-sheets (Riquet, 2016;Steinberg & Kristoffersen, 2017), but are also powerfully brought into play in all sorts of other innovative ways in island studies today. ...
The island has become arguably one of the most emblematic figures of the Anthropocene. It is regularly invoked as exemplary of the changing stakes of our planet. This generates a crucially important role for island studies scholars; to explore, question, but now perhaps also trouble, some fundamental debates about islands in the Anthropocene. This paper picks up a particularly recurrent theme for island scholarship in recent decades-relationality and islands-and reorientates this within the stakes of the Anthropocene; discussing some implications for island studies, island ontology and resilience ethics. © 2018 - Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
... The presentation of Ile aux Aigrettes for tourists clearly guides visitors on a journey to the distant past, contributing to the image of a temporally isolated, pristine, pre-modern island supposedly separated from global processes (cf. Deloughrey, 2007;Hennessy & McCleary, 2011). However, conservationists' work on Ile aux Aigrettes is not quite seen as human interference, but rather as doing justice to inherent island qualities. ...
... The second island is the pristine island. This powerful image conceives of islands as somehow different 'other' spaces, outside of time and modernity, as nostalgia, a kind of paradise lost, a more natural and authentic place (Deloughrey, 2007;Hay, 2006). Built on the assumption of oppositional spaces separated by boundaries, this aspect resonates with the discourse of wilderness and the nature-culture dichotomy (Cronon, 1996;Descola, 2013). ...
This article discusses the Mauritian offshore islet and nature reserve Ile aux Aigrettes as an example of how the tension between isolation and connectivity of small islands plays out in the context of nature conservation. Combining approaches from island studies, anthropology, and geography, and based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the article enquires into how 'pristine' nature on Ile aux Aigrettes is produced. It shows how the selective mobility of humans, animals, and plants is part and parcel in producing a seemingly isolated island, e.g. in the case of visiting scientists, species translocation, and invasive species. This shows how the production of the isolated 'pristine' island is dependent on global connections and flows. Isolation and connectivity of islands, I argue here, depend on each other, and are significantly co-constituted by nonhuman mobilities. Nature conservation on Ile aux Aigrettes will be looked at as a reference towards an ideal past or a utopian future, protected as signifiers for a world in socio-ecological balance.
... Thus the poem establishes what Édouard Glissant terms a "poetics of relation", a referential system that, rather than remaining rooted in individual national contexts, engages in a horizontal, transoceanic dialogue with other cultures, languages and value systems in its critique of colonialism ( Glissant 1997, 44-46). Glissant's theory (which takes the Caribbean as its main point of reference) is comparable to Hauʻofa's in positing the sea as a basis for elaborating a regional, interpelagic identity, and as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has noted, Edward Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics (another Caribbean theoretical model) is also a productive paradigm for analysing the "cyclic" ebb and flow of the Pacific, and of the diasporic populations that have moved across and within it (see Brathwaite 1991 andDeLoughrey 2007). DeLoughrey relates these theories primarily to anglophone Pacific literatures, but Glissant's and Brathwaite's work is also pertinent to the large corpus of francophone, hispanophone and indigenous-language material that has emerged from the successive waves of colonial and postcolonial encounter in the region, not least because an increasing amount of francophone Pacific literature is now available in English translation (see Keown 2010Keown , 2014. ...
This article explores the ways in which precolonial understandings of the Pacific as a cross-cultural space involving extensive interpelagic networks of trade and cultural exchange, notably elaborated in Tongan scholar Epeli Hauʻofa’s 1990s series of essays celebrating Oceania as a “sea of islands”, are evident in pan-Pacific indigenous protests against nuclear testing in the region. It explores indigenous literary and artistic condemnations of both French and US nuclear testing (which collectively spanned a 50-year period, 1946–96), touching on the work of a range of authors from Aotearoa New Zealand, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti/French Polynesia, before discussing a recent UK government-funded research project focused on the legacy of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The project involved Marshallese poet and environmental activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and a range of her anti-nuclear poetry commissioned for the project (including “History Project”, “Monster” and “Anointed”) is analysed in the closing sections of this article.
... More recently, the Kerguelen Islands have emerged as a very tangible laboratory for French polar research, leaving traces of scientific exploration in the archipelago's landscape. The actual isolation of remote islands has been questioned by scholars of island studies, importantly with Deloughrey (2007) establishing this trope as an instrument of colonization. These geographies of the imagination are important to deconstruct for post-colonial analytical purposes, but they often overlook the tangible spatial practices through which island cultures and senses are shaped over time (Riquet, 2017). ...
The Kerguelen Islands are devoid of a permanent population, but are nonetheless interlinked to past and current human activities that have shaped their subantarctic landscape. In the past decades, the archipelago has become a French outpost for scientific research where scientists, support staff, research assistants, and travelers assemble during temporary missions. In this article, I present the spatial formation of islands as relational in order to explore how the material and the cultural converge to make the Kerguelen Islands a place of both mundane practice and global interconnection. These spatialities intertwine the features of the landscape with pre-departure preparations, animal encounters, scientific rigour, daily routines, and past human activities. I advance these narratives by analyzing 18 blogs of French sojourners who have spent extensive time on the Kerguelen Islands. I ultimately give islands without a permanent population a character unlike that of isolation and contemplation as is usually attributed to cold-water islands of the (sub) polar seas.
... Within typical island life, SIDS' peoples accept population mobility as part of islandness (DeLoughrey, 2007;Hau'ofa, 2008;Nixon and King, 2013). They also accept that, contemporarily, they might need to resettle and rebuild communities due to climate change's impacts (McNamara, 2009;McNamara & Gibson, 2009). ...
Small island developing states (SIDS) are portrayed as icons of climate change impacts, with assumed islandness characteristics being used to emphasize vulnerability. Meanwhile, island resilience expressed as the stability of island ‘paradises’ is said to be undermined by climate change. Two dominant counternarratives have been emerging. Physical science demonstrates the limited empirical evidence at the moment for SIDS being destroyed due to climate change. Notwithstanding that such empirical evidence could appear in the future, social science counternarratives are challenging notions of SIDS’ peoples inevitably fleeing their homes as climate refugees. Instead, SIDS’ peoples have strong abilities and desires to make their own mobility decisions, whether due to climate change or other impetuses. Consequently, islandness within SIDS’ climate change narratives is not necessarily problematic, but instead can help islanders address climate change and wider challenges. The counternarratives, even if not entirely contradicting the dominant narratives, provide needed nuances, balance, and contextualization to provide a full picture of SIDS, islandness, and climate change. © 2018 — Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
... Brathwaite and many of his fellow Caribbean authors have envi-sioned what I have elsewhere called a "transoceanic imaginary" as a trope for Caribbean history, migration, and regionalism. 6 This can be characterized as a cultural oceanography that maps a broader regional identity, establishing that, in Brathwaite's words, the "unity is submarine." 7 Or it can be characterized as "sea ontologies," figuring the ocean as constitutive to being. ...
... Second, assemblage thinking denotes a relational understanding of composition and agency (Dittmer, 2014), an approach that befits a region defined not so much by a bounded territorial identity, but by its frag- mented and archipelagic geography stitched together by a history of movement, interac- tion and complex forms of connection (DeLoughrey, 2007;Glissant, 2007;Pugh, 2013). A relational view can bring into focus the tensions between sovereignty and dependen- cy arising from these historical geographies of connection within the Caribbean basin. ...
... Islands have often been and still are the basis of major scientific breakthroughs in disciplines ranging from anthropology and the social sciences to geosciences, biogeography, ecology and evolutionary biology, and they have inspired indigenous cultures as well as modern literature and arts for centuries (DeLoughrey 2007;Royle 2008;Gillespie & Clague 2009;Kueffer et al. 2014;Royle 2014;Kueffer et al. 2016;Braje et al. 2017). Islands are used as model systems in a wide range of disciplines, including ecology, evolutionary biology and biogeography (Vitousek 2004;Kueffer et al. 2014), systems ecology (Davies et al. 2016), conservation biology (Kueffer 2012;Ewel et al. 2013;Kueffer & Kaiser-Bunbury 2014), the environmental sciences (Walker & Bellingham 2011), historical ecology (Rolett & Diamond 2004;Vitousek et al. 2004;Braje et al. 2017), sustainability science (McDaniel & Gowdy 2000;Diamond 2005;Kelman et al. 2015), socioecological research (Chertow et al. 2013) and anthropology and the social sciences (Royle 2014;Coulthard et al. 2017). ...
This article discusses four features of islands that make them places of special importance to environmental conservation. First, investment in island conservation is both urgent and cost-effective. Islands are threatened hotspots of diversity that concentrate unique cultural, biological and geophysical values, and they form the basis of the livelihoods of millions of islanders. Second, islands are paradigmatic places of human–environment relationships. Island livelihoods have a long tradition of existing within spatial, ecological and ultimately social boundaries and are still often highly dependent on local resources and social cohesion. Island cultures and their rich biocultural knowledge can be an important basis for revitalizing and innovating sustainable human–nature relationships. Third, islands form a global web that interlinks biogeographic regions and cultural spaces. They are nodes in a global cultural network: as multicultural island societies, through diaspora islander communities on continents and through numerous political and trade relationships among islands and between islands and countries on continents. Fourth, islands can serve as real-world laboratories that enable scientific innovation, integration of local and generalized knowledge and social learning and empowerment of local actors. We conclude that island systems can serve as globally distributed hubs of innovation, if the voices of islanders are better recognized.
