From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues

From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues
^{Curated by Dr. Michelle Stephens
Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.}
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This seminar explores the archipelagic, as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation across various planetary spaces, including the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking and methodologies, informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses also on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, socio-political formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but rather, as models.

The seminar aims to address several related question: How can archipelagoes become the conceptual foundation of cultural notions of space and time, geography and topography? How can the comparative study of Atlantic and Pacific archipelagoes enrich area studies such as Caribbean, American, and Pacific Studies? How can archipelagoes redefine debates in imperial and postcolonial studies? What are the political, philosophical, and historical implications of assuming an archipelagic framework? And can the archipelagic function as a heuristic, a methodology, a discipline, or a field?

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