Disciplinary formations, creative tensions, and certain logics in archipelagic studies

In the context of writing and reading, the phrase “gather round” is a prompt to focus in and settle. It conjures spaces and times to come together - like pulling material into folds that are then stitched, or collecting the fruits of a harvest, or centering around a person or thing for some purpose. For me at least, such ideas are reminiscent of both islands and archipelagoes. So, in this chapter, I use “gather round” as an invitation to revisit and augment some of the recent foundational debates that have helped produce the study of archipelagoes and inclinations to archipelagic thinking. The focus of my story is the essay “Envisioning the Archipelago” (Stratford et al. 2011).

The chapter is in two parts. The longer, first part is historical and necessarily partial, and in it I revisit certain ideas about islands and archipelagoes that inform this collection and hinge on different ontologies, epistemologies, and values; I bolster those ideas by reference to work by Tariq Jazeel (2016). Then, in the shorter second part I respond to an invitation from the editors to think about the methodological implications of engaging with archipelagic frameworks by reference to work by Lanny Thompson (2017, 66). That work presents several ideas about the possibility that “archipelagic studies might have its own ‘methodo-logic’: an ‘archipe-logic,’” as do observations about thinking advanced by Marjorie Garber (2012), on whom I also draw.