Some reading recs on tidalectics and archipelagic thinking (Black Atlantic; Indigenous ontologies; transnational resistance)
(Originally posted elsewhere on 15 April 2025.)
Got an anon message; they were interested in hearing more about the concept of tidalectics.
I didn’t want to subsume these terms, over-simplify, or mischaracterize the work of these scholars/thinkers. But I do sometimes in post-tagging systems use “tidalectics” as a sort of shorthand for a constellation or archipelago (pun intended, lol) of related concepts described as ‘archipelagic thinking’ and ‘poetics of Relation’ by Edouard Glissant, ‘repeating islands’ by Benitez-Rojo/Brathwaite, and ‘sea of islands’ by Epeli Hau’ofa. I also use it for related things like Black Atlantic, ‘Caribbeanist’ thinking, ‘oceanic thinking,’ transnationalism, ‘intimacies of four continents,’ etc. Much of this deeply, deeply connected to Afro-Caribbean thinking and literature. Unsurprisingly. I’m not from islands/Caribbean, so I don’t wanna take-on a tone of authority here. Comes up often in discussion of eco-poetics and the postcolonial. This discussion is kinda becoming in-vogue in environmental humanities (’blue humanities’ and critical geography) and postcolonial studies by self-satisfied academics, but this has of course been discussed for years and years and years by Caribbean and Pacific scholars, especially Glissant (Martinican/Caribbean), Brathwaite (Barbadian/Caribbean), Cesaire (Caribbean), and Hau’ofa (Tonga/Fiji/Pacific).
The Caribbean(ist) journal Small Axe has also been a big arena for discussing the concept. Two of my fave authors on colonial histories and multispecies ethnographies, Sujit Sivasundaram and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, also focus on oceanic/archipelagic thinking. Highly recommend those two. Another, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, also covers Caribbean eco-poetics and frequently describes archipelagic thinking in accessible ways. You can search their names/publications for articles to read online. (Macarena Gomez-Barris--author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives--is currently working on a text about “fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.)
I’ve previously shared summaries of the work of DeLoughrey on “Submarine Futures”; Paravising-Gebert on “eco-poetics of extinction”; Harney, Moten, and Sandra Ruiz discussing archipelagic thinking; Hi’ilei Julia Hobart on “oceanic fugitivity” and “thinking at the land-water boundary in Hawai’i”; Britt Rusert on “the horror of the sea” in twentieth-century US popular consciousness as legacy of historical plantocracy and ascendant US global power (she also wrote much about “the experiential plantation” of the Caribbean during professionalization of European scientific institutions/discourse); Tiziana Terranova and Iain Chambers on “the Black Mediterranean” and the surveillance of refugees in Europe as part of a continuum/spectrum with enslavement/dispossession in modernity’s “epistemological order of racial capitalism”; and others.
Also has come to be provocative framework for thinking about non-literal islands. You’ll see ‘archipelago’ also applied to other spatial and ideological formation things like ‘carceral archipelagoes’ and ‘plantation archipelagos’ and ‘poverty archipelagos.’ Basically, that US-European empire treated the Caribbean as a laboratory for how to isolate, contain, extract, commodify, and experiment on people, labor, land, industry, ecologies, etc. during instantiation of ‘modernity.’ (While Spain and Portugal played around with this in the Caribbean they also did something similar in the early modern spice gardens and ports of Southeast Asia, while Britain/France/US continued similar in both regions too. So archipelagos of both ‘East’ and ‘West’ brutalized.) Added weight because British and then later US naval force understood and capitalized on importance of oceanic networks to maintaining global empire (think British Navy; Lisa Lowe’s writing on Britain importing Chinese and South Asian laborers to Caribbean during technical abolition of chattel slavery; US building Panama Canal; US naval force in twentieth century linking Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico). Elizabeth Povinelli describes this process of colonial fixation on land titles and ‘solid’ land in Northern Territory in Australia, too.
And these forms persist in extractivist settings and spatiality of labor, incarceration, industrial sites. Think Cancer Alley in Louisiana; archipelagos of Southeast Asian, West African, or Brazilian plantations along corridors of highways and railroads; low-income residential neighborhoods or ‘workforce’ housing compartmentalized along transportation corridors near logistics nodes; prisons in upstate New York; Commencement Bay’s industrial sites and immigrant detention in Seattle-Tacoma, etc. Like hotspots or blinking lights along corridor. Australia, the US, and the EU all still use islands for migrant detention. At the same time, if global empire yokes together East and West, then empire’s malcontents can perform the same trick. You can look at correspondences and writing from colonial subjects and radicals in like 1890s who explicitly described how anticolonial actors could and should also invoke transnational networks. (Linking networks in Buenos Aires, Havana, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Paris, Cairo, Istanbul, Tokyo, etc. And today still, too. Archipelagos of cooperation, not just on islands. What happens in a housing commune in Athens is related to movements in Puerto Rico, connected by defiance of same empire, market, capital, etc.)
So since at least 1500-ish, ‘globalized’ world(s) involve circuits, networks, routes, often mediated by the sea. But people living on islands often have relationship with that sea long predating modernity. Glissant and others talk about a submarine/subterranean connecting tissue between islands, so that, even if they are apparently physically isolated or separated by Hispanophone/Francophone linguistic tradition, there is something akin, shared, in common.
Relationality and relation to landscape asserts agency, autonomy, belonging. Especially with Glissant, this involves language, poetics, translation, reclamation of ‘submarine’ histories. Hau’ofa says “we are the ocean.”
Maybe reminiscent of Indigenous resurgence, constellations of resistance, fugitivity, opacity/refusal, pedagogies of deep listening, maroons/marronage, resonances, and writers like Harney and Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Achille Mbembe, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo, and others.
Anyway, four classics:
The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Rights of Passage; Islands; Masks) (Kamau Brathwaite, 1973)
The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Antonio Beniteze-Rojo, 1989)
The Archipelago Conversations (Eduoard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2021)
We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Epeli Hau’ofa, 2008)
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As more-contemporary or accessible intros or summaries, maybe:
Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Elizabetth DeLoughrey), especially introduction chapter: “Tidalectics: Navigating Repeating Islands”
“Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene” (Elizabeth DeLoughrey, English Language Notes 57:1, 2019)
“The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature” (Sharae Deckard, The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, 2016)
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And some others:
“Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene” (Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Comparative Literature 69:1, 2017)
Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (Sujit Sivasundaram, 2021)
“Archipelagic Interiority: Notes and Reflections on Poetic Voice and Trans Writing in the Philippines” (shane carreon, Kohl 9:1 Special Issue: Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries, 2023)
“On the Unfolding of Edouard Glissant’s Archipelagic Thought” (Michael Wiedorn, Karib-Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 6:1, 2021)
“Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking” (Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33:2, 2015)
“New Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the Submersible” (Stacy Alaimo, NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research)
“Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality” (Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziheri, e-flux Journal Issue #45, May 2013)
“Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities” (Serpil Oppermann, Configurations 27:4, 2019) and Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene (Edited by Serpil Oppermann, 2023)
Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Edited by Tamara Shefer, Vivenne Bozalek, and Nike Romano, 2024)
“From the black Atlantic to the bleak Pacific: Re-reading “Benito Cereno”“ (Alexandra Ganser, Atlantic Studies 15:2, 2018)
“Literary Ecologies of the Indian Ocean” (Hofmeyer, English Studies in Africa 62:1, 2019)
“Archipelagic Readings: towards a Poetics of Creolization” (Hugues Azerad, Trans-Revue de litterature generale et comparee, Special Issue: Insularities/Archipelagos, 2020)
“Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology” (Campbell and Paye, Humanities 9:106, 2020)
“A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis” (Sidney Mentz, Coastal Studies and Society, 2022)
“Tending the Forests Beneath Anthropocene Seas” (Williams and Zalasiewicz, in Oceans Rising: A Companion to Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation, 2022)
“Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands: Building Resistance against Climate Change” (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, The Black Scholar 51:2, 2021)
Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo, 2018)
“Oceanic Routes: (Post-it) Notes on Hydro-Colonialism” (Bystrom and Hofmeyer, Comparative Literature 69:1, 2017)
“Foreword: Ocean Space and the Marine Social Sciences” (McKinley, in The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space, 2023)
“Atomic histories and elemental futures across Indigenous waters” (Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, Media + Environment 3:1, 2021)
“On Oceanic Fugitivity” (Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, Ways of Water series by Social Science Research Council, 2020)
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2020)
“Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific” (Sujit Sivasundaram, Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives, 2020)
