We Are Castaways: Archipelagic Imagination in Our Trembling Échos-monde

Abstract This article, here translated from the author's original lecture in Portuguese, distills his experiences of fieldwork in Latin America and reading of Caribbean authors who took his “imagination to the creole seas,” from which emerged eventually a “vision of archipelago” as a space-time splintering conducted from underwater, anti-continental perspectives. Bringing the challenge of archipelagicity to the reconfiguring of time as well as space, the lecture traces his journey from creole toward archipelago. Traversing the Mississippi delta, island clusters, and coral atolls in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds, gathering up the poetics of dialects, pidgins, creoles, and other errant tongues, it is an “unpacific” voyage that dredges up the author's East Asian, Pacific Rim identity as a divining rod for sensing archipelagic connections between differently creolized subjectivities. This meaningful web, generated through a shared awareness of not history but its lack, constitutes a new home: “a dwelling called archipelago.”