Aquapelagos

“The aquapelago has become a seminal framework for shifting debate in island scholarship beyond the land-locked island and towards engagements with watery surroundings. Aquapelagos: Integrated Terrestrial and Marine Assemblages makes a major contribution to aquapelago thinking. It is not only indispensable for Island Studies but significant for the shifting stakes of broader debate in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. For, by foregrounding the power of thinking with terrestrial-aquatic continua, of emergent patchworks of dynamic relational (un)becoming, the aquapelago is a powerful engagement with today’s crisis of faith in modern frameworks of reasoning, a unique challenge to the human/nature divide.”

—Jonathan Pugh, Professor of Island Studies, Newcastle University (UK). Co-author (with David Chandler) (2021) Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds, University of Westminster Press

“What is an ‘aquapelago’? The answer leads readers to question mainstream understandings of socio-spatial existence. The opening discussion of Hau’ofa’s Pacific ‘sea of islands’ framework reveals ‘the island’ as a limited construct stemming from a terrestrial, Euro-centric tradition. The chapters then present examples by diverse authors who attend to the socio–olitical–cological–oceanographic dynamics of space and place in historical context, combined with the critical stakes of global climate change. This is essential reading for scholars emerging from generations of thwarted justice and evaded settler colonial responsibility in search of reparative onto-epistemologies to enable the sovereignty and survival of the world’s most vital aquapelagic assemblages.”

—Amelia Moore, Associate Professor University of Rhode Island, USA

“A dozen years after the concept was introduced to Island Studies, the longawaited international anthology dedicated to empirical and critical theoretical discussions on the aquapelago is here. It assembles a selection of essays demonstrating the formidable scope and strength of the aquapelago as lens for inquiry into the connection between land and sea and the position of humans and non-humans in terrestrial and marine assemblages. This book unlocks island scholarship’s potential as analytic optic in progressive projects (re)thinking and (re)imagining environmental, social and existential crises across the globe. Aquapelagos is a welcome collection that anyone interested in shorelines –and in the consequences that changes in the ways the water and the land influence each other –have on our lives.”

—Firouz Gaini, Professor, University of the Faroe Islands