“We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces which we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed place” (Hau’ofa 39).
Archipelagic Connections examines the literary and historical connections between island carceral sites: the plantation, the reserve, and the detention centre. By mapping these spaces together in literary form and political geography, the project to highlights specific literary and historical continuities between geographical sites represented as isolated. The project is led by Dr. Dashiell Moore at the University of Sydney and is funded by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award awarded by the Australian Research Council.
Literature has always helped define the concepts of islands and prison, often in conjunction and association. This project focuses upon this overlap to remap the continental borderlines of Australian literature, analysing the use of archipelagic tropes to subjectively represent and unsettle applications of settler-colonial power, nationalism, and continentality.
By pursuing these connections, we may trace answers to the following questions:
- What is the purpose and impact of Aboriginal, Pasifika, and migrant authors' decisions to write in relation to one another’s experiences of isolation and enclosure?
- What new perspectives and spatial models of continents, nations, empires, and regions will an archipelagic method of reading between these discrete spaces provide?
- How does a writer’s sense of an archipelagic connection with the world inform the concepts of identity, affiliation, and relation that emerge in their work?
- How will Australia’s archipelagic connections reframe the continental borderlines of Australian literary and cultural production?
