Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12423741 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yi‐ting Chang (0000-0002-4996-931X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 839-864 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | positions asia critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10679847-9967383 |
| OpenAlex | W4310474777 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
In transpacific and Asian/American studies, islands often gain decolonial meaning via their explicit ties to US and Japanese military imperialisms. This article inquires how islands express the decolonial beyond US-centric anti-imperial critique, and how they complicate the fields’ geopolitical imagination largely defined by the category of independent nation-states. To that end, the author turns to Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes and develops “archipelagic optics” as a transpacific interpretive framework—one that includes the decontinental in its decolonial thesis. Archipelagic optics takes liminal islands such as Taiwan and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as its epistemic grounds; it advances a multicentered epistemology in order to articulate inter- and intra-island contradictions; and it foregrounds “interdependence” rather than “independence” as an ontopolitical premise of archipelagic lives. Archipelagic optics indexes a form of decolonial sensing by refuting the impersonal, monocular eye of military cameras used by multiple empires to surveil Pacific islands. As this article will demonstrate, the decolonial goes beyond the deconstruction of military intercolonialism. It also means tracing noninnocent multiplicity, decontinental seeing, and immanent dependencies emerging from formerly “obscure” sites
Archipelagic state · Deconstruction (building · Epistemology · Political science · Premise · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Ecology
Creole Indigeneity
Transpacific Studies
Empires of Vision
Archipelagic American Studies
Asian Settler Colonialism
Militarized Currents
Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Other
Speculating Extinction
Poetics of relation
The Repeating Island
Globalisation and the (in)significance of Taiwan
Introduction
Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies
Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific
Situated Knowledges
Non-Sovereign Futures
The myth of isolates
The Right to Look
Delinking
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |