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Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes

Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes

positions asia critique , Volume 30 (4) – Nov 1, 2022

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Copyright
Copyright 2022 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-9967383
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

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.

Journal

positions asia critiqueDuke University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2022

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