Navigating Archipelagos

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter situates travel writing in the Caribbean region, looking at how geography might enter productively in travel narratives as a point of entanglement. Using Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking alongside Henri Lefebvre’s and Michel de Certeau’s theories of the construction of space, it argues that whereas the travelers sought to territorialize the islands, the archipelago drew them into more erratic movements, which impacted on the ways in which they presented the Caribbean. Indigenous ways of life notably introduce ruptures in the narrative of conquest. The chapter starts with an analysis of how travelers negotiated their representation of space with an existing European island imaginary. The next section offers an examination of the limitations of discursive acts of control, such as naming, at the point of encounter of the histories, cultures, and geographies of the region. The last two sections look at spatial practices following de Certeau’s distinction between mapping and touring space. It pays attention to movements between islands and interrogates how ways of practicing space both draw from and are contrasted with other ways of living the archipelago.