Shu-mei
Shih

This lecture will explore one of methods that island studies makes possible and perhaps inevitable: the method of relational comparison. As many scholars and writers from the Caribbean to the Pacific islands have argued, all land masses are islands in the sea, whether large or small, and the sea connects them all. In this view, our world is an archipelago, in the root meaning of the word “archipelago” as the “arch-sea.” The sea thus serves as a connector of all places, placing them in relation, making relational comparison a possibility and perhaps also an inevitability, if we wish to do comparative work among islands in the sea.