Chavez,
Jeremy De

​The concept of the archipelago has been deployed in recent critical discourse as an enabling model for a style of thinking that is in opposition to those that are totalizing and hierarchical. As a style of thought that privileges fluidity, multiplicity, and relationality, archipelagic thinking also represents a strong demand for what Édouard Glissant calls the “right to opacity,” an ethical appeal to respect the integrity of the ineffable, irreducible, and untranslatable, terms, which are coincidentally also often associated with the messiness of emotions, affects, and feelings. The agenda of this paper is to resituate the concept of the archipelago from the exclusive domain of thought to the domain of feelings—that is to say, from archipelagic thinking to archipelagic feeling. To conceive of feelings as archipelagic is to underscore the fluidity of affects and their interdependence. Toward this goal, I make a case for conceiving of affects through oceanic metaphors—waves, tides, ebb and flow—defined against terrestrial metaphors—eruption, seismic intensity, tectonic shifts. I then offer some reflections on how such a shift might have an affirmative impact on methods of affective interpretation. This paper is an affirmative response to recent calls to decolonize affect theory, a field that has constituted affective taxonomies but formulated within the exclusive epistemology of the European tradition.