Aquapelago
Aquapelago refers to an assemblage of marine and terrestrial elements in which the aquatic spaces are key to community livelihoods and to communities’ senses of identity and belonging.[1]
Concept and Etymology
The term aquapelago was introduced to the field of Island Studies in 2012 by contributors to Shima, an online, open-access journal of research into island and maritime cultures.[2] In its initial coinage, by Philip Hayward,[1] Etymologically, the term replaces the initial two syllables of the well-known term “archipelago” with “aqua” in order to reassert the role of marine elements in aggregations of islands that has been largely lost from contemporary usage of the term archipelago.[3] Elaborating the concept, Suwa[4] linked it to livelihood activities and to the Japanese concept of shima (referring to islands and related distinct cultural landscapes). Suwa’s concept is striking in that it conceives of combined terrestrial and aquatic spaces as, effectively, neighborhoods.
In a reflection on and expansion of his initial article on the topic, Hayward[5] identified that he envisaged the concept as a reflection on the Anthropocene and as:
Subsequent developments of the concept have analysed its applicability to topics such as ocean spaces and national rights of access to these (Fleury[7]), cultural practices in Melanesian coastal societies (Dick[8]) and career making in island communities (Alexander[9]). Writing in the (now defunct) journal Urban Island Studies, Hayward[10] expanded on his original analyses by addressing metropolitan locales and providing a characterisation of Manhattan as an aquapelagic city that was subsequently critiqued and modified by Ayasha Guerin.[11] While there have been critics of the concept, such as Baldacchino,[12] who regard the term as unnecessary in that archipelagic analyses can be extended to address aquatic elements, writers from various disciplines have engaged with the concept in a positive manner, such as May Joseph and Sofia Varino’s exploration of the concept with regard to water ecology themed performance works in the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly[13] and Barbara Hawkins in her discussion of a geopolitical aesthetic of the subterranean in the journal Geopolitics.[14]
Associated Concepts
One significant development of the concept of the aquapelago has concerned the notion of there being an “aquapelagic imaginary.” This idea was originally floated by Hayward in 2017,[15] and was subsequently elaborated in a theme issue of the journal Shima on mermaids, mer-cultures and the aquapelagic imaginary[16] to refer to the manner in which communities’ “engagements with their aquapelagic locales” in folk-/media-loric contexts can be understood to reflect upon and transcend “perceptions of the limits of human presence in and experience of aquatic spaces.”[17] In an article analysing the creation of a modern mythic entity, the Ningen, a creature rumoured to inhabit the southern Pacific Ocean, Greenland and Hayward[18] discuss the aquapelagic imaginary as a “subset" of the "social imaginary”, which can be regarded as a historically determined “enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents”.[19]
Further reading
A variety of articles on the concept of aquapelago published in the journal Shima and elsewhere are anthologised online at: https://shimajournal.org/anthologies.php
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Hayward, Philip (2012), “Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages” Shima 6 (1), 1-11.
- ↑ Publication Details - Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures [ISSN: 1834-6057]
- ↑ There is a degree of irony here in that the term “archipelago” was derived from the Greek arkhi (chief) and pelagos (sea), referring to the Aegean.
- ↑ Suwa, Jun’ichiro (2012) “Shima and Aquapelagic Assemblages” Shima 6 (1), 12-16.
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (2012), “The constitution of assemblages and the aquapelagality of Haida Gwaii” Shima 6 (2), 1-14
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (2012), “The constitution of assemblages and the aquapelagality of Haida Gwaii” Shima 6 (2), 3-4.
- ↑ Fleury, Christian (2013) “The Island/Sea/Territory Relationship” Shima 7 (1), 1-13.
- ↑ Dick, Thomas (2015) “Chorographing the Vanuatu Aquapelago”, Shima 9 (1), 1-22.
- ↑ Alexander, Rosie (2015) “Career Decision Making in Island Communities”, Shima 9 (1), 38-52
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (2015) “The Aquapelago and the Estuarine City: Reflections on Manhattan” Urban Island Studies 1, 81-95.
- ↑ Guerin, Ayasha (2019) “Underground and at Sea: Oysters and Black Marine Entanglements in New York’s Zone A” Shima 13 (2), 30-55.
- ↑ Baldacchino, Godfrey (2012) “Getting Wet: A response to Hayward’s concept of Aquapelagos”, Shima 6 (2), 22-26.
- ↑ Joseph, May and Sofia Varino (2017) “Aquapelagic Assemblages: Performing Water Ecology with Harmattan Theatre” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45 (1-2) 151-166.
- ↑ Hawkins, Barbara (2018) “A Volcanic Incident’: Towards a geopolitical aesthetics of the subterranean” Geopolitics 24 (3), 1-26.
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (2017) Making a Splash: Representations of Mermaids (and Mermen) in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media, Eastleigh: John Libbey and Co. pp 6-7.
- ↑ Shima 12 (2), https://shimajournal.org/issues.php
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (2018) “Introduction: Mermaids, Mercultures and the Aquapelagic Imaginary”, Shima 12 (2), 1-2.
- ↑ Greenland, Felicity and Hayward, Philip (2020) “Ningen: The context and generation of media-lore concerning a giant, sub-Antarctic, aquatic humanoid” Shima 14 (1), 33-40.
- ↑ Gaonkar, D.P (2002) ‘Towards New Imaginaries’, Popular Culture 14 (1), 1.
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