Reading the Planetary Archipelago of the Torres Strait

This essay makes use of the Western concept of the archipelago as a starting point for an examination of island to island relations in the Torres Strait, Australia, as they are rehearsed in the imaginary domain of story, in both its written and oral modes. The essay deploys Spivak’s notions of planetarity and Bloch’s concept of utopianism as ways of charting the relationship between two Torres Strait stories, one old, one new. In so doing, the essay seeks to identify the capacity of Torres Strait literature and storytelling to re-conceive relations of space and time and to acknowledge a spatial and temporal mobility running parallel to the circumscribed trajectories of late modernity.