Towards an archipelagraphic literary methodology: reading the archipelago in Julieta Campos’ The Fear of Losing Eurydice

Despite the recent archipelagraphic turn in island studies, there have been few literary studies of the archipelago. This paper has three aims. The first is to bring to light an archipelagraphic literary text that has not yet been explored in Island Studies Journal: Cuban writer Julieta Campos’s The Fear of Losing Eurydice. The second is to develop ‘archipelagraphy’ (a term coined by DeLoughrey) into a methodology for reading literary texts, putting it into practice through an analysis of The Fear of Losing Eurydice. This archipelagraphic analysis reveals that Campos’ text destabilizes the concept of the island as tabula rasa, an end-goal in a utopian quest. Instead utopia emerges as a call uttered by multiple voices across different times and spaces, resulting in the ‘archipelago of desire’ motif. This emancipatory cartography remaps western geographies of centre and periphery, instead stressing the connections between the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and Africa. The paper’s final aim is to provide a working definition of an archipelagraphic text.