ABSTRACT
Indeed, while the notion of bounded islands has played an important role in Western discourses, oceanic cultures have often produced very different island imaginaries. Hau'ofa's vision has been highly influential on the recent archipelagic turn in the study of island literature and culture, which takes inspiration from the seafaring practices of Pacific islanders and the fluid networks of the Caribbean archipelago. Derek Walcott's narrative poem "The Schooner Flight" is a good example of a literary text that deploys a tidalectic and archipelagic island poetics to great effect. Literary critics, too, have endorsed the view of islands as bounded, sometimes sealing off islands more thoroughly than the primary texts themselves. Hau'ofa's islands are characterized by interconnectedness rather than boundedness; his inclusion of the ocean in his conceptualization of islands privileges a mobile, expansive and dynamic spatiality over a static land-based insular cartography.
