ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the archipelago writers collective and Kurdish writer Behrouz Boochani for how displaced writers in South-East Asia imagine alternative critical geographies through archipelagos. It explores how the archipelago in Indonesia and Boochani's novel No Friend from the Mountains —set in Papua New Guinea—destabilize colonial readings of their resistance to settler colonial Australia. Instead, I argue their works constitute an archipelagic literature that draws new cartographies by centering multilingualism and South-South relationships. The chapter investigates how this spatial reorientation is enabled by the writers’ claims to an artistic identity in contrast to the reception of their narratives as testimonial or non-fiction.
