Rajeev S. Patke, Yale-NUS College
ABSTRACT
Both the fact and the idea of an archipelago are premised on the fact and the idea of islandness. My paper will provide a series of reflections on islands and archipelagos as concepts in perpetual negotiation between the realities of geography, history and ecology on the one hand, and with the human needs and desires that cause humans to imagine islands and archipelagos as more than their geography, history and ecology. I hope to contextualize some of the specificities of Southeast Asian archipelagos within a broadly global framework, where both similarities and differences between islandness and the archipelagic imagination play a vital part in ordinary life and in the life of writing.
BIO
Rajeev S. Patke was educated at the University of Pune, and the University of Oxford. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University. He has worked at the National University of Singapore for over two decades and is currently Professor of Humanities and the inaugural Director of the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, 1985), Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford, 2006), Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2013), and Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He has also co-authored The Concise Routledge History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (Routledge, 2010), and co-edited several other books including an Anthology of Southeast Asian Writing in English (NLB Singapore, 2012).