The world-making of archipelagic thought in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s <i>The Dragonfly Sea</i>

This article explores the concept of the archipelago as a geographical reality and a figure of thought in relation to Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019). It demonstrates how the long history of maritime connections between Kenya and China are rendered narratively as both proximate and distant, connected yet separate. Owuor’s novel is set in the Lamu archipelago in the Indian Ocean close to the northern coast of Kenya, to which it belongs. The narrative showcases Pate Island as a microcosm of archipelagic complexity, where cosmopolitan accommodation toward strangers coexists with conditions characterized by protective insularity and social strictures. An attentiveness to the environmental and geopolitical nature of the archipelago reveals the narrative’s critique of China’s (neo-)imperial pursuits in Kenya and its alternative social imaginaries that think Pate-as-world in order to foreground embedded, localized knowledge of environmental care for the island and its surrounding sea.