Dennitza Gabrakova's The Unnamable Archipelago is an ambitious critique of postwar contemporary literature from a postcolonial perspective that has been overlooked by conventional studies of Japanese literature in the English-speaking world. Gabrakova states that this book “took shape within the disciplinary setting of Japanese studies, but its secret yearning is to be a book about the unnameable archipelago, not Japan” (p. 5). She employs the theory of “archipelago” developed by the Japanese cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta, who visualizes Japan as a part of an archipelago extending from Southeast Asia, undermining the illusion of Japan as a sovereign state. Imafuku garnered ideas and insights from Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Yanagita Kunio, and Shimao Toshio, as well as the Caribbean postcolonial writers Eric M. Roach and Derek Walcott, to shape his theory.
The first chapter introduces Imafuku's theory of archipelago, a geopolitical intervention that evades the mechanisms of modernization, capitalism, and the...
