"Archipelagic thought suits the allure of our worlds. It borrows from them the ambiguous, the fragile, the derivative. It consents to the practice of the detour, which is neither flight nor renunciation. It recognizes the scope of the imaginaries of the Trace, which it ratifies. Is this giving up governing oneself? No, it is to agree with what of the world has spread into archipelagos precisely, these kinds of diversities in the expanse, which nevertheless rally shores and marry horizons. We realize what was continental, what was thick and what weighed on us, in the sumptuous systemic thoughts which until this day have governed the History of humanities, and which are no longer adequate to our explosions, to our histories nor to our no less sumptuous wanderings. The thought of the archipelago, of archipelagos, opens these seas to us." Edouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole World (1997).