(draft version) Chap 4. ʺEcocriticism of the Global South,ʺ Lexington Books, eds. Slovic, Rangarajan, & Sarveswaran Literary Isomorphism and the Malayan and Caribbean Archipelagos Christopher Lloyd De Shield Martinique is not a Polynesian Island. 1 Édouard Glissant opens Caribbean Discourse with a straightforward declaration of specificity that seems to forestall any attempt at archipelagic comparison: “Martinique is not a Polynesian Island” (1). With this provocative opening, Glissant rebuts past and present colonists and tourists who apprehend the land in a particularly insensible fashion: namely, as existing solely for the pleasure of the privileged. Martinique, he seems to insist, is not simply one of “many islands”—interchangeable and dismissible as a group. As such, Glissant’s qualification undermines colonial and touristic discourses of exploitation. However, it is only on a first reading that Glissant’s invocation of Polynesia insists on Caribbean (more specifically Martiniquan) difference. A second reading reveals how Glissant simultaneously invokes the shared predicament of (post)colonial islands apprehended within colonial discourse. In articulating the “opacity” of the Caribbean island in question, he seems to reject the invitation for comparison by preventing the two regions’ inclusion within the same intellectual frame; but at the same time—in rejecting this colonial comprehension of tropical islands—Glissant necessarily implies a counter‑discursive equivalence. That is, insisting on Polynesian and Caribbean islands’ shared rejection of colonial comparison ironically reifies a comparative project; the archipelagos begin to resemble one another in the similarity of their strategic claims to postcolonial opacity. Thus, Glissant’s insistence on the specificity of the island immediately plunges it into relation with other islands. This relationship between specificity and relationality, or comparison, is almost a disavowed dialectic within postcolonial studies; only recently have attempts to theorize the field from regionalist perspectives been re‑examined. 1 Comparative approaches within postcolonial studies are frequently greeted with suspicion, risking charges of a‑ and de‑historicization, or de‑contextualization. 2 1 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, (1)