Description
Book SynopsisContemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich volume takes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to a global, Anthropocenic framework.
This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and rather, as models.
The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaelogy, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Enviromental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy.. The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of islands, oceans and constellations.
Table of Contents1. “Introduction: ‘Isolated Above, But Connected Below’: Toward New, Global, Archipelagic Linkages”, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Michelle Stephens
2. “Archipelagic Poetics”, Craig Santos Perez
I. Beyond the Repeating Islands: Geographies, Disciplinary Topographies, and Conceptual Archipelagoes
3. “The Fifth Map”, Craig Santos Perez
4. “The Chronotopes of Archipelagic Thinking: Glissant and the Narrative of Philosophy”, Lanny Thompson,
5. “Postscript: On the Chronotope of the Hurricane”, Lanny Thompson
6. “Mediterranean Archipelago: A Maritime Eco-System between Sicily and Tunisia”, Sarah Demott
7. “Sardinia ‘Lost between Europe and Africa’: Archaeology and Archipelagic Theory”, Thomas P. Leppard & Elizabeth A. Murphy and Andrea Roppa
8. “Literary Archipelagraphies: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago”, Pippa Marland
9. “A Shorebird Conservation Archipelago? Archipelagic Political Ecology”, Jenny Isaacs
10. “Storm Tracking, 2016”,Craig Santos Perez
II. Beyond the Sea as Metaphor: Comparative Maritime Epistemologies.
11. “Chanting the Waters”, Craig Santos Perez
12. “Praise Song for Oceania”, Craig Santos Perez
13. “The Anglo-Saxon Sea of Islands”, Jeremy DeAngelo,
14. “Digital Currents, Oceanic Drift, and the Evolving Ecology of the Temporary Autonomous Zone” Lisa Swanstrom
15. “Archipelagic Deformations in Early American Disability Studies”, Mary Eyring
16. “The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature, Art and Archipelagic Plastic”, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
17. “Care”, Craig Santos Perez
III. Relational Archipelagics: Redefining Imperial and Postcolonial Studies
18. “Family Trees”, Craig Santos Perez
19. “Archipelagoes as the Fractal Fringe of Coloniality: De-militarizing Caribbean and Pacific Islands”, Mimi Sheller
20. “Archipelagic Studies and the British Empire in the Nineteenth Century”, Kyle McAuley,
21. “The Insular and the Transnational Archipelagies of Indo-Caribbean literature in Sam Selvon and Harold Sonny Ladoo”, Anjali Nerlekar,
22. “The Archipelagoes of Power and Resistance: Counter-Mapping Indigeneity and Diaspora in the Trans-Pacific”, Haruki Eda,
23. “Decolonizing Archipelagos: Rethinking Sovereignty between Empire and Nation-State”, Christopher Lee
IV. Erasure and In/visibility: Big Island/ Small Island Relations
24 “Off-Island Chamorros”, Craig Santos Perez,
25 “Bringing Together the Small and the Smaller: Decolonization on Anguilla and Barbuda”, Don E. Walicek
25 “‘Together, but not together, together’: The Politics of Identity in Island Archipelagos” Godfrey Baldacchino,
26. “Large Radio: Small Islands, and Archipelagic Listening”, Jessica Swanston Baker
27. “On Archipelagic Beings”, Gitanjali Pyndiah
28. “Thanksgiving in the Anthropocene, 2015”, Craig Santos Perez
V. Theorizing and Doing the Archipelago: Toward New Disciplinary Formations
29. “A Phenomenology of Archipelagos: from Thinking with to within the Archipelago”, Jonathan Pugh
30. “What Is an Archipelago? On Bandung Praxis, Lingua Franca, and Archipelagic Interlapping”, Brian Russell Roberts31. Afterword, Susan Stanford Friedman
