I will be teaching a new graduate seminar in fall 2018 called “Archipelagic American Studies,” and it is entirely because of Archipelagic American Studies. I opened the volume keen to learn from its contributors and to rejoin oceanic and insular conversations into which I had been graciously invited by editors Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens at an earlier symposium. I had not, however, expected to be as surprised and stirred by the inventiveness and provocations of its contributors as I have been. Nearly everything scholars read shapes our research and our teaching, at various scales, but this may be the first book that led me to declare – even upon reading Roberts and Stephens's introduction alone – that I needed to teach the topic immediately. I might have said that I would be exploring the archipelagic reach of American literary and historical study, but Roberts and Stephens have suggested that readers meditate instead upon what they call an “anti-explorer's method,” by which further investigation of the known world leads not to mastery but to a recognition of its “final unknowability” (23). In a similar sense, the essays that follow spark insight, curiosity, frustration, and a sense of both the limits and the expansiveness of their methodological frame. As a volume, Archipelagic American Studies neither exhausts its topic nor forecloses upon the possibilities for further amplification.
Some new critical frameworks run the risk of conforming to a pattern that might uncharitably be called the adjectival model, in which American studies (or any field) is modified afresh by degrees. A number of existing adjectival fields, for example, would seem to be in close conversation with the archipelagic: oceanic, island, transnational, or hemispheric studies. Intellectual purchase comes when the adjectival moves beyond a “theme of X” formulation, and Archipelagic American Studies establishes immediately its substantial explanatory power. The form of the adjectival, indeed, is part of this critical purchase. The essays in the volume illuminate the indeterminacy of archipelagos, which can have vast geophysical sweep but little visible land mass above the seas. For archipelagos the seas also constitute their total “area,” the very land-centric definition of which the archipelagic formulation calls into question. Indeed, the working sense of the definition of “insular” in common use (parochial, narrow-minded, hidebound) perverts its meaning as an adjectival form of islands and the network of planetary relations they imply.
What is more, the very generic form of the essay collection performs the dispersal and accretion of archipelagos. As Roberts and Stephens astutely note,
Whereas the 1950s and 1960s myth-and-symbol school of American studies found its central critical genre in the monograph … the transnational American studies found one of its central critical genres in the essay collection, as scholars with differentiated specialties have collaborated to bring into focus something beyond what their individual areas of expertise might render legible. (36)
The essay-collection-as-archipelago analogy is a productive one. The volume features information that will likely be startling and new even to long-term students of American studies, such as the fact that the total land and water area of America's Pacific holdings exceeds the size of the continental US. Overcoming what the editors call a “continental bias” requires expanding critical and political understanding of the scope of what is geographically “America” (12). The awful insufficiency of the response of the US government to Puerto Rico's devastation during the 2017 hurricane season underscores the urgency of this reconceptualization.
The standout essays in Archipelagic American Studies draw from archives that are both fixed and adrift, like the geophysical and conceptual models themselves. I am thinking here of Allan Punzalan Isaac's chapter on Filipino call centers; the Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez's meditation on Guam and archipelagic American studies; Nicole A. Waligora-Davis's sharp, fascinating cultural history of the song “Rum and Coca-Cola”; Etsuko Taketani's discussion of Walter White and Pacific island hopping; and Alice Te Punga Somerville's galvanizing work on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The global range and diversity of scholars in the volume is one of its great strengths, one that more collections should emulate.
Some of the collection demonstrates a theoretical overreliance on the work of Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Edouard Glissant, vital as those thinkers are to the field and the discipline; but this may be inevitable in an emerging field. I found myself wondering how the work of Monique Allewaert (on tropical catechresis), Michelle Burnham (on islands and the Pacific), and Michele Navakas (on Florida, as well as her new work on coral) would be in conversation with this volume.Footnote 1 I also have been interrogating my own sense of oceanic models of thinking, too, and contemplating how an archipelagic perspective extends in some unexpected ways the relational contingencies of the sea. Promising, exciting essays like these open up new perspectives, demand new intellectual relations. The perspectival shifts modeled by the essays in the volume urge me to chart a new course – and plot a new graduate course – in my research and teaching about the terraqueous world.
What would happen to our understanding of the vast and varied United States if we were to imagine it as one among many islands in a global sea of civilizations? Would it retain a recognizably “American” character, or would our conception of its nature, reach, and influence be forever altered? Such pressing questions and more animate Archipelagic American Studies, a compelling new volume edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, and a project that seems essential given the ever more precarious role and reputation of the US on the world stage.
Since the consolidation of American studies as a field in the 1950s, its circles of inquiry have continued to expand, from the well-trodden terrain of Puritan New England toward the borderlines of the American hemisphere and outward into the transnational, transoceanic, and multilingual identities and relationships that constitute the contemporary United States. Guided by the bold editorial stance of Roberts and Stephens, the contributors to Archipelagic American Studies both participate in and work to counterbalance this centrifugal movement as they look well beyond US shores for evidence of the nation's cultural impact. The central intent of this book – to unsettle the continental US as the container and arbiter of American identity and power – leads its contributors to trace not only how the US spread its “confetti of empire” around the globe (80), but also how the insistent presence of those pieces of “America,” from the fiftieth state of Hawaii to the detention site of Guantánamo Bay to the former territory of the Philippines, shakes up our perception of the nation itself. It is this creative “inversion” of expectations (175, 325), a flipping upside down of our notions of what America means, which proves most valuable in each of the chapters as well as in the volume as a whole.
In their introduction, Roberts and Stephens remind us that the essay collection as an academic genre has risen along with the tide of transnational American studies. While conglomerations of critical essays have been common for decades, Duke University Press in particular has done much to advance essay collections that make distinct arguments from multiple scholarly perspectives in the years since Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's landmark book Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993). Roberts and Stephens's volume is fully interdisciplinary and even more international in scope than its predecessors, “in and of itself constituting an archipelagic formation” (11), although perhaps too swept up in its own archipelagic metaphors in calling itself a “canoe-anthology” (36).
While comprehensive charting of this book's “metageograph[ical]” archipelago is beyond the scope of this response (9), I would like to explore a pair of essays as representative examples, then pose two additional questions about the significance of this volume's shared work of scholarly imagination. Joseph Keith's essay “Invisible Islands: Remapping the Transpacific Archipelago of US Empire in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart,” pursues this book's core goal of “decontinentalizing” the US by seeing it first from without and then from within (14). Bulosan's 1946 novel shares the perspective of a Filipino migrant worker who is a “castaway,” like Robinson Crusoe, but this time in “America” (174–75). Instead of re-creating himself like Crusoe on his desert island, Bulosan's protagonist navigates a hostile continent in which he suffers prejudice and exclusion, only gradually developing a “collective” consciousness that links him to other migrants (184). As a result, this novel's archipelagic orientation undercuts notions of American possibility and the American Dream, producing what Keith calls a “critical countercartography” that maps a nation adrift (177).
While Keith's analysis exposes the tensions between the US and the Philippines, one of its former territories whose citizens were once considered paradoxically “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” (179), Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's essay “Living the West Indian Dream: Archipelagic Cosmopolitanism and Triangulated Economies of Desire in Jamaican Popular Culture” further exposes the permeability of the continental US as one island among many. Nwankwo asserts that the US plays as important a role in the Jamaican imaginary as the Caribbean does in the American quest for “escape” to nearby islands, for the “United States is no less exotic to the Caribbean-based Caribbean person than the Caribbean is to the US-American” (396). The story Nwankwo tells is one of interrelation, or what she terms “relational dynamics” (391), as Jamaicans establish their world citizenship via travel to the US, and US citizens consume elements of an “island” lifestyle by purchasing resort vacations, Tommy Bahama shirts, and Malibu rum. By understanding the flow patterns of influence in these two essays, we can see more clearly that fused continents and island chains form part of the “global meta-archipelago” that Roberts and Stephens envision at the outset of this volume (394).
This kind of planetary vision is captivating, and in the book's Afterword, Paul Giles celebrates the potential of a “more fluid system” of geographical and imaginative connection (434). Even as it promotes the global reach of its archipelagic model, though, the book risks clouding its other premise: the desire to make a statement about the “fractal,” and indeed fractured, nature of American identity and power as it spreads itself thin around the world (23). If critical work using oceanic and planetary scales of inquiry has become more common with the recent rise of Atlantic and Pacific cultural studies, then why does this book need to be both archipelagic and American? Are the interrelationships that these essays reveal unique to a nation that is in practice a constellation of interests, but still, at least in theory, staunchly protective of its “heartland” identity (76), as contributor Elaine Stratford observes? It seems as though archipelagic studies, at least as they are constructed here, rely on the type of nation-centered model that they intend to unsettle. To push this point further, without the continental US at the center, it might be difficult to find a unifying concept or set of principles for archipelagic studies themselves. Perhaps, then, archipelagic studies have global range in characterizing and critiquing cultural formations – especially those shaped by imperial impulses – but also natural limits; they too are dependent on conceptual models that have come before them and remain in dialogue with their landlocked opposites.
In their introduction to Archipelagic American Studies, Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens highlight how the narrative of continental America has eclipsed what they term “the archipelagic Americas” by producing a collective “negative hallucination” which has powerfully erased from view something that is in fact in plain sight (9). Taking their cue from Martin W. Lewis's and Kären E. Wigen's refutation of the standard seven-part continental scheme,Footnote 1 Roberts and Stephens highlight how continents, oceans and, indeed, archipelagos are culturally contingent and encourage us to consider a broader cartography which, in this particular volume, extends
from Canada to New Zealand, from the early eighteenth century's Archipiélago de Mexico to the present-day Caribbean, from José Martí’s Cuba to José Rizal's Philippines, from the Bahamas to an island set in the US–Canada borderwaters, from Haida Gwaii (off the coast of British Columbia) to Pongso no Tau (of the Taiwanese archipelago) to Aotearoa (New Zealand), from Kamehameha I's Pae ‘Āina (Hawai'i) to Italy, from Jamaica to England, from the Philippines to its planetary diaspora, from the French Antilles to the contested site of Guam, to theoretical and imagined geographies, to subaltern archipelagos within the continental United States. (35)
This list deserves to be quoted in full if only to pay tribute to the richness and spatio-temporal diversity covered by Archipelagic American Studies and to Roberts and Stephens who have assembled for us this wealth of material. Using Alice Te Punga Somerville's evocative description of Pacific literature anthologies as a springboard, Roberts and Stephens appropriately describe their edited collection as ‘a canoe that takes on things and travellers, dropping them off in new places, accruing value and meaning from the diversity of their cargoes’ (36–37).Footnote 2 As we read Archipelagic American Studies, in fact, we embark on a journey which is full of twists and turns, instructive and rewarding, and for which Roberts and Stephens provide an invaluable road map, a comprehensive introductory essay which enables us to impart meaning and purpose to every stop in our journey in relation to the overarching trajectory of the volume. We are invited to concern ourselves, simultaneously, with the topographic and the topologic and to ponder the metaphorical and conceptual repercussions that the remappings on offer can have on the way in which we conjugate and understand our relation with our “immediate” and/or “remote,” “small” and/or “infinite” surroundings, their “specificity” but also the way in which they form part of a linked network of “repetition.”
Cultural contingency is embedded in the operative word “archipelago” itself, whose roots, as Roberts and Stephens explain, can be traced in the Italian arcipelago (with arci- signifying “principal” or “chief” and -pélago signifying “pool” or “abyss”). This term was initially used to describe the Aegean Sea, which was called “the main sea” because of the number and the “importance” of its islands. The term was later redeployed to describe Europe's newly “discovered” “main seas,” which also contained many and “important” islands. In “Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture,” Roberts and Stephens seem aware of the residual but haunting megalomania of arci- when they address the disciplinary grounding of the volume in American studies and the fact that it takes “the United States, with its cultures of imperial and global interdependencies, as a notable object of study” (35). The broad cartography of the collection, however, is anchored in the materiality of archipelagic constellations which have the potential to bring to the fore those communities that continental cartographies tend to marginalize, and a number of essays are concerned with the ways in which archipelagic thinking can impact or has already impacted the “US-American” imaginary, consolidating and enriching the post-exceptionalist and transnational turns of American studies. Amongst others, Elaine Stratford, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson and Brandy Nālani McDougall offer examples of how archipelagic thinking can be successfully deployed to bring to the fore counterimperial discourses. While Stratford, using as a visual cue a 1891 oil by Childe Hassam, invites us to consider new assemblages which would revisit the continental materiality of the United States in the light of an archipelagic continuum, Sherrard-Johnson reads Pauline Hopkins's “continental” novels (Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) and Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and the Southwest (1902)) through the lenses of their island-based prologues or openings. Meanwhile, McDougall, whilst emphasizing that, in ‘olelo Hawai'i (the Hawaiian language), the term for archipelago implies “active human and state intervention in [its] creation” (261), painstakingly documents how the United States naturalizes its claim on the Hawaiian archipelago through the appropriation of some of the foundational symbols of Kamehameha I's “rhetorical archipelago” (263).
McDougall also indirectly reveals how the archipelagic formations under scrutiny here can always be appropriated, discarded or revisited: for example, in his afterword, Paul Giles (at 429) praises Susan Gillman's insightful remark earlier in the volume (at 145) that Benedict Anderson could be regarded as “an unrecognized theorist of archipelagos” when Anderson described the Philippines of the 1890s as the “westernmost part of Latin America,”Footnote 3 while, in “Archipelagic Trash: Despised Forms in the Cultural History of the Americas,” Ramón E. Soto-Crespo seems to contest the parameters of Anderson's archipelagic foundational thinking when he argues for the value of antifoundational archipelagic narratives of “trash.”
At the core of both Gillman's and Soto's archipelagic formations, however, is the Caribbean region: given the long-lasting engagement of Caribbean studies with the “archipelagic turn,” it is perhaps not unexpected that a good proportion of the essays in Archipelagic American Studies are focussed on the Caribbean, or concerned with it at different levels, and it is even less surprising that Caribbean authors or seminal works carried out in the field of Caribbean studies are often invoked as critical touchstones. One might assume, therefore, that while “archipelagic thinking” benefits American studies, it might not bring anything new to the field of Caribbean studies. Yet, in his comparativist reading of plays by Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire and José Pliya, Michael Dash reminds us that Glissant described his fellow Martinicans as suffering from a pernicious form of blindness: “The Martinican,” wrote Glissant in Le discours antillais, “is an Antillean blind to his true antilleanness. He cannot even see Saint Lucia and Dominica whose outlines are on the horizon in the south and north of the country” (364). The focus of Dash's essay is an archipelago of relations from which the United States is excluded, but Glissant's words reveal how the “tragedy of departmentalization” (365), much like the narrative of continental America, brought about a negative collective hallucination which powerfully erases from view something – namely the archipelago – that is in fact in plain view. Glissant's archipelagic thinking, in fact, is also shaped by the desire to counter this hallucination: “I see Saint Lucia on the horizon. Thus, step by step, calling up the expanse, I am able to realize the seabow” (quoted at 359); significantly, the locus of this pronouncement is a shoreline, a hybrid, unbounded and ever-changing site where water and earth meet and where the Martinican coast opens to the rest of the archipelago. The “blindness” that Glissant discusses, however, is not a prerogative of Martinicans but, in different forms and for a variety of reasons, still affects many in the rest of the Caribbean subset of the larger archipelagic Americas. Moreover, scholars working on the region are often straitjacketed by a rigid disciplinary compartmentalization based on language and derived from the ongoing impact of former imperial archipelagic formations. Far from bringing nothing new to the field, by encouraging scholars who are keen to break free from disabling constraints and fully embrace the Caribbean “archipelagic turn,” Archipelagic American Studies can therefore play an important role in a much-needed reorganization of knowledge in Caribbean studies.
Since Shelley Fisher Fishkin pronounced “the transnational turn” at the American Studies Association's annual convention in Atlanta in 2004, transnational American studies has flourished and transformed the field in terms of methodology, discipline imaginary, and object of study.Footnote 1 What has characterized the “turn” is a growing interest in Asia-Pacific and Oceania. If Janet Hoskins and Viet Nguyen in their coedited volume Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (2014) articulate and foreground the Asian and Asian American dimensions of the transpacific, then Yuan Shu and Donald Pease's coedited volume American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (2016) intervenes in transnational American studies by proclaiming a paradigm shift in the field from the transatlantic to the transpacific and suggesting a new planetary consciousness based on indigenous epistemology. In this context, Archipelagic American Studies, coedited by Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, poses a new alternative to American studies, seeking to redefine transnational American studies by speaking from the historically and geopolitically marginal spaces of archipelagos and to critique US imperialism through spatial and temporal reimagination and reconfiguration.
By invoking “archipelago,” Roberts and Stephens not only reverse the center and periphery in American studies but also promise a material history and an epistemological significance of such a reverse. It is not new to critique US centrism or US exceptionalism in relation to the Americas or to the Asian Pacific. While Arif Dirlik, in his edited volume What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (1998), articulates Asia-Pacific as an extension of the Americas in the Western history of consciousness in terms of voyaging, discovery, and conquest, then Elizabeth DeLoughrey, in her work Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2007), makes connections between the Caribbean and Oceania in their political and literary articulations as critical responses and cultural resistance to European and US colonialisms and imperialisms. What defines Roberts's and Stephens's intervention is their foregrounding of “archipelago” as the new center of transnational American studies and their understanding of US imperialism in terms of what they call “US-American continentalism” (11). Following the New Americanist tradition of questioning US imperialism, which is best exemplified by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease's coedited volume Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), Roberts and Stephens explore archipelagic imaginaries as post-continental and develop a new distant-reading strategy based on their geopolitical remapping of archipelagos.
What archipelago means to Roberts and Stephens first and foremost is a trope, which is remapped in relation to Asia-Pacific and the Americas, and which bears theoretical implications for identities and national borders. In the first essay of the volume, “Heuristic Geographies: Territories and Areas, Islands and Archipelagos,” Lanny Thompson examines the meaning of archipelago politically, historically, and culturally. In reading the topological relationships between island and sea, between island and continent, and between island and island, he engages Edouard Glissant's theory of “Relation,” which understands the contact zone as a European imposition upon the Caribbean, and divides such domination into three moments in history, which first emerged as formation of center and peripheries, then evolved to be a movement from peripheries to center, and finally ended up in a status without center or periphery. To him, the last moment is the most significant because it marks a process of creolization that is creative and dialectical. Thompson recapitulates the logic of “archipelagic thinking” as multiple and relational in comparison with “double consciousness,” which is binary and oppositional, and redefines its heuristic in terms of shifting “the geography of reason” (68). Following this reasoning, in his essay “Guam and Archipelagic American Studies,” Craig Santos Perez, a well-established poet and active decolonial thinker, aims to decolonize the island in different cartographic and geopolitical imaginaries of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonialisms and imperialisms, and documents the struggles and articulations of the Chamorro people for sovereignty, self-determination, and demilitarization. As these practices are loaded with epistemological, linguistic, and ecological implications, Perez concludes that Guam and Chamorro studies should serve as the starting point for rather than a simple footnote to American studies.
To Roberts and Stephens, archipelago should also entail a material history with both spatial and temporal dimensions, calling attention to empires and their histories of colonialism and imperialism, islands as sites of resistance and articulation, and ecologies of relations. In “‘Shades of Paradise’: Craig Santos Perez's Transpacific Voyages,” John Carlos Rowe, a leading scholar in American studies, observes that European, US, and Japanese imperialisms in the Pacific produced “political, economic, social, cultural, linguistic, environmental, and biological dislocations” for indigenous populations and generated diaspora on a massive scale both domestically and globally (214). Exploring what he calls “domestic diaspora” and engaging theories of “settler colonialism,” Rowe further notices that production of cognitive dissonance makes everyday life impossible for the indigenous, being caught “between familiar and suddenly imposed foreign epistemologies and languages” (214). In this light, he reads Perez's poetry as drawing centrally on Chamorro culture and language as well as indicting the destructive effects of Spanish, Japanese, and US colonial and imperial occupations of Guam. To Rowe, Perez's work serves as “postdiasporic” in that it seeks to “overturn the idea of forced removal while remaining attentive to a material history of human suffering and natural damage” (228). Similarly, in her essay “Performing Archipelagic Identities in Bill Reid, Robert Sullivan, and Syaman Rapongan,” Hsinya Huang offers a comparative study among North American Haida artist Bill Reid, New Zealand Aotearoan poet Robert Sullivan, and Pongso no Tau writer Syaman Rapongan. She argues that their invocation of the powerful metaphor of “the canoe navigating across the pathway of the sea” decontinentalizes American studies and reenvisions Oceania holistically as a collective and relational body (281).
There are certainly issues unaddressed or undertheorized in the volume. While “continentalism” is an innovative way to critique US imperialism, it should not replace any documentation of US imperial practices in the Americas, Oceania, and Asia-Pacific such as the US nuclear testing programs on the Marshall Islands. Moreover, the volume should also include in-depth study of indigenous philosophers such as Epeli Hau'ofa and his sense of “our sea of islands.”Footnote 2 In that sense, Walter Mignolo's “decolonial theory” and Kuan-hsing Chen's articulation of “Asia as method” may serve as useful tools to rethink indigenous ontology and epistemology beyond archipelagic American studies.Footnote 3
CONTINENTS, INTER-ARCHIPELAGIC RELATIONALITIES, AND THE CHUCKLING ROCKS OF HISTORY: A RESPONSE
We are grateful to Sinéad Moynihan, associate editor of the Journal of American Studies, for commissioning this roundtable on our coedited collection Archipelagic American Studies, and we deeply appreciate the four studied, insightful, and enthusiastic reflections by Hester Blum, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, and Yuan Shu. Collectively, in their own work, these roundtable participants have brought crucial attention and analyses to oceanic and archipelagic spaces ranging from the Atlantic to the Pacific, advancing terraqueous epistemological frameworks that have inspired us. We are pleased to have them as interlocutors, both for Archipelagic American Studies and in this roundtable.
Perhaps the shared observation we find most notable among the comments of our four generous reviewers is their appreciation of the formal links, at once necessary and obvious, between the essay collection and the archipelago. By taking this link seriously, Blum, Eckel, and Fumagalli all point to a key feature of archipelagic American studies as a project – its fundamentally collaborative nature. As editors seeking to help crystallize a field “in solution,” as we describe in our introduction, the anthology form provided the right balance for gathering together a group of scholars whose works simultaneously cluster around a common set of themes, while moving in very particular, variegated directions based on each writer's archipelagic area of focus. In his in-progress book Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America, as well as in an essay for Michelle's in-progress collection Archipelagic Thinking (coedited with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel), Brian has used the term “interlapping,” rather than overlapping, to capture our collaborators’ interanimating investments in archipelagic dynamics. Our 2017 collection is dedicated to providing a forum for the unpredictable, unforecasted, and interdependent movements of these investments, back and forth between recurrent geoformal and material elements such as islands, oceans, waves, shorelines, watersheds, flotsam and jetsam, tides, and so on. In Archipelagic American Studies, this interlapping dynamic is heightened as geoformal concerns meet with the very specific, situated, material accounts that our collaborators offer regarding a wide range of terraqueous territories and temporalities. And our own set of projects – the coedited Archipelagic American Studies, Brian's Borderwaters, Michelle and Yolanda's Archipelagic Thinking, and two interanimating archipelagic and oceanic research groups at our home institutions of Rutgers and Brigham Young University – have also operated according to this interlapping dynamic.
Of course, archipelagic regions have not needed promptings from us to engage in these types of geoformally inspired collaboration across time and space. Along these lines, we have been intrigued by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau'ofa's use of excerpts from the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott's 1979 poem “The Sea Is History” as the epigraph for their watershed 1993 collection A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, published by the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. What might we make of this Caribbean–Pacific convergence on the common archipelagic forms of the sea as a “gray vault” for History, the silent chambers of “sea sands / out there past the reef's moiling shelf,” and “the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools” as a sound marking “History, really beginning”?Footnote 1 Such a moment, we believe, speaks to Blum and Eckel's converging interest in thinking through the implications of the archipelagic frame for the field of American studies. Blum concludes that the archipelagic framework moves beyond an adjectival project of modifying American studies “by degrees” and instead “establishes immediately its substantial explanatory power,” agreeing essentially with Eckel's sense that it is in the collection's “creative ‘inversion’ of expectations,” overall, that one finds its revisionary power as offering a substantive new framework for American studies. And yet, Eckel also importantly wonders, “without the continental US at the center, it might be difficult to find a unifying concept or set of principles for archipelagic studies themselves.”
A New Oceania’s reliance on Walcott's evocations of sand and reefs and rocks chuckling in the waves points toward archipelagic connections that might seem to emerge without taking the continent into account. But the poem itself – again, titled “The Sea Is History” – cannot help but be an answer of sorts to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's nineteenth-century Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which presents the geographical form of the continent as the stage for world history – Africa is the famously unhistorical continent, America's world-historical importance has not yet matured, Asia has passed its best accomplishments on to Europe, and Europe is the continent upon which (surprise) Geist has emerged, with “the Germanic nations” as the recipients of Geist’s “true principle.”Footnote 2 This continental-historical narrative disqualifies the form of the island from the outset: Hegel himself says that “world history takes account only of those nations which have formed themselves into states. But we cannot imagine that this can occur on a desert island.”Footnote 3 In this light, consider the way in which Walcott's poem, with its image of chuckling rocks in the waves as the beginning of history, has been taken up in the Caribbean and the Pacific – this Caribbean–Pacific connection is inter-archipelagic, to be sure, but is also an inter-archipelagic engagement that supplants the model of continent-as-historical-stage, advancing a decolonial image of history chuckling up from the pools at the saltwater edges of islands. In a similar way, Archipelagic American Studies – even as it showcases inter-archipelagic relations characterized by what Fumagalli calls a “richness and spatio-temporal diversity” – is also an extended grappling with the continent as the presumptive stage of world history. And in light of American studies’ enduring field imaginary, the North American continent will tend to lurk even at moments that seem strictly inter-archipelagic, with the imperial and neoimperial continental United States making regular appearances.
Fumagalli and Shu, who both approach the collection from the slightly different starting points of Caribbean and transpacific studies, have offered responses to Archipelagic American Studies that suggest further answers to Eckel's important question. While it is the case that much of the “American Pacific” of Alice Te Punga Somerville's essay in the collection is only considered American to the degree that it has been engaged by a US-American imperialism emanating from the North American continent, it is not the case that this swath of US-American continent must be the point around which the archipelagic always circles in a dialectical formation. Rather, the archipelagic canoe sets out first from the insular, forming archipelagic and inter-archipelagic assemblages among many islands. When it makes visits to US-America's continental shores, those shores are always already rippling outward in oceanic space and inward, up rivers and into internal archipelagic watersheds. As François Noudelmann has recently observed, “The continent itself can become an archipelago if we think of it differently,” not as coherent and static but “as essentially composite and continually changing.”Footnote 4 If a continent can become an archipelago, as Noudelmann says, then Fumagalli also sees that islands can sometimes become like continents (static and allegedly coherent unto themselves), as she sees at times in Caribbean studies, which has often been “straitjacketed by a rigid disciplinary compartmentalization based on language and derived from the ongoing impact of former imperial … formations.” Fumagalli emphasizes that the collection's situation of the Caribbean as part of the greater archipelagic Americas promises “a much-needed reorganization of knowledge in Caribbean studies.” Such promise aligns with Shu's emphasis that “the logic of ‘archipelagic thinking’” is “multiple and relational” rather than “binary and oppositional” – that is, it ruminates not in a static dialectical mode but rather in a network of concentric, fractal, interlapping interactions that create spaces for “indigenous ontology and epistemology.” These insular, archipelagic, continental, and oceanic ruminations of necessity cut back and forth among (and into the infinite shades between) the national and the transnational, the sovereign and the non-sovereign, the sea as History's gray vault and the chuckling Caribbean–Pacific stones as the beginning of History.
