Full Description
Contemporary 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 volumetakes 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, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental 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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Archipelagic Poetics: Foreword, Craig Santos Perez
1. Introduction: "Isolated Above, but Connected Below": Toward New, Global, Archipelagic Linkages, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Michelle Stephens
PART I: SPACE, SCALE, LANGUAGE, AND TIME: FOUNDATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF ARCHIPELAGIC THOUGHT
2. Disciplinary Formations, Creative Tensions, and Certain Logics in Archipelagic Studies, Elaine Stratford
3. The Affirmational Turn to Ontology in the Anthropocene: A Critique, Jonathan Pugh
4. What Is an Archipelago? On Bandung Praxis, Lingua Franca, and Archipelagic Interlapping, Brian Russell Roberts
5. The Chronotopes of Archipelagic Thinking: Glissant and the Narrative of Philosophy, Lanny Thompson
PART II: BEYOND THE SEA AS METAPHOR: COMPARATIVE MARITIME EPISTEMOLOGIES
6. An Early Medieval "Sea of Islands": Area Studies, Medieval Studies, and Traditions of Wayfinding, Jeremy DeAngelo
7. Archipelago of the Maghreb: Mapping Mediterranean Movement from Transnational Migration to Transregional Mobility, Sarah DeMott
8. Archipelagic Deformations and Decontinental Disability Studies, Mary Eyring
9. Digital Currents, Oceanic Drift, and the Evolving Ecology of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Lisa Swanstrom
PART III: ARCHIPELAGIC ENVIRONMENTS: EVOLVING POLITICAL ECOLOGIES
10. Literary Archipelagraphies: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago, Pippa Marland
11. Conservation Archipelago: Protecting Long-Distance Migratory Shorebirds along the Atlantic Flyway, Jenny R. Isaacs
12. The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature, Art, and Archipelagic Plastic, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
PART IV: RELATIONAL ARCHIPELAGICS: REDEFINING IMPERIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
13. Archipelagoes as the Fractal Fringe of Coloniality: Demilitarizing Caribbean and Pacific Islands, Mimi Sheller
14. Sardinia "Lost between Europe and Africa": Archaeology and Archipelagic Theory, Thomas P. Leppard, Elizabeth A. Murphy, and Andrea Roppa
15. Sovereignty between Empire and Nation-State: The Archipelago as Postcolonial Format, Christopher J. Lee
16. Archipelagic Feeling: Counter-mapping Indigeneity and Diaspora in the Trans-Pacific, Haruki Eda
PART V: INTER-ISLAND DYNAMISMS: SMALL ISLANDS/BIG WORLDS
17. "Together, but Not Together, Together": The Politics of Identity in Island Archipelagoes, Godfrey Baldacchino
18. Small Islands, Large Radio: Archipelagic Listening in the Caribbean, Jessica Swanston Baker
19. The Insular and the Transnational Archipelagoes: The Indo-Caribbean in Samuel Selvon and Harold Sonny Ladoo, Anjali Nerlekar
20. On Archipelagic Beings, Gitanjali Pyndiah
Index
About the Contributors
