Brian Roberts

(Duke University Press Books, 2017)

Departing from conventional narratives of the United States and the Americas as fundamentally continental spaces, the contributors to Archipelagic American Studies theorize America as constituted by and accountable to an assemblage of interconnected islands, archipelagoes, shorelines, continents, seas, and oceans. They trace these planet-spanning archipelagic connections in essays on topics ranging from Indigenous sovereignty to the work of Édouard Glissant, from Philippine call centers to US militarization in the Caribbean, and from the great Pacific garbage patch to enduring overlaps between US imperialism and a colonial Mexican archipelago. Shaking loose the straitjacket of continental exceptionalism that hinders and permeates Americanist scholarship, Archipelagic American Studies asserts a more relevant and dynamic approach for thinking about the geographic, cultural, and political claims of the United States within broader notions of America.

Review by Emron Esplin presented at Faculty Book Lunch

In Archipelagic American Studies, Brian Russell Roberts and his colleague Michelle Ann Stephens set out to decontinentalize the field of American Studies and to help us see the field and the world from the perspective of the island and the cluster of islands or archipelago. They begin to challenge the “myth of the continent” with a discussion of scale and a comparison between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the lesser-known U.S. trusteeship in Micronesia in which the U.S. took control of a mass of land and sea larger than the 48 continental states. The point, however, is not one of scale or size, not a hope of making us see the importance of islands, archipelagoes, and oceans by claiming “see, they’re even bigger than the continent….” Instead, the point is to show the “epistemic violence” (13) that takes place when a culture and a field of study define island spaces in the negative—when “insular” takes on all of its familiar negative meanings—and to ask how we can see the U.S., the Americas, and the world in new ways by demystifying the continent and by looking to the island chain or the archipelago for alternative ways of understanding and being. Brian and Michelle very briefly demonstrate a long tradition in the most well-known American studies scholarship of praising the continent and using the term “insular” as a pejorative. They combat this continental exceptionalism and anti-insularity in a direct but patient manner with a maturity and complexity that does not kills off former epistemologies but that, instead, suggests that other ways of knowing exist. They reorient “insularity” to imply “interconnectedness” rather than “narrowness” (19) and ask their readers to become “anti-explorers” of the coastline, readers who don’t try to map out the island space and make it known, but instead, readers who—following Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry and Antonio Benitez Rojo’s concept of the repeating island—can read a single island chain, a single island, or a single coastline as infinite.