Archipelagic American studies

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 Edouard Glissant, from Philippine call centers to US militarization in the Caribbean, 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.

Introduction: Archipelagic American studies: decontinentalizing the study of American culture / Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens -- Theories and methods for an Archipelagic American studies -- Heuristic geographies: territories and areas, islands and archipelagoes / Lanny Thompson -- Imagining the archipelago / Elaine Stratford -- Archipelagic mappings and meta-geographies -- Guam and Archipelagic American studies / Craig Santos Perez -- The Archipelagic black global imaginary: Walter White's Pacific Island hopping / Etsuko Taketani -- It takes an archipelago to compare otherwise / Susan Gillman -- Empires and archipelagoes -- Colonial and Mexican archipelagoes: reimagining Colonial Caribbean studies / Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel -- Invisible islands: remapping the transpacific archipelago of US Empire in Carlos Bulosan's America is in the heart / Joseph Keith -- Myth of the continents: American vulnerabilities and Rum and Coca-cola? / Nicole A. Waligora-Davis -- Islands of resistance -- Shades of paradise: Craig Santos Perez's transpacific voyages / John Carlos Rowe -- Insubordinate islands and coastal chaos: Pauline Hopkins's literary land/seascapes / Cherene Sher…