Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking

Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations

By: Michelle Stephens (Editor), Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel (Editor)

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Hardcover | 15 September 2020

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496 Pages

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15.9 x 23.5 x 3.7

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Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Bentez 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.

Industry Reviews

Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking reveals what forms of intellectual, political, material, and ecological relation become possible when archipelagoes are imagined not as peripheral or marginal geo-formations, but as models for new modes of affiliation and transformation. The essays and poems in this volume constellate fresh and often surprising perspectives on a contemporary world in which the scales of the global and the local are themselves in shifting relation.

--Hester Blum, associate professor of English, Penn State University

Like a multilayered archipelago, poetry and scholarship resonate and come together in beautiful new forms in this extraordinary collection. Subaqueous and subterranean connections and entanglements forge new relational paths and unfold in revelatory ways. Inspiring world-making visions, the collection draws attention to the intellectual seismic shifts reimagining how we think through the human, the non-human, and our geographic worlds.

--Allan Isaac, associate professor of American studies and English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

This groundbreaking collection of essays, by seeking to establish a more flexible definition of the archipelago, draws together its historical, cultural, and diasporic dimensions to seek out new epistemologies, new modes of inquiry and new methodologies that will reframe a range of interdisciplinary approaches by viewing them through an archipelagic prism. By conceiving the analytical and re-presentational potential of islands, oceans and bodies of water as a framework that can theorize multiplicity and difference, and expanding it to a global framework, the resulting disciplinary formations will enable new perspectives and conclusions across a host of fields, from literature and poetics to environmental studies to the study of empire and postcoloniality.

--H. Adlai Murdoch, Professor of Francophone Studies, Tufts University

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