Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America

Brian Russell Roberts

Published by Duke University Press 2021

Borderwaters

Amid the Archipelagic States of America

Brian Russell Roberts

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478013204

Overview
Contents

About this book

Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental-centric US national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation to better reflect its claims to archipelagoes in the Pacific and Caribbean.

Author / Editor information

Brian Russell Roberts is Professor of English at Brigham Young University, coeditor of Archipelagic American Studies and Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, both also published by Duke University Press, and author of Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era.

Reviews

“Brian Russell Roberts's astonishing new paradigm recasts the United States as a nation of islands and oceans, engaging Benoit Mandelbrot (among others) to elucidate the archipelagic fractals of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Examining works ranging from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Florence Frisbie's Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka to the visual arts by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, this detail-rich study is eye-opening in every way. Essential reading for all Americanists.”

-- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

“Offering an important new theoretical way of understanding American literature and culture, Brian Russell Roberts suggests how ‘archipelagic thinking’ can induce us to reconceive American literary culture as something other than a landlocked affair. Borderwaters should resonate widely among Americanists across a broad range of disciplinary fields and is certain to be widely influential.”

-- Paul Giles, author of Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

"The extraordinary contribution of Brian Russell Roberts’ recent book is not only to the advancement of the field of a specifically archipelagic American Studies which sits in ready conversation with Atlantic and Pacific discourse and study and in whose conception he has been for the last decade an innovator, but that it sets up the possibility for a renewal of dialogue within interdisciplinary global studies and world literary studies from the early modern to the present, with the archipelagic as dominant paradigm; the reach of this book is far greater than the field of contemporary American Studies in which it most obviously finds a home."

-- Heather H. Yeung New Global Studies

"This monograph marries the interdisciplinarity of American studies to that of the environmental humanities. Readers will find themselves parsing heady engagements with geology, marine biology, fractal geometry, international maritime law, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature. . . . Roberts often dredges from the archipelagic archives potent rereadings from the terraqueous sphere of American studies."

-- Jason Frydman American Literary History

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter One. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Chapter Two. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
Chapter Three. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Chapter Four. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Chapter Five. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	202
Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	359

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 392

eBook

Published: April 5, 2021
ISBN: 9781478013204