Island Studies Journal 12(2), Book Reviews

Relational and archipelagic turns are now well established in island studies.However, Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens's edited collection Archipelagic American studies adds something missing: an outstanding volume covering the archipelagic Americas.This book will become seminal for two key reasons at least: (1) it comprehensively demonstrates the Americas are archipelagic; and (2) it pushes relational thinking further than to date, suggesting we are now straining at some older concepts and verging on new theoretical frameworks.In doing so, Archipelagic American studies both speaks back to American studies and cultural studies, and develops useful theoretical concerns for island studies scholars, and others invested in wider relational and archipelagic turns.The book's main aim is to decontinentalise the Americas (mainly USA, but also Canada).and foreground their archipelagic nature.Taken as a whole, the book admirably achieves this goal and reveals the interrelations of America as a contingent and elastic space of continents, waterways, and uncounted islands in both hemispheres that spans the planet.Introducing the archipelagic approach, Roberts and Stephens show a deep concern for: how the narrative of continental America (which has been a geographical story central to US historiography and self-conception) has so completely eclipsed the narrative of what we are terming "the archipelagic Americas," or the temporally shifting and spatially splayed set of islands, island chains, and island-ocean-continent relations which have exceeded US-Americanism and have been affiliated with and indeed constitutive of competing notions of the Americas since at least 1492.Infusing American Studies with archipelagic debates, the range of contributions importantly takes analysis way beyond the more usual concerns for the imperial connections of the United States in Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands, so that the various book chapters include such geographical relations as Guam, the Caribbean, Oceania, Hawaii, the Mediterranean, New Zealand, and Canada, but also transpacific voyages and garbage patches.Taken together, the chapters give a sense of the stretch, folds, and reach of movements and relations that define the Americas.We are firmly left with the impression that the Americas are "a set of spaces that has been persistently intertwined with, constituted by, and grounded in the archipelagic."Structurally, the book is broken into seven parts and an afterword.These includes: Part I 'Theories and Methods for an Archipelagic American Studies'; Part II 'Archipelagic Mappings and Meta-Geographies'; Part III 'Empires and Archipelagoes'; Part IV 'Islands of Resistance'; Part V 'Ecologies of Relation'; Part VI 'Insular Imaginaries'; and Part VII 'Migrating Identities, Moving Borders'.In a reflective afterword, 'Archipelagic Accretions', Paul Giles summarises the tone of archipelagic debates:the archipelagic tends to involve an excess of significations, a disruption of stable entities, the overwhelming of static land masses by multidirectional flows of oceanic space.If postcolonialism focused on the power structures, and transnationalism on power exchanges of one kind or another, then the archipelagic imaginary might be said to involve a more fluid system, one that disrupts solid foundations and reinscribes them as ontologically evanescent.Readers of Island Studies Journal in particular will note just how much the book engages with relational and archipelagic turns in island studies.Given the disorientations of the Anthropocene and the consequences for island studies, I was also drawn to Roberts and Stephens' 'anti-explorer method'.This argues against Euclidian geometry and the explorer who confidently traces linear lines across the globe, and instead employs fractal geometry, exposing how island

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