Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision  1 1. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies  45 2. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form  82 3. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid 111 4. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores  159 5. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America  202 Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes  248 Notes  275 Bibliography  323 Index  359

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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)