"Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture" (full text of intro to Archipelagic American Studies, Duke 2017) (original) (raw)

Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean (Journal of Transnational American Studies)

Journal of Transnational American Studies 5.1 (2013): 1-20

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a white American preacher and an African American scholar arrived at converging prophecies regarding the racialized colonial and postcolonial trends that would characterize planetary relations during the coming decades. In 1885, Josiah Strong (of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States) predicted that "the world [will] enter upon a new stage of its history-the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled." "Strengthened in the United States," averred Strong, "this powerful race will move down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond." 1 Less than two decades after Strong advanced this prediction, W. E. B. Du Bois advanced a geographically similar vision of racial conflict in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Prefacing a discussion of the US Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois famously wrote, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." 2 The two men's visions were clearly antithetical in terms of their racial and imperial politics. Strong focused on the extension of one race's influence over others, while Du Bois focused on relations between the races, in the context of but also above and beyond mere imperial might. In other writings, Du Bois would suggest that, similar to colonies in relation to the European empires, those territories in which the United States was pursuing colonial expansion could also prove to be intractable shadows, difficult to administer and control. 3 Regardless of these differences, Du Bois and Strong converged in their conceptualizations of the twentieth century's major actors and the planetary geographies upon which these actors would perform. Their visions adumbrated events that would transpire within Roberts and Stephens: Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean 1 several continental regions, but these prophecies also predicted major conflicts within a non-continental and non-regional space, "the islands of the sea," a transregional archipelago constituted by all the islands splayed across the world's seas and oceans.

Embattled Excavations. Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past

2021

American national self-invention is fundamentally entwined with cultural constructions of American “prehistory” – the human presence on the continent since the earliest arrivals at least 16,000 years ago. Embattled Excavations offers exemplary readings of the entanglements between reconstructions of the American deep past and racialist ideologies and legal doctrine, with continental expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and with the epistemic and spiritual crisis about the origins of mankind following nineteenth-century discoveries in the fields of geology and evolutionary biology. It argues, from a decolonial perspective, that popular assumptions about the early history of settlement effectively downplay the length and intensity of the Indigenous presence on the continent. Individual chapters critically investigate modern scientific hypotheses about Pleistocene migrations; they follow in the tracks of imperial and transatlantic adventurers in search of Maya ruins and fossil megafauna;...

General introduction to the Routledge Handbook to the history and society of the Americas

The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas, 2019

The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas charts the field of inter-American studies, focusing on the transnational or hemispheric imensions of social, cultural, and political dynamics in history that shaped the different societies and communities in the Americas. In doing so, the Handbook is inspired by recent debates in cultural and postcolonial studies in the humanities and social sciences that have challenged traditional conceptualizations that have had the tendency to essentialize and universalize Western/ European concepts that are grounded on particular local experiences. Furthermore, these approaches have illuminated the important contributions of other epistemic communities, especially indigenous and Afro-American, as well as nonacademic actors, especially from social movements and the field of cultural production, for the emergence and constant redefining of key concepts in the Americas. In this sense, it is not the aim of this Handbook to provide a unilateral and homogenous narration of history and society in the Americas from a single perspective. In contrast, this Routledge Handbook deals with selected key concepts that are widely used in academic and cultural–political discussions in the Americas. These concepts are explored from different geopolitical, disciplinary, and epistemological perspectives. In highlighting the contested character of key concepts that are usually defined in strict disciplinary terms or in regard to specific – often unconsidered – geopolitical standpoints, the Handbook provides the basis for a better and deeper understanding of inter-American entanglements.

Archaelogy and Cultural Nationalism In the American Southwest, 1895-1920

Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 1993

During the past twenty-seven years, the objective of providing fU'St-class training to students in archaeology has remained uncbanged. The department, at least within its own perception, ba.� remained oriented toward graduate work, and largely gauges its undergraduate success by its ability to turn oul students prepared to carry on graduate studies elsewhere. The graduate programme has not been changeless. The early emphasis on instruction in tbe natuml sciences (especially in geology, vertebrate palaeontology and palynology) has gradually declined, and with it the environmental approach. Sessional instructors who were specially suited to offer courses, not only ancillary ftelds, but also in specialized archaeological subjects, have by and large disappeare d from the scene as a result of budgetary cuts. Course offerings by other departments have offset tbese losses to a certain extenL At the same time, the field of archaeology itself bas developed greater sophistication and requires more in-depth instruction at both graduate and undergraduate levels. If anytbing, the department has taken a swing back in the direction of the Social Sci ences, particularly in its theoretical stance. But probably not one of the an:haeology faculty would go so far as to subscribe to the notion that "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing," an aphorism widely accepted by North American arcbaeologists 25 or SO years ago. Method and theory courses are given more prominence in recent years. While the coneem is primarily archaeological, the issues lately have moved toward broader concern with contemporary society. Method and theory are emphasized in all courses. On a more particularistic level, advanced undergraduate inslruction includes such courses as museology, ceramic analysis and comput ers. Seminars are given largely to discussions of curr ent issues in archaeology, and include a wide moge of topics. Area} coverage bas expanded appreciably in response to the special interests of new faculty members. Until 1974 the Faculty of Graduate Studies insisted that the department limit is scope to New World archaeology, but when this stricture was laid to rest, African studies rose into prominence. Aside from Europe and Oceania, staff members bave not personally specialized in regions outside the Americas and Africa. The department does. however, offer courses in general Old World archaeology as well as. topical courses which are not confined geographically. The subtle shifts that can be detected in the archaeology program can be seen as moves away from the natural sciences. environ mental studies and descriptive reconstructions of the past to great concern with contemporary archaeological problems; contem porary not only in the sense of keeping uJrto-date in relation to modem trends in world archaeology. but also in the sense of addres sing modem social issues from the archaeological perspective. James It: Snead Department or Anthropology University of CaUfornia.Los Angeles Traditional histories of archaeology have been described by a recent commentator as resembling travel journals, providing n •• .an account of the slow journey out of the darkness of subjectivity and speculation towards objectivity, rationality, and science" (MumlY 1989:56). In recent years new approaches to this subject have taken a more critical look at the tangled social and intellectual currents surr ounding the development of archaeology. One of the least contestable points to arise from the cmrent theoretical debates within the discipline is that of the fundamental relationsbip between the observer/scientist and the. production of knowledge (for example. Leone 1986). This topic is central to modem sociocultura1 anthropology (Stocking 1983) and is particularly pertinent to the history the field. In North America research OD the history of prehistoric archaeology bas bee n dominated by considerations of adminislrative and intellectual contexts (for example, Meltzer 1983; Dunnc1l1986; Hinsley 1987; Fowler 1989; Trigger (989). Few scholars, hy comparison. have deull with the role of social histury in this process (but scc PallersOD 1986: Hinsley 1989). The present study adopts the perspective of social history in examining archaeology as it developed in the southwestern United

European journal of American studies, Vol 9, No 3 | 2014

2016

Combining insights from human geography, critical regionalism, and environmental literary criticism, I argue that the concept of the translocal, rather than the transnational, is useful to describe the complex poetics of place in Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) and Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light (2009). Engaging with landscapes of the American Southwest and elsewhere, and in particular with the natural environment, both poets reimagine the region as a site of translocal attachments and as the grounds for transethnic affiliations, especially with local Native American peoples. What emerges from this inclusive and yet open sense of belonging to place is an ethics of being in and with nature that attempts to reckon with the increasing pressures of both globalization and global environmental crisis. Literature, as Ali’s and Sze’s poetry suggest by foregrounding poetic strategies like intertextuality and metaphorical On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Tran...

Disciplinary Frontier(s) Between the “Americas”

2020

People from diverse geo-political, historical, and racial standpoints understand the meaning of the word America in correspondingly diverse fashions. In the sixteenth century, Europeans coined the name America to refer to the single continent they had 'discovered' overseas. Since then, power relations shaped systems of knowledge that, in turn, provided a myriad of significances to the word America. In the contemporaneity, the term came to signify the country of the United States of America (U.S.) alone. This paper analyses the processes that transformed the meaning of America from an entire continent to one of the nations this landmass encompasses. I denounce the role that USAmerican academia played in this process of geographical and epistemological manipulation and propose a model that identifies the dismembering of the continent of America in three different stages. 2 Each stage corresponds to a different USAmerican project of territorial, military, political, or economic expansion and evinces specific rationales. The first stage corresponds to the continental split, in which North and South America were conceptualized as two different continents rather than two parts of the same continent. USAmerican intellectuals initiated this schism in the nineteenth century and cemented it in the beginning of the twentieth century to legitimize U.S. expansion towards parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and adjacent territories. The second stage is the cultural split, that ignored the previous partition of the continent into North and South America and reconceptualized it into the new categories of Anglo and Latin America. It has roots in the first decades of the twentieth century, but both academia and the general public systematically incorporated the division after World War II. The cultural split makes part of a project that isolated the U.S. as a global hegemonic power. And, finally, the third stage is the global divide between the 'West and the rest,' a product of Cold War and Area Studies that degraded Latin America to a non-Western status in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that, while both the state and academia combined forces to achieve the two first stages, 'Western scholars,' mostly from the U.S., hold exclusive authorship of the third stage. 3 Anglophone historiographies of the 'Americas,' especially of Latin America, are the basis for this paper. I focus on literature published in English for two main reasons. Firstly, because most of the discourses that produced and justified the conceptualizations of the different Americas originated in the Northern hemisphere of America and, therefore, compose the core object of inquiry of this paper. 4 Secondly, the ultimate legitimization of these discourses depends on not only producers, but consumers. Scholarship in English, an academic lingua franca, is universally consumed, but literature in other languages reaches a significantly smaller audience in Anglophone countries. Many were voices in Spanish, Portuguese, or many other languages spoken throughout the continent, that tried to redress conceptualizations about the continent summarily imposed by Europe, at first, and,