Journal of Transnational American Studies

Issue introduction by the journal's editor in chief.

This article centers on Mary Church Terrell’s membership in the first transnational feminist organization following World War One and the ways race shaped the participation of this prominent African American feminist with extensive ties to Germany – and that of other African American women’s participation – in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In tracing Terrell’s activities, the article unpacks her response to Germany’s Rhineland Campaign – which erupted into an international scandal and debate on race, sex, and claims to national citizenship after World War One. Terrell’s intervention made her a broker of German-American transatlantic diplomacy via conversations about race. Of equal importance, the essay explores the complex threads of the “schwarze Schmach” (Black Shame), as it unearths the motives that precipitated white American and European feminists’ willing involvement. With African American participation in World War One and its aftermath as the backdrop to Terrell’s intervention in the Rhineland Campaign, the article traces the arc of African American women’s activism from a domestic-focused agenda to an international-focused agenda. It argues that Terrell’s approach to the international arena redefined African American women’s potential role in transnational organizations and debates.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik movement, believed that a flourishing Black proletariat consciousness was the catalyst needed for a Communist revolution in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, the Bolshevik egalitarian ideology of antiracism attracted Black Americans and anchored support for the global Communist agenda of Leninist Internationalism.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, his protégé Joseph Stalin becomes the new leader of Soviet Russia and signs and sustains a strategic arms alliance with Italy. In his Harlem-set lost novel Amiable with Big Teeth (AWBT), Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay chronicles how this decision places Stalin at odds with the Black American allies of Leninist Internationalism.

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini invades Ethiopia in 1935 and because Stalin remains committed to the Italo-Soviet Pact, the Black American community in AWBT views this commitment as an endorsement of the colonial suppression of Ethiopia’s Black sovereignty and thus a violation of Lenin’s antiracism ideology.

With the demise of Leninist Internationalism in the Stalin era, AWBT argues that the Pan-Africanist agenda of Black-led organizations is more adept at forging antiracist and antiimperialist transnational bonds. However, Blackness is not a monolith and McKay’s lost novel must soon confront the uncomfortable reality that even within Black-led organizations, ethnic differences can easily supersede racial allegiance.

AWBT is ultimately a story about the arduous, and sometimes impossible, task of building an ideological identity across diverse national borders and racial groups.

In the following essay, I discuss what is transnational in the book-length query that Citizens and Rulers of the World explores, as it starts and ends with Huckleberry Finn; and in the edited excerpt from my book, sit with Huck Finn in three settings, exploring what I term “scripts of empire.”

Introduction by Special Forum editors.

In this public conversation, Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens talk about their work in the field of Archipelagic American Studies and about the intersections of this field with Mobility Studies. They discuss archipelagic thinking, islands and the insular, the borderwaters, alternative mapping, and the ways in which thinking with the archipelago foregrounds relational entanglements and mobilities. The conversation was part of the workshop “Archipelagic Imperial Spaces and Mobilities” that took place in Leipzig in July 2021.

This article proposes a three-way reinflection among the categories of mobility, archipelagic thought, and translation. It draws on the work of several island-oriented thinkers, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Édouard Glissant, and Craig Santos Perez. Via Te Punga Somerville, I develop a conceptualization of archipelagic translation that is decolonizing, decontinentalizing, and reliant on interisland waters as places of being and meaning. Subsequently, via Glissant’s emphasis on translation as a crucial form of archipelagic thinking, I emphasize a translation less of betweenness (from one language to another) and more of amidness (a translation in the presence of every language of the world). Finally, and by recourse to Perez’s from unincorporated territory poetry series, I elaborate on a view of archipelagic translation as a renaming of the world in which translational equivalents break down and translation happens amid the push and pull of materiality and metaphoricity. Thus, Perez’s work offers both a conceptual template for and an example of archipelagic translation. As I navigate through the work of these three thinkers, the article’s three major preoccupations—mobility, archipelagic thinking, and translation—exist in a constant, reinflecting, and reconstituting dynamic in relation to one another. In the conclusion, I turn toward the potential for the mobilities of archipelagic translation to reroute recent work in Transnational American Studies that takes up questions of language, multilingualism, and translation. Further, the conclusion looks toward the archipelagic’s sense of amidness as key to a planetary restructuring of scholarly approaches to mobility, archipelagic spaces, and translation.

On the surface, maps enable the planning and development of human dwelling, the visualization of connections, and drawing of boundaries. Throughout human history, however, maps have also acted as antidotes to chaos by generating spatial imaginations as pathways to meaning, belonging, and yearning. Exploring both theoretical and practical trajectories of transnational mappings, this article traces cartographies through the spatio-cultural nodes of the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi, and Micronesia. By revealing hidden connections, interstices, mobilities, memories, flows, and polysemic knowledges, it argues that an archipelagic approach to cartographic creation and interpretation reveals the significance of ‘minor’ spatial imaginations, mobilities, and historical practices. Although these may appear interspersed, fragmented, or insular, I suggest that they form nodes in archipelagic networks of resistance against colonizing cartographic regimes that aim to homogenize, police, and commodify spaces according to imperial logics—thus casting doubts on the authority of continental, national, and imperial/colonial geographic vocabularies. The article’s findings make apparent the need for a methodological turn that takes into account the methodological relationality and social agency of maps as actors in the generation and interpretation of discursive networks of spatial imaginations. Engaging with these imaginations, it becomes clear, means reevaluating and redefining conventional understandings of oceans, islands, continents, archipelagos, as well as those yet unnamed, unmapped, and unwritten places that exist between or submerged below these categories.

This essay offers an archipelagic reading of Walter Mosley’s detective novel Down the River Unto the Sea (2018). I argue that the spatial imaginary of the novel constitutes a layered map of the Americas that registers continental visions of the US nation-state but cognitively remaps and breaks up this space into various archipelagic constellations. I read the novel as contributing to a specifically African American mode of the archipelagic, which I trace along two trajectories: a focus on carceral archipelagos and im/mobilities, and a negotiation between what David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh have called “interstitial” geographies, which focus on relationality, and “abyssal” geographies, which posit and critique antiblackness as the world’s foundational violence. In my reading, both trajectories sit firmly within the concerns of archipelagic studies but significantly extend the paradigm’s scope. The first trajectory depicts the US nation-state both as imperial continent and as racialized carceral archipelago and sets these layers off against visions of fugitive archipelagos that afford Mosley’s characters temporary islands of safety or respite, but never grant them the contiguity that undergirds Western fantasies of nation-state sovereignty. The second trajectory employs both interstitial and abyssal analytics to address the question what an "imagined community" can mean in a starkly antiblack world. Via the intertwined stories of two protagonists, the detective Joe King Oliver and the prisoner A Free Man, Mosley’s novel envisions African American responses to systemic betrayal within the US—being sold Down the River—and pushes, geographically and ideologically, beyond constellations of the nation-state and citizenship—Unto the Sea.

The essay uses an archipelagic lens to explore narratives of mobility and relationality surrounding the Panama Canal Zone. In the early twenieth century, the various projects of creating an interoceanic route culminated in the territorializing project of the Panama Canal that was organized around the colonization of land and ocean spaces and tied to the imperial expansion to the Caribbean and the Pacific, making the isthmus a crucial link in the imperial archipelago. After briefly discussing Willis J. Abbot’s popular history of the canal, Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose (1913), the essay explores two texts by Black writers that question dominant representations of the canal and of the migrant Caribbean workers who built it: Eric Walrond’s collection of stories, Tropic Death (1926), and the bilingual prose–poetry history of Black West Indians in Panama, An Old Woman Remembers (1995), by Carlos E. Russell. I argue that these texts practice “archipelagic memory” by evoking an archive of submerged historical experiences that relates the Canal Zone to other spaces, and by making visible spectral presences and the sediments of imperial history submerged in the waters of the canal.

Caribbean cultural tourism is deeply entwined with American empire and its transoceanic mobilities, yet transnational Caribbean cultural production constantly exceeds and escapes such limiting constructs. In this article, we combine the insights of a cultural sociologist (Sheller) and a musicologist (Martin) to interrogate the meanings of the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts, held in Puerto Rico in 1952, in shaping divergent archipelagic spaces and competing musical itineraries that formed Black Atlantic soundscapes, both imperial and anti-imperial. Following the travels of musical production, dance performance, and cultural tourism marketing around the Caribbean and into North America, we argue that beneath the currents of imperial transnational tourism and cultural consumption there were also countermobilities forming an “alterNative archipelagic” imaginary that connected the Caribbean with Africa and Black America. We trace the ways in which Caribbean music entered North American bodies, with Caribbean musicians bringing surprising trends such as steelpan and Calypso into United States musical performance circuits beyond tourism. The music itself, as well, changed culture and moved people, all over the world, forging other kinds of mobilities and connections contra American imperialism. Music inspired a vision for radical Caribbean and Pan-African unity against the imperial interests of the United States and extractive industries in the region. This tale of an imperial archipelago and its countervailing alterNative archipelagoes suggests that archipelagic formations are open to definition, difficult to stabilize, and always extending outwards beyond the horizon. Constituted by mobilities as much as by islands, archipelagoes are a matrix of transnational cultures capable of remixing, expanding, and resisting imperial power.

Both the 1996 novel In Another Place, Not Here by Trinidadian Canadian writer Dionne Brand and the 2017 poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis by St. Lucian Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin are concerned with desires spanning the Caribbean archipelago, to Canada and back again. The narrators and protagonists of Brand’s text migrate across this archipelago while navigating various desires—for places, people, a sense of belonging, and revolution—that serve as a way of bridging distances between bodies, continents, and moments in time. Lubrin shares in that project by not only writing about the archipelago’s historic echoes and present connections, but by explicitly dedicating one of her poems to Brand. In this article, we read desire and the archipelagic in these works not just together, but through one another, conceptualizing what we call an “archipelago of desire.” The notion of the archipelago proves useful due to the concrete geographical constellation that forms the Caribbean and that can, in extension, be used to explore not merely one or two forms of mobility, but a plurality of im/mobilities, such as these speakers’ crisscrossing paths. In using the archipelago to grasp desire, we see different desires as fragmented and interwoven; they are part of not a whole but of something which resists being a whole, much like an archipelago resists being subsumed into one category; desire is then a way of assembling these things together while affirming their fragmentary nature.

Starting from the fact that the International Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies/UNOOSA, 1967) has been modeled on international laws of the seas, this essay investigates the epistemic consequences of conceiving outer space archipelagically, or, more specifically and following Craig Santos Perez, terripelagically. By reversing center/periphery structurations in line with both archipelagic approaches to and philosophical theorizations of outer space by Jacques Lacan and Hannah Arendt, the article critiques the current discursive transformation in both science and popular culture of celestial bodies into desirable territories of capitalization, exploitation, and imperialism, and it suggests the term astropelago as an alternative conception. We argue that as a continuation of imperial exploratory mobilities, terripelagic outer space projections, which are becoming increasingly real, demonstrate the need for an outside of capitalism on ever new frontiers to continue ecological—human and nonhuman—exploitation on Earth. In a second part, we explore the initiative “For All Moonkind” and the TV series For All Mankind and the ways in which they center Mars and Earth’s moon respectively as spaces that reaffirm and renew imperial desires.

This interview between Barbara Gfoellner and Jonathan Pugh explores archipelagic thinking, transnational American Studies, the concept of islandness and recent debates in Black Studies. Notably, it draws out two distinct ways, or analytical approaches, in which American Studies can be taken beyond understandings of the nation-state as a fixed and bounded object. Both seek to move beyond modern frameworks of reasoning, a linear telos of progress, fixed grids of space and time, which are widely argued to have supported American exceptionalism. The first, more common analytical approach, can be situated within the broader “relational” and “ontological” turns that have swept across the social sciences and humanities in recent decades, involving turns towards such tropes as assemblages, networks, flows, mobilities, post- and more-than-human approaches. The second analytical approach, what Pugh (in his current research with David Chandler) calls “abyssal thought,” has yet to emerge as prominently, but poses a significant challenge to the relational and ontological turns. Central for abyssal work is how, as we learn from W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, the world cannot be separated out from the violence that forged the antiblack modernist ontology of “human as subject” and “world as object.” For abyssal work, however, the task is not to rework the subject of modernity in terms of relational ontologies and epistemologies, but to problematize and to undo the human and the world. This interview explores how the abyssal project is thus nonontological and nonrelational, deconstructive rather than productive, deworlding as opposed to world-making.