Journal of Transnational American Studies

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.