Archipelagic American Studies

"Archipelagic American Studies offers an expansive, liberating vision of archipelagic, island, and American studies as well as the discourses and material relations that implicate US imperialism and the locations and articulations of power." - Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Island World: A History of Hawai`i and the United States

"Brilliant, transformative, and a model of engaging scholarship, Archipelagic American Studies offers a bracing challenge to reevaluate and reimagine the ways in which we structure knowledge in American studies. A conceptually innovative and highly imaginative work." - Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

"With some of the best essays collected on the subject. this volume opens up new spaces for the fields of Caribbean and of American studies. This is a pathbreaking edited volume." - Anthony Bogues, Brown University

"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." - Jonathan Pugh, Island Studies Journal

“A transformative series of essays. Archipelagic American Studies sets an important new course toward geographic, political, and cultural recognition of Island spaces and places.” - Rebecca Hogue, Contemporary Pacific

"The many essays in this book . . . provide readers with opportunities to rethink their own relationship(s) with archipelagos and how we may situate our work. . . . Transformative." - Emalani Case, Journal of Pacific Studies

"Collectively, the anthology highlights the limitations of US-centric understandings of archipelagos and presents a nuanced display of the lasting impacts and contemporary reaches of US imperialism. . . . I highly recommend the collection to scholars concerned with the Asia Pacific region’ as the editors offer a systematised and organised arrangement of theories and methodologies for thinking like an archipelago."
  - Sylvia C Frain, Asia Pacific Viewpoint

"This book provided me with tools to begin to think about my own group of islands differently, to recentre my concerns and to begin to unravel the consequences of dominant, continental thinking in real-life situations." - Emalani Case, Journal of Pacific History

"As we read Archipelagic American Studies, in fact, we embark on a journey which is full of twists and turns, instructive and rewarding, and for which Roberts and Stephens provide an invaluable road map, a comprehensive introductory essay which enables us to impart meaning and purpose to every stop in our journey in relation to the overarching trajectory of the volume." - Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Journal of American Studies

"Archipelagic American Studies is, overall, an important intervention in and beyond the discipline of American studies. Its remapping of the United States and the Americas at large as an archipelagic formation is a bold gesture that has implications for the many fields concerned with spaces where land and see meet and with the peoples and cultures that inhabit them. The book is a necessary read for anyone interested in decontinentalizing scholarship related to empire and nation." - Natalie Catasús, sx salon