Archipelagic Imperial Spaces and Mobilities: 2nd International Workshop

This workshop is co-organized by members of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1199) Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition (Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Steffen Wöll, both Leipzig University) and of the research platform  “Mobile Cultures and Societies” at the University of Vienna (Alexandra Ganser and Barbara Gföllner). Here you can find the full programme of the workshop.

Abstract

The second workshop under the heading of «Archipelagic Imperial Spaces and Mobilities» continues to bring together international scholars from the fields of Archipelagic Studies, Island Studies and Mobility Studies. Its goal is to discuss our papers and findings across disciplinary border in preparation for a special issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS). Mobility has been central for the real and imaginative construction of the United States from its beginnings. From the mid-1800s onward, the nation’s continental gaze shifted towards a ‹terraqueous triumphalism› that dissolved global distances with imperial projects in the Caribbean and Asian-Pacific, thus creating what Lanny Thompson called an «imperial archipelago.»¹ While many colonial spaces such as Hawai’i and the Philippines are actual archipelagoes, the field of archipelagic American Studies approaches its eponymous topic as a blend of physical and cultural geographies, proposing that «the archipelago emerges as neither strictly natural nor as wholly cultural but always as at the intersection of the Earth’s materiality and humans’ penchant for metaphoricity.»²

Thinking archipelagically therefore becomes both a metaphor and theoretical lens for accessing the multiple dimensions of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls the «transoceanic imaginary.»³ In the words of island studies scholar Elaine Stratford, «thinking with the archipelago may reveal multiple emancipatory narratives that enunciate exceptions to colonizing grammars of empire that rendered islands remote, isolated and backward.»⁴ Archipelagic approaches thus evoke epistemic disruptions of global conditions and a renegotiation of conventional cultural vocabularies that revolve around centrality and peripherality, identity, history, geography, and mobility.

Building upon the spatial turn’s insistence on the social construction of space, transnational American Studies has decentered the topic of mobility from the nationstate, rethinking it as «socially produced motion»⁵ embedded in a «web of connections» among cross-cultural and cross-border practices.⁶ This new mobility research «sets out to critique dominant scripts of American mobility articulated in cultural forms from suband transnational perspectives and from gender-, race-, and class-critical angle.»⁷ It traces (im)mobilities as part of human and cultural geographies, for instance as part of diasporas, border regimes and
borderlands⁸, migration flows, regimes of mass incarceration, the racial politics of movement⁹, or alongside asymmetrical constellations of contagion or panic¹⁰. Other current research explores the scope of «minor mobilities.»¹¹

Exploring the intersections of archipelagicity, mobility, and American imperialism promises to illuminate dimensions of (im)mobility and imperialism / colonialism in a framework that goes beyond conventional perspectives by assuming a healthy «skepticism regarding continental presumptions to uniquely mainland status, combined with a dedication to the project of reimagining insular, oceanic, and archipelagic spaces as mainlands and mainwaters, crucial spaces, participants, nodes, and networks within planetary history.»¹²

The workshop asks:

1. How does archipelagic thinking or ‹thinking with the archipelago› shape the production of knowledge?
2. Can concepts such as archipelagicity, insularity, and peripherality help in the exploration of continuities between the southern US and the Caribbean, particularly concerning colonial violence, racial hierarchies, and differential mobilities?
3. How do mobilities challenge spatial formats that are based on principles of territoriality, most notably concepts of region, nation-state, and empire?
4. What new spatial imaginations emerge from archipelagic epistemes and mobility practices?

---

1. _{1 Thompson, Lanny. Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Domination after Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.
   2 Roberts, Brian Russell and Michelle Ann Stephens (eds.), Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 7.
   3 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, p. 4.
   4 Stratford, Elaine, «The Idea of the Archipelago: Contemplating Island Relations, » Island Studies Journal 8 (2013) 1, pp. 3–8; 4}
2. _{5 Cresswell, Tim, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 3.
   6 See e.g., Dirlik, Arif, What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, «Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies», American Quarterly 57 (2005) 1, pp. 17-57; Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.), Cultural
   Mobility: A Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
   7 See https://mobilecultures.univie.ac.at/docfunds/.
   8 Anzald a, Gloria, Borderlands: La Frontera, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.}
3. _{9 Sheller, Mimi, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in the Age of Extremes, London: Verso, 2018.
   10 Kunow, Rüdiger, «American Studies as Mobility Studies: Some Terms and Constellations », in: Fluck, Winfried, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (eds.), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2011, pp. 245–64.
   11 See https://enmma.org.
   12 Roberts / Stephens (eds.), Archipelagic American Studies, p.14.}

---

Programme

Day 1 • Wednesday, March 30

4–4:30 pm

Welcome and coffee

4:30–5:15 pm

Kick-off Discussion: Framing our JTAS Special Issue: Transnational, Archipelagic, and Mobility Studies

5:15–7:15 pm Session 1

Brian Russell Roberts: Archipelagic Translation: Translating in the Presence of Every Language in the World

Commentary: Nicole Waller

Mimi Sheller and Andrew R. Martin: «Kaleidoscopic Combinations»: Forging Bonds and Imperial Adventure through Musical Mobilities across the Caribbean Archipelago

Commentary: Barbara Gföllner and Sigrid Thomsen

Day 2 • Thursday, March 31

10 am–12 pm Session 2

Steffen Wöll: Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

Commentary: Jens Temmen

Jonathan Pugh: The Americas: A Relational or Abyssal Geography?

(Transcript of conversation with Barbara Gföllner)

2–5:30 pm Session 3

Barbara Gföllner and Sigrid Thomsen: «Near Enough to Smell and Far Enough to Desire»: Archipelagos of Desire in Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here

Commentary: Jonathan Pugh

Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez: Narrating the Isthmus: (Im)Mobilities and Archipelagic Identities in Texts about the Panama Canal

Commentary: Brian Russell Roberts

Alexandra Ganser and Jens Temmen (with Clemens Rettenbacher): An Archipelagic Reading of Outer Space

Commentary: Mimi Sheller

Day 3 • Friday, April 1

10–11 am Session 4

Nicole Waller: Layered Maps: Black Geographies and Archipelagic (Im)mobility

Commentary: Alexandra Ganser

11 am–12 pm Final Discussion and Further Planning

Moderation: Steffen Wöll

Participants

Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez is Professor of American Studies and Minority Studies at Leipzig. She is Deputy Speaker of and a Principal Investigator in the collaborative research centre (SFB) Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition at of Leipzig University. Recent publications include the volumes Spatialization Processes in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives (Peter Lang, 2018), The Early United States in a Transnational Perspective (Peter Lang, 2016), Periphere Räume in der Amerikanistik (DeGruyter, 2019), as well as the essay Being Black in the archipelagic Americas: Racialized (im)mobilities in the autobiographies of James Weldon Johnson and Evelio Grillo in Atlantic Studies (July 2021).

Alexandra Ganser is Professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna. She is head of the interdisciplinary research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies as well as key researcher of the doc.funds PhD program Cultural Mobility Studies, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She is also co-director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Recent publications include the volumes Crisis and Legitimacy in American Narratives of Piracy, 1678–1865 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Mobile Cultures and Societies (Vienna University Press, 2020) and Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her current research investigates
mobility futures, astrofuturism, and maritime im / mobilities.

Steffen Wöll is Postdoctoral Fellow at Leipzig University’s collaborative research center Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition. He has published on various and intersectional topics in American Studies, including spatial imaginations, border studies, naturalism, postmodernism, as well as film and horror studies. Wöll is the author of The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse (de Gruyter, 2020). His current research investigates the transoceanic dynamics of the United States’ imperial and literary discourses.

Barbara Gföllner is a scholar of American Studies and French Studies at the University of Vienna and a member of the research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies. She is a project assistant in the doc.funds PhD program Cultural Mobility Studies, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She studied English and American Studies as well as French Studies at the University of Vienna and the Université des Antilles, which informed her current dissertation project on practices of (im-)mobility in anglophone and francophone Caribbean poetry. She has published an edited volume on Cultural Mobilities between Africa and the Caribbean with Routledge in 2021.

Michelle Ann Stephens is Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies as well as the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Among other works, she is the author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (2014) and Archipelagic American Studies (2017; co-edited with Brian Russell Roberts). Her most recent book Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking (2020; co-edited with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel) explores epistemologies and methodologies informed by the archipelago.

Brian Russell Roberts is Professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He is the author of Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (U of Virginia P, 2013) and Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke UP, 2021). He has co-dedited Archipelagic American Studies (with Michelle Stephens, 2017) and Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (with Keith Foulcher, 2016) both also published by Duke University Press.

Jens Temmen is a postdoctoral researcher at the American Studies department at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in Germany. He received his PhD with the research training group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. Temmen has co-edited the anthology Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies (2018). His resumé includes research projects such as American Territorialities and Writing Life on Mars: Conceptions of Planetarity and Extraterrestrial Human Life in Representations of Space.

Sigrid Thomsen is a scholar of Comparative Literature and American Studies at the University of Vienna and a member of the research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies.

Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology, Head of the Sociology Department, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She is considered to be a key theorist in critical mobilities research and in Caribbean studies. She is the author of over 125 publications, including Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018).

Andrew R. Martin is Professor of Music at Inver Hills College. His research explores the global spread of steelpan and steelbands, American music, and popular and folk music and musicians since the Cold War. Since 2011, Martin has written a semi-regular newspaper column, Pan Worldwide, for the Trinidad Guardian.

Nicole Waller is Professor for American Studies at the University of Potsdam and a member of the research training group Minor Cosmopolitanisms, which seeks to establish new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies. Her recent work revolves around issues of territoriality, Black geographies, and Indigenous sovereignty in North America.

Jonathan Pugh is a lecturer at Newcastle University. He is noted for his development of what has come to be known as the ‹relational turn› in islands studies, producing a number of influential publications examining how contemporary scholarship disrupts insular and isolated island geographies. His present work focuses on the figure of the island in the Anthropocene. He is the co-author of Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021).