No abstract

This article looks at Richard Georges’ poetry collection Epiphaneia, which is set on the British Virgin Islands in the aftermath of hurricane Irma. While Georges’ poems are placed amidst destruction, they go beyond narratives of devastation; instead, they articulate a poetics of livingness on the hurricane-struck island. This paper first draws out critical debates on the coloniality of climate that show the longue durée and complexity of a history of catastrophe in the Caribbean context. It addresses how Epiphaneia challenges one-sided discourses of island dependency and victimization by offering ways to perceive islands in the Anthropocene not as passive victims of catastrophes but as sites of living within what Glissant calls a chaos-world. This article then advances an ecopoetics of the archipelago in the wake of the hurricane. The various tensions held by the island after the storm will be traced through the word ‘still’: the ongoing violence of coloniality, still present; yet continuously resisted due to the island’s and islanders’ resilience and survival, still alive. This paper explores the poetics emerging from the island in the Anthropocene: What poetics are needed to sustain life after, and within, catastrophe? What does it mean to exist and move, still, on the island in the wake of the hurricane?

This special forum of JTAS brings together the work of international scholars from the fields of archipelagic American studies, island studies, and mobility studies. It is the result of two thematic workshops in Leipzig, Germany organized by the collaborative research center "Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition" and the Vienna research platform "Mobile Cultures and Societies" that set out to investigate the relationship between transnational studies, archipelagic studies, and mobility studies. In seven articles, an interview, and an exploratory conversation, the twelve contributors open up and navigate new paths of thinking through the intersections of archipelagicity, mobility, US-American imperialism, and decoloniality. As part of a rising tide of critical voices that express discontent about global neoliberal regimes of im/mobility and their representation, the contributors concurrently identify and answer to contemporary needs of renegotiating spaces, places, identities, and power relations. Archipelagic epistemes, the authors demonstrate across a diverse range of topics, provide a lens through which to critically interrogate traditional binaries of continentalism and islandness. They challenge colonial discourses of static, self-contained islands and bring into focus the role of im/mobilities and relational entanglements.As Édouard Glissant noted in his conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, archipelagos "are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real. …They open us up to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting." 1 The contributions to this special forum operate within that "sea of wandering" as they open into and move across varied literal and figurative archipelagos; they demonstrate how transnational imaginaries and discourses become part of archipelagic formations, both in contexts of imperialism and resistance to its dominant epistemes. Significantly, arch-

is a leading scholar in island studies. He is renowned for his critical reflections on the prominent role which islands and thinking with "islandness" is playing in the generation of different contemporary pathways of critical thought. His earlier work contributed to scholarship challenging perceptions of islands as insular, and thereby joins key concerns in archipelagic studies, by delineating a "relational turn" in island studies. 1 Pugh's more recent work, together with David Chandler, is interested in the role of the island in the Anthropocene, examined in his "Anthropocene Islands" project and their co-authored book Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021). His latest research conceptualizes what Pugh and Chandler call "the abyssal," a radical critique of modernity, by drawing on Caribbean and Black scholarship in their book The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023). 2 This interview teeters between these debates and is a result of written reflections and verbal correspondence between Jonathan Pugh and Barbara Gfoellner over several months throughout 2021 and early 2022. The final interview is an edited version of their discussion, which started off with reflections on archipelagic studies and its relevance for the Anthropocene and organically moved to Pugh's more recent theoretical reflections on "the abyssal." Barbara Gfoellner: Let's perhaps start with your background as island studies scholar. You have examined the turn to "thinking with the archipelago" 3 that, with its geographical formation, evokes multifaceted entanglements, assemblages and mobilities instead of isolation and separation. How do you understand "archipelagic thinking,"