Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean

Roberts, B. C.; Stephens, Michelle

doi:10.5070/t851019711

Cited by 23 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Thus Perez's contemplations of language and translation resemble the archipelago, as elaborated in the introduction to Archipelagic American Studies: "a push and pull between the metaphoric and the material, in which the concept of archipelago serves to mediate the phenomenology of humans' cultural relation to the solid and liquid materiality of geography." 40 And yet further, Perez converges with Glissant's commentary on archipelagic translation (previously quoted in the present essay) as working "to accumulate the expanse of all the beings and all the existences in the world," tracing "the unforeseeable of what is now our common condition." Our momongmong (the material sound) meets the CHamoru language's momongmong (or linguistic translation of that sound).…”

Section: Materialities and Metaphoricities Of Being Amidmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…7 Indeed, the grammar of overwater transit that resides within the fundamentals of translational thinking comes to resemble some of the archipelagic relationalities discussed in the introduction to the 2017 edited volume Archipelagic American Studies, as archipelagoes' "connections proliferate among nodes and across a sea of islands," with these connections emerging as "filamentous networks, simultaneously evocative of airline routes, communications cables, kinship ties, Internet connections, social networks, and waka/canoe voyages." 8 In thinking through translation's relevance to and place within such archipelagic networks, it is necessary to take seriously the convergence between translation's self-conscious preoccupation with meaning-conveyance and the archipelago's relation to meaning-making, as intimated by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Michelle Stephens in Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: "the archipelago calls for a meaning-making and rearticulation that responds to human experiences traversing space and time." 9 In other words, the archipelago, whose discontinuous conjunction of oceans and shorelines has already been a structuring metaphor for thinking about the kinetics of translation, is a thought template and material geography that specifically calls for the cross-cultural meaning-making to which the theory and practice of translation is dedicated.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

Roberts¹

2023

Transnational American Studies

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When most English speakers hear the verb to translate, we think of the task of "convert [ing] from one language to another." Unsurprisingly, this is the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition for the term, and the OED further expounds on this initial definition: "To convert or render (a word, a work, an author, a language, etc.) into another language; to express or convey the meaning of (a word or text) using equivalent words in a different language." This all feels like common sense. But scroll down in the OED's discussion, and another definition, less prominent than the first, presents itself: "to convey or move (a person or thing) from one place to another; to transfer or transport (a person or thing); to exile or deport (a person or people)." 1 Within a special forum dedicated to theorizing mobility, juxtaposing these two definitions of the English verb to translate is a reminder that the notion of translation has traditionally hinged on mobility, on movement or the idea of movement from one place to another. That which is moving, or that which is being moved, may be a person, thing, sentence, or poem. And the sites from which and to which it is being moved may be material places or language traditions. Translation's imbrication with mobility comes as no surprise to German speakers, who speak a language in which the standard translational equivalent for the verb to translate is übersetzen, which might be paraphrased in English as an act of taking something and moving or setting it into a new place. 2 Translation is movement, and when we talk about translation from one language to another, we are also talking about movement.Although the overtly and self-consciously kinetic definition of translation is to a large degree overlooked in everyday speech, language translation as movement from one place to another is a founding structural metaphor among translators and scholars who have thought about translation. We see this in many places. For instance, in the introduction to their Oxford University Press anthology, Translation-Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (2006), editors Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson

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Section: Materialities and Metaphoricities Of Being Amidmentioning

confidence: 54%

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confidence: 99%

Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

Roberts¹

2023

Transnational American Studies

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“…However, much Western discourse following climate disasters on islands employs tropes of the remote and dependent island, a trope that has been abundantly used in the past to justify colonialism (see Roberts & Stephens, 2017), culturally reproduced in literary texts of the deserted island (see DeLoughrey, 2007;Gillis, 2004) or commercialized and exoticized for white, westernized dreams (see DeLoughrey & Flores, 2020;Nimführ & Meloni, 2021). Debates surrounding islands and ecological disasters overemphasizing island vulnerability due to their precarious position far apart and encircled by the ocean, threatened by rising sea levels, deflect from the convoluted complexity of climate change and the implication of colonialism and imperialism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This deliberate setting apart of the island serves to justify the mainland's own reluctance to act and to aid. Numerous scholars in island and archipelagic studies have critically examined tropes of island remoteness (Baldacchino, 2006;DeLoughrey, 2001;Hau'ofa, 1999;Ronström, 2021) and argued for an archipelagic framework (Pugh, 2013;Roberts & Stephens, 2017;Stephens & Martínez-San Miguel, 2020;Stratford et al, 2011), drawn attention to the "slow violence" (Nixon, 2011) intricately related to the longue durée of colonial exploitation and racial capitalism and to the question of climate justice for affected places like the Caribbean (Sheller, 2020), and shifted the debate from island vulnerability to islands' and islanders' agency in the Anthropocene (Baldacchino, 2018;Chandler & Pugh, 2021a;2021b;DeLoughrey, 2019;Ruehr, 2022;Sheller, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“we are still here holding fast”: Stillness in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia

Gfoellner¹

2023

ISJ

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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?

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“…"Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Talk").2 Blackwell goes to Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the Alberta tar sands in Canada, the Amazon forest in the Brazilian northwestern state of Pará, and the recycling facilities of Shanxi province in China, amongst others.3 Cf Stratford et al (2011),. as well as the notion of the anti-anti-insularity inRoberts and Stephens (2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

Birds of the Plastic Pacific: Moving (the) Masses

Crane

2023

Maritime Literature and Culture

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The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”is a misnomer. It suggests an easily visualizable mass of plastic, clearly defined and floating atop the Pacific Ocean. The reality is that the masses of plastic move not singularly as a mass, nor are they necessarily clearly visible. The plastic moves, certainly; it shifts, floats, and sinks. It entangles and mangles. And it degrades, exuding lethal toxins into and through the oceans. The “Plastic Pacific” is more a shifting accretion of material than a static accumulation of objects.In lieu of a “patch,” then, what images and symbols can be mobilized to “move the masses” to respond to this phenomenon? Images of two kinds of maritime birds have emerged: the Layson albatross, lying prostate with plastic (Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series, Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume), and the rubber duck, rendered both homely and unheimlich in several books (Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn).Drawing on theories of entanglement, archipelagoes, and toxicity, this article stresses the relational as a crucial component of political and ethical critique. The “moving” of the subtitle thus not only references the mobility of the material itself, but also the different aesthetic measures employed to effect responses and responsibilities.

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Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean

Cited by 23 publications

References 27 publications

Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World

“we are still here holding fast”: Stillness in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia

Birds of the Plastic Pacific: Moving (the) Masses

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