Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters

Abstract

In 2013 two scholars at the Mas sa chu setts Institute of Technology published a "Territorial Map of the World" that drew attention to the boundaries that currently exist between and among all of the planet's sovereign nation-states. As one would expect, in representing the United States, the map registers the US-Mexico border to the south and the US-Canada border to the north. These two borders, of course, are the borders of the United States, canonized within traditional and popu lar thought. And as is intoned by the well-known patriotic hymn, between these two canonical borders the United States extends "from sea to shining sea"-it extends as a vast continental nation of fruited plains and purple mountains and fields of grain, with a manifest destiny whose only east-west limits have been the seemingly nonnational and apo liti cal blank spaces of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And yet the "Territorial Map of the World, " created by Rafi Segal and Yonatan Cohen, offers a substantial jolt to the traditional continental US narrative precisely because it does not represent shorelines as naturally imposed bound aries but instead moves toward an apprehension of the United States as a nation whose bound aries extend into heretofore uncanonized waters. As the creators explain, "This po liti cal map of the world depicts the extent of territories, both on land and at sea . . . , which