Introduction

Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media

“…Now, we arrive at what this afterword dubs the transnational problems of “medium America” in agricultural media studies: by “medium America,” we mean to identify a territory of no less than 40% of non-coastal North American landmass bounded by the Rockies and Appalachian mountains running from central Canada through the center of the United States into central Mexico (and beyond), and dub this vague geographic swath “medium” in reference both to its central status between coasts and its curious doubled role in media and communication, where its media contributions are at once routinely sidelined and highly generative. Irreducible to a single nation state, this double blind runs in at least two directions: first, the United States is famously remembered for having powerful populated coasts separated by a vast flyover heartland forgettable except for occasional troublemaking in election seasons and then serving as patriotic sacrificial scapegoats in trade wars with China between those elections; by calling attention to “medium America,” we first seek to overcome that national coastal bias, attending to the farmland ground behind the fore of urban coastal America; second, more urgently, we look to deconstruct the call to look internally, and instead point externally: medium American also lies not between but beyond US borders in Mexico, Canada, Pan-America, and what Michael Stephens and Brian Roberts (2017; Roberts, 2021) calls “Archipelago America.” In other words, while farm media ground us again and again in land, a proper conception of its work must be as distributed, fluid, and multipolar as archipelagos. An antidote to continentality and land-massed thinking, the resulting medium archipelagic America, like any medium, resists understanding as a singular continuous farm medial land empire and instead invites critical comparative analysis of transnationally distributed agricultural forces driving crop monocultures and the industrialization of farms transforming arable surfaces across the world.…”

Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

“…Finally, Hawaiʻi's conspicuous colonial mappings find poetic equivalence in Derek Walcott's figure of the Western explorer who, as Roberts and Stephens note, "sallies forth with confidence that if the world is as yet unknown, then it at least may be surveyed and hence known via the Euclidean geometry of a latitudinal and longitudinal grid superimposed upon an idealized sphere." 44 Like the tourists' expectations which are plotted through leisurely fantasies in colorful brochures "[i]n the explorer's world, space is mapped, before it is known." 45 Today, more and more scholars work towards reversing this Western-centric spatial narrative.…”

“…44 Like the tourists' expectations which are plotted through leisurely fantasies in colorful brochures "[i]n the explorer's world, space is mapped, before it is known." 45 Today, more and more scholars work towards reversing this Western-centric spatial narrative. David Chang, for examples, traces nineteenth-century oceanic explorations of Kānaka Maoli (i.e., Indigenous Hawaiians) and asks: "What if we were to understand indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration, rather than the passive objects of that exploration?…”

“…They thus harken back to Walcott's counterconcept to Western placemaking that is expressed in the figure of the anti-explorer, who, in the words of Roberts and Stephens, "conceptualized the world not by means of the Euclidean set of lines that constitute the latitudinal and longitudinal grid, but rather by means of the post-Euclidean schemas of chaos and fractal geometry." 58 The anti-explorer, analogous to the narrator's movement of Walcott's poem "A Sea-Chantey" traverses the ocean not to order the world alongside unwavering grids of absolute certainty but guided by the sublime momentum of a poetics of relationality between inner and outer spaces that observes…”

Perspectives on Creolizing the Modern

“…Many such scholars (whose work is also often interdisciplinary) highlight the radically different historical relations to and epistemologies of land among Indigenous and other minoritized communities even as they also track the violent suppression of these relations within gendered and raced colonialist capitalism. 1 Relatedly, some scholars in Archipelagaic studies, such as Stephens and Roberts (2017), and King (2019), attempt to think through land/labor/sea relations in relation to Native/ Black relations within the colonial context. How might Creolizing the Modern be considered together with this diversity of work?…”