Brian Russell Roberts

Although the United States is often thought of as a continental country, with its continental frontier central to national mythology, the United States today, due partially to claims in the Pacific and Caribbean, asserts authority over more ocean than land territory. Without endorsing the United States’ majority-ocean claims, this book takes them seriously, working to renarrate the United States vis-à-vis its archipelagic materiality. The book focuses on the United States of a long twentieth century, and on the natural-cultural prehistories of its emergence as an archipelagic nation. In redescribing the United States, the book’s first chapter suggests that US-Americans, in terms of national mythology and history, have a long tradition of bumping into islands and mistaking them for continents. The book’s following chapters examine the archipelagic states of America and their borderwaters, first spatially and then temporally. Spatially oriented, chapters two and three use the figure of the archipelago to approach the United States in ways accountable to geographical form and the nontraditional geometries tied to the country’s watery borders and borderwaters. Subsequently, chapters four and five examine how the archipelago’s geographical form and borderwaters manifest themselves temporally, as US cultures engage with waterscapes reaching into deep geological times and astronomically distant futures. A conclusion uses computer assisted distant reading to analyze the full runs of three major Americanist journals, commenting on the presence and absence of archipelagic terminology in Americanist scholarship. Caribbean, Pacific, and other island-oriented philosophers are key to this archipelagic redescription of the United States.

Translated by Harry Aveling, Keith Foulcher & Brian Russell Roberts

Born into a high-status family of the Batak ethnic group indigenous to
North Sumatra, Sitor Situmorang (1924–2014) was a Dutch-educated
Indonesian nationalist who experienced firsthand the transition from the
Dutch East Indies of his youth to the modern Indonesia of his adulthood.
The stories in this collection are a window into the world of a writer
dedicated to exploration and change but resolutely attached to the land,
people, and stories of his homeland. Set variously in western Europe,
post-independence Jakarta, and modernizing communities in his native
North Sumatra, the stories live in—as the translators put it—the “perpetual tension between the urge to wander and a longing for origins."

Harry Aveling is professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University; Keith Foulcher, honorary associate at the University of Sydney, writes on Indonesian literary and cultural history; Brian Russell Roberts is associate professor of English at Brigham Young University.

Richard Wright's The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference has long been a fundamental book in Bandung historiography. As a crucial companion volume to The Color Curtain, Roberts and Foulcher's Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and The Bandung Conference showcases the previously unknown side of Wright's Bandung narrative, as told from the perspectives of the vibrant group of Indonesian intellectuals and writers who hosted him in Indonesia in 1955. Showcasing Wright’s previously unknown interactions with Indonesian modernists and his previously unknown lecturing activities in Indonesia, this book has major implications for any reading of postcolonial history and culture after the Asian-African Conference of 1955.

Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) has launched a thousand ships. And perhaps rightly so: it begins with the materiality of the sea. The border of today is preponderantly oceanic and its borderwaters are archipelagic.

Generally speaking, the border/borderlands complex has oriented itself around interactions between the border as a one-dimensional Euclidean line and the borderlands’ set of contestations growing out of cultural currents that exceed the state’s superimposed Euclidean geometry/geography. In complement and contradistinction, this essay advances a borderwaters framework as interlinked with governmentality’s engagement in and with modes of non-Euclidean spatial perception, in which the state’s imagination of borders has not been the evocation of, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s term, an “unnatural boundary” but has rather been a partial function of the geological and hydrological materialities and processes to which governmentality has tended to affix water-based and water-dependent borders. These water-dependent and natural-cultural borders (with their attendant notions of human sovereignty) are intertwined with an arena of borderwaters where nonhuman actants (currents, waves, shorelines, and nonhuman animals) play roles in establishing how human borders will attain perception. In outlining some of the dynamics of the borderwaters, this essay turns toward the oceanic and archipelagic work of the Greater Mexican visual artist Miguel Covarrubias, whose midcentury representations of Indonesia and the United States’s Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands help contextualize and theorize state, Indigenous, and nonhuman cultures as they have converged and diverged across non-Euclidean modes of imagining boundaries, nonboundaries, and spatial area on a terraqueous planet.

Beb Vuyk's article brings crucial new context to Richard Wright's landmark book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. For more information, see her article as it appears in Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference.

https://www.academia.edu/10927987/Indonesian_Notebook_A_Sourcebook_on_Richard_Wright_and_the_Bandung_Conference_Duke_University_Press_pre-order_2015_

After the Bandung conference, Wright gave an extended interview for the cultural column Gelanggang, one of the main mouthpieces for the writers and intellectuals with whom Wright associated in Indonesia. Much of the interview deals with Wright's development as a writer and his views on the function of literature and the nature of a writer's audience. In his commentary on these issues, Wright shows himself to be working through the ideas that would form the core of the lecture he gave at the Balai Budaja (Cultural Center) in Jakarta just before his departure from Indonesia. The interview also illustrates the Indonesian interest at this time in existentialism, particularly its humanist dimensions, which are seen to resonate with the Indonesian aesthetic philosophy of universal humanism. Wright and his unnamed Indonesian interviewer find common ground in the issue of existentialism, although they each come to it by a different route. For full text of chapter, see: Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference

Chapter 1 of _Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era_ (University of Virginia Press, 2013): Exploring the ways in which black US diplomats adapted foundational diplomatic fictions to the context of a nascent New Negro discourse on representation, chapter one focuses on the writings of four late nineteenth-century US diplomats: Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, and John Stephens Durham. Sent to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar, each of these writers redeployed the diplomatic fiction of “representative character” within non-diplomatic representational realms. Analyzing and contextualizing the autobiographies of Douglass, Langston, and Gibbs, the chapter argues that during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the diplomatic fiction of representative character assumed special importance in prominent African American men’s efforts at (re)constructing themselves as race representatives and in the project of seeking the full rights of US citizenship for their black US constituency. The reception of these three writers suggests that black US diplomats were generally successful in using work as international representatives to attain or cement their status as African American race representatives. However, the State Department’s segregated practices of diplomatic delegation, in tandem with US myths and suspicions regarding race and national representation, largely stymied black diplomats’ efforts at parlaying work abroad into civil rights at home. In the face of these difficulties, John Stephens Durham (Douglass’s successor in Haiti) redeployed the trope of representative character not merely within the arena of race representation but also within the realm of literary representation. Durham’s novel Diane, Priestess of Haiti (1902) vividly contributes to the New Negro project of using international representation to seek the amelioration of racial conditions within the United States. Operating allegorically, the novel sets forth a cast of representative characters to criticize the US’s mistrust of its black diplomats and to argue for African Americans’ constitutional fitness for full participation in the US’s state apparatuses.

Chapter 4 of _Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era_ (Virginia, 2013): Addressing the archival and epistemic limits of attempting to historicize New Negro cultural and literary involvements in official internationalism, chapter four of _Artistic Ambassadors_ examines the repressed presences of Archibald Grimké’s diplomatic work within the literary work of his daughter Angelina W. Grimké. Archibald’s lifetime of vivid descriptions of his four-year consulship in Santo Domingo (from 1894 to 1898) caused Angelina, even while in the sixth decade of her life, to feel she “seem[ed] to have been there too.” Interrogating Angelina’s sense of virtual presence, the chapter reads Archibald’s diplomatic work as the foreign presence against which Angelina defines the domestic (i.e., simultaneously maternal and national) project in her drama Rachel (1916). Rachel, in turn, offers unexpected insight into the epistemic violence involved in African American participation in the US’s diplomatic program. Reading a series of textual gaps within the drama, this chapter locates Rachel’s metonymies of absence and presence. These metonymies are instructive vis-à-vis the ways in which official internationalism has often functioned—epistemically and archivally—to silence black men while erasing the material presence of black women within the international world.

Section three, titled “Hip-to-macy,” takes its organizing logic from Langston Hughes’s notion of hip-to-macy, a term derived from diplomacy but incorporating the hip knowingness of African American vernacular culture. As a concept and practice that draws on and departs from the conventions of official internationalism, hip-to-macy is useful to theorizing both the unofficial work of official black diplomats and the diplomatically-inspired work of African Americans who have not worked as official diplomats.

Bringing the state-generated performance imperatives of official internationalism into greater dialogue with African American writers and cultural figures who did not spend long periods of time working as US diplomats, chapter five riffs on Langston Hughes’s development of the notion of hip-to-macy in response to an imagined “Summit Meeting.” Hughes’s imagination of the summit meeting as fundamental to hip-to-macy creates hip-to-macy as a particularly useful lens through which to examine the representational and international tensions surrounding a landmark series of summits—the 1919 and early 1920s meetings of the Pan-African Congress (PAC). The trope of hip-to-macy draws attention to two of the Congress’s fundamental tensions—the ethics of PAC leaders’ self-appointment as transnational race representatives, and the untested potential of international diplomacy to become a messianic liberator of the darker world. In exploring these tensions, the chapter brings focus to well-known PAC organizer W. E. B. Du Bois and to the Congress’s little-known co-organizer Ida Gibbs Hunt. Here, the chapter rereads Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) and offer the first literary-critical reading of Gibbs Hunt’s poems “To France” and “To Belgium” (ca. 1919). These texts are literary condensations of the rationales that PAC leadership used to validate its often shaky representational claims. The texts reveal that Congress leaders sought to vindicate their self-appointment not only through the notion of the “Talented Tenth” but also through recourse to official internationalism’s conventions of diplomatic delegation. These literary texts aid the chapter in exploring Du Bois and Gibbs Hunt’s theorizations of conventional diplomacy’s limits and the need for a messianic, dimensional shift in the darker world’s mode of interacting with an official internationalism that by its very structure pushed toward white supremacy. Gibbs Hunt and Du Bois were not extensively involved in official international diplomacy, but Gibbs Hunt was the wife of a US consul in France, and during the early 1920s Du Bois spent a month as a US minister in Liberia.

Resurfacing three decades after Du Bois and Gibbs Hunt held their Pan-African Congresses, Artistic Ambassadors offers a sixth chapter that draws attention to the legacies of New Negro artistic ambassadorship, bringing particular focus to the complexities of practicing hip-to-macy during the Cold War era. Taking as an exemplum the CIA’s covert funding of Richard Wright’s 1955 travel to Indonesia, chapter six reads a previously unaccessed archive of English-, Indonesian-, and Dutch-language documents on Wright’s foray into a Cold War cultural diplomacy that the US deliberately infused with racial valences. Now, the US began a long-term reliance on hip-to-macy, reconscripting the informal international riffs that the New Negro diplomats innovated in response to the strictures of official internationalism. Borrowing from Norman Mailer’s famous commentary in “The White Negro” (1957), the chapter describes this Cold War diplomatic form as a hipster diplomacy that the US hoped would be internationally powerful enough to eclipse its dismal record in domestic race relations. The chapter uses Wright’s participation in US cultural diplomacy as a springboard for reflecting on the type of interpretive crosshatching that can productively emerge at the nexus of American studies’ suspicion regarding (neo)colonialism and black diaspora studies’ work to recover the circuits of black transnationalism.

Aim and rationale Our aim is to develop the first collection of provocative and thoughtful essays that critically consider the how of island and archipelagic studies. The book will bring together leading thinkers in island and allied studies to share critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and field techniques they use in their work. The text will fill significant gaps in the literature and reflect on research methodologies and associated methods-those in island studies proper and those about varied quantitative and qualitative approaches to research and scientific inquiry that engage somehow with islands, islanders and/or island life. It will span disciplines and cover hemispheres and sociocultural, political, spatial, and other contexts. Studies of islands (and archipelagos) and island (and archipelagic) studies are different but related ventures. However, both the study of islands and the formal [inter]discipline of island studies are based on varied methodologies and associated theories, methods, and practices (including those related to dissemination and policy). Yet, no single and comprehensive volume of essays deals with how island studies scholars and practitioners understand, know, value, and should work with their subject matter. A corollary of that lack is that there is no work dealing with how those epistemological and ontological standpoints are then translated into research designs and made manifest in diverse sites of inquiry (the archive, the museum, the laboratory, the ferry, the atoll, the ocean, and so on).

Submission: 11 January 2017 Bandung Modernism and Bandung Today Contributing to a stream of modernist studies that has looked beyond Euro-American modernism's usual figures and art forms, Peter Kalliney has recently coined the term " Bandung modernism, " a modernist mode that he links heuristically to the postcolonial Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. In his book Modernism is a Global Context (Bloomsbury 2016), he discusses Bandung modernism as a set of Global South aesthetic approaches growing up alongside an anticolonial embrace of the economic, industrial, and other conditions of modernity. According to Kalliney, Bandung modernist aesthetics tend to grow alongside anticolonialism and the exploration of intercultural collaborations. (See pages 49 and 58 for Kalliney's specific descriptions of Bandung modernism.) The present session-information , titled " Bandung Modernism and Bandung Today, " seeks to draw on the insight of presenters from multiple disciplines (including but not limited to literary scholars, art historians, practicing artists, and Third World studies scholars) to examine and trace some of the aesthetic formations (modern, postmodern, and others) that may be linked either directly or indirectly to the anticolonial and cross-cultural energies of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Aesthetic formations (including but not limited to literary texts, music, works of art and architecture, and exhibitions and performances) may be drawn from any time period ranging from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Inspired by the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Convention theme (" Modernism Today "), we invite proposals for 15-minute presentations that consider how Bandung modernism and the Bandung Conference are relevant today, whether to current scholarly innovations or to postmodern and other current approaches to art and aesthetics. By 11 January 2017, please send the following to brianrussellroberts@byu.edu: • 150-to 200-word presentation abstract (including presentation title) • 100-word scholarly biography • Short CV of 2 to 3 pages (including email and phone number)

Syllabus and reading calendar for a grad seminar I taught Winter 2020, titled "Borderwaters of US American Literature." Course overview:
During the first decades of the twentieth century, US and broader American historians innovated and elaborated on a historical model that centered on "the borderlands," a set of contested spaces at the margins and overlaps of European empires in the Americas. According to this model, the wild borderlands were moving toward domestication by means of nation-states' consolidations and superimpositions of geopolitical borders. In the 1980s, inspired by the Chicana scholar and activist Gloria Anzaldúa, Latinx critics also embraced a borderlands model of culture, now looking toward the geopolitical border (principally the US-Mexico border) as an unnatural line superimposed upon cultural continuums that have not stopped at borders, with the borderlands now emerging as the geographical and cultural arenas of anxiety and insurgence against unnatural geopolitical divisions. These two models of the borderlands-as advanced by American historians and Latinx scholars-have taken inspiration from one another in mutual ways, and have sometimes been leavened in recent years by the decolonial border thinking of Latin American intellectuals including Walter Mignolo. Today, the borderlands paradigm has to a large extent been universalized, deployed widely as a heuristic capable of illuminating cultural contestations, insurgencies, comminglings, and interactions regardless of place or time period. On one level, the universalization of the borderlands might seem benign enough, even if it may tend to evacuate the model's specificities and hence eventually meaning. However, acquiescing to the overtly landed borderlands as a key to understanding the dynamics of US and broader American cultures becomes pronouncedly dicey when we recall that although the United States has been mythologized as a decidedly continental and hence landed geopolitical and cultural entity, the country, largely by virtue of the archipelagoes it claims in the Pacific and the Caribbean, lays claim to more ocean space than it does land space, and it assert geopolitical authority over more oceanic space than any other country. The United States is not a majority-continent nation-state; it is a preponderantly archipelagic nation-state. Hence, for as illuminating as borderlands paradigms have been, slipping too easily into a land-centric and universalized version of the borderlands is to acquiesce to the storied-yet geographically unmoored-mythology of the United States as a continent. Alternatively, how might we imagine an archipelagic United States characterized by the borderlands' watery analogue, the borderwaters? What stories-what mythologies-might facilitate these imaginations? Following the impetus of recent scholarly work in the arena of archipelagic American studies, this graduate course turns toward a variety of cultural forms-novels, memoirs, treaties, poetry, scholarly essays, short stories, films, international law, archipelagic and oceanic conceptual readings, visual art, maps, geology, haiku, and archives stored in the digestive tracts of albatrosses-to piece together a version of US literary culture that sees, and re-mythologizes, the United States for what it is, a majority ocean nation. In so doing, this course draws on texts from multiple geographies and time periods but focuses on literatures and cultures of the twentieth-and twenty-first-century United States.

ASLE Spotlight Episode 2: Water Works
Date: Friday, April 16 @ 1-2pm EST

Panelists/works:
Craig Santos Perez (Habitat Threshhold)

Steve Mentz (Ocean)

Brian Russell Roberts (Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America)

Tori Bush (editor, The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing)

Co-Hosts: Bethany Wiggin, Melody Jue