Intimate Relations: Bodies, Texts, and Indigenizations in Archipelagic American Space

Catherine Cocks’s Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas, begins with “A Note on America and Americans,” which specifies her use of the term “‘American’ to describe people and things from the Western Hemisphere—all of it” (ix). Acknowledging that she is intentionally “not following the customary usage,” she goes on to explain that “in a book that is about the travels of people from the United States in other areas of the Americas, using ‘American’ to mean ‘of the United States’ would be confusing as well as arrogant” (ix). Cocks’s declaration offers a useful starting point for a review of recent scholarly works that traverse the terrain between the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. More than simply avoiding arrogance, these books demonstrate an American studies that treats not just the United States alone or even simply the USA as seen from a hemispheric perspective. Rather, in their focus on the networks of circulation and exchange that shape the relations between the Americas’ interconnected continental, island, coastal, littoral, and aquatic spaces, these works demonstrate the merits of framing US–Caribbean or US–Latin American relations in archipelagic terms. As such, these works move beyond American studies’ recent hemispheric, transnational, and global turns, which have tended to center on continental spaces as their sites of comparison.

In “Envisioning the Archipelago,” Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko, and Andrew Harwood point to three frameworks that guide the study of islands. “The first predominant relation,” they write, “presents a clear focus on islands’ singularity, unique histories and cultures, crafted and inscribed by the border between land and sea. The second distinguishes islands from mainlands/continents, and dwells on their differences from these larger settings.” The third framework “engage[s] with less defensive, potentially novel, powerful and revealing commonalities and relations of islands qua islands.” Through this third framework for studying island–island relations specifically, the authors “seek to understand archipelagos: to ask how those who inhabit them … might view, represent, talk and write about, or otherwise experience disjuncture, connection and entanglement between and among islands.”¹

Stratford et al.’s archipelagic approach views geographic land and sea spaces as forming a kind of assemblage. As such, it bears extending back to those forms of relationality captured in island–sea or island–continent configurations—the latter in particular as it shapes discussions of US–Caribbean relationalities. The method of archipelagic relationality privileges how spaces and places are organized and experienced through “networks, assemblages, filaments, connective tissue, mobilities and multiplicities.” “Archipelagraphy,” they assert, “may constitute a form of counter-mapping.”² Indeed, that countermapping occurs when one places in dialogue recent...