Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago

Perez, Craig Santos

doi:10.1353/aq.2015.0044

Cited by 29 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…essentialized depictions of islands as paradise Wilkinson, 2010, p. 1409). Alternative island imaginaries can incorporate more fluid conceptions of islands between land and sea, like terripelagoes (Perez, 2015), which may indeed question the very concept of islands.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…), and this should invite scholars to cultivate epistemological diversity, such as more fluid theorizations of land and sea (Beer, 2003, p. 33;Okihiro, 2009). 5 In this context, Indigenous concepts that defy belittling and stagnant depictions of islands (Hau'ofa, 1993;Teaiwa, 2014;Perez, 2015;Ingersoll, 2016;Taitingfong, 2020) are important analytical interventions. A powerful example of island imaginaries subverting the common isolation-framing is Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands) and Aka Niviâna's (Kalaallit Nunaat from Greenland) poem and video Rise on climate change's effects on their islands (Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna, n.d.).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Island Imaginariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

Gugganig

Klimburg-Witjes

2021

Science as Culture

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Colonial empires, scientists, philanthropists and Hollywood studios have long sustained an image of islands as remote places with unique ecologies and cultures, experimental labs, or loci of escapism. The climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to a predominant view of islands as both exceptional spaces and testbeds to be scaled up onto continental or planetary levels. Likewise, the metaphor of the island is foundational to Western thought yet has been less explored in the context of scientific processes and technology development. Bringing together science and technology studies (STS) with critical Island Studies and related fields, this special section expands upon the spatial dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries to consider islands and their imaginations as both preexisting and channeling visions of science and technology. The introduced concept of Island Imaginaries captures the mutual constitution of island visions and their materialization in scientific, technological and technocratic endeavors that are imagined and pursued by scientific communities, policymakers, and other social collectives. Such an approach explores the co-constitutive dynamic of islands as sites for the foundation of technoscientific knowledge regimes, and the concomitant rendering of islands as conducive places for discovery and experimentation. The special section offers empirical case studies with insights into islands as synecdoche for larger wholes (the Earth), as experimental and exceptional sites for trialing business creation and political orders (in Singapore, and for Asia), and as variously interpreted laboratory paradise (of Hawai'i). Further research themes for STS are suggested in the Conclusion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conceptualizing Island Imaginariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

Gugganig

Klimburg-Witjes

2021

Science as Culture

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“…Craig Santos Perez describes in "Transterritorial Currents" how particularly maritime conservationism, or "blue washing," continues to be a popular strategy to cloak maritime territorialism, and Jens Temmen has argued elsewhere that we see a similar logic of "astrowashing" at work in the space entrepreneurs' agenda of veiling their plans for a privatized space industry in narratives of climate activism and social progress. 84 There is a likelihood then that conservation sites, as proposed by "For All Moonkind," will coexist with and even legitimize extractivist and colonial lunar business ventures. In other words, even if peppered with the occasional extraterritorial conservation site, the Moon remains in stable orbit around Earth, gravitating towards humanity as a (in Lacanian terms) perfect and calculable Other that neither speaks nor talks back, and thus continues to serve as a space of projection for our desire for Imaginary wholeness.…”

Section: For All Mankind: Imagining Outer Space As Territorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Humans, animals, plants, and environments all struggle over territoriality." 96 In "Transterritorial Currents," Santos Perez advocates for a shift in perspective towards the terripelago, necessary to reveal the complexities and fluidities of discourses of territoriality as they serve to prop up and/or resist imperial mappings of land and land-relations. 97 By gesturing towards a concept of the astropelago, which needs to be fully developed elsewhere, our contribution urges towards a similar shift of perspective with regard to outer space.…”

Section: Conclusion: Towards the Astropelagomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sea of Stars? Towards an Astropelagic Reading of Outer Space with Jacques Lacan and Hannah Arendt

Ganser,

Temmen,

Rettenbacher

2023

Transnational American Studies

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The Territorialization of Outer SpaceWith his novel The Martian (2015), author Andy Weir is credited with having almost single-handedly reinvigorated space exploration in general and Mars colonization in particular as popular narratives both within science and fiction. 1 Weir's fictional account of US astronaut Mark Watney and his accidental exile on Mars has been praised for its scientific accuracy and compelling writing style in depicting Watney's strategies of survival in the hostile environment of the Red Planet. Read through the lens of theories of imperialism and mobility, this survival essentially relies on Watney's ability to navigate the alien territoriality of planet Mars. In the story, the protagonist cycles through different approaches to conceptualizing Martian territoriality in order to make sense of and survive on the planet. Initially, Watney-a botanist by training-relies on planting potatoes in the arid soil of Mars to replenish his supplies. This introduction of agriculture to a territory resisting cultivation carries with it the distinct logic of nineteenth-century US settler-colonialism-a discourse that privileges agricultural use of land and ultimately serves as a way of legitimizing white settler land ownership. 2 Watney is accordingly informed by NASA that "once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it" and triumphantly surmises that he "technically colonized Mars." 3 Much like Watney's potato harvest itself, this initial attempt to locate the planet within an agricultural discourse of US imperialism, however, literally blows up

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“…If we add the network of US American military bases and embassies across the globe, then the map "more truly reflects America's global archipelago." 14 Transnational American studies, from its early focus on migration and diaspora studies and its (much belated) inclusion of US-Mexican (and later also US-Canadian) border studies in the 1990s to its transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, and finally global "turns" has constantly widened its geographic scope (a fact that has evoked much critique as repeating US expansionism on an academic level). 15 While this series of turns suggests an understanding of archipelagic American studies as merely the latest iteration of an ongoing geographic expansion, archipelagic studies builds on important scholarship in transnational American studies and yet proposes a more radical revision of conventional geographical imaginations by striving, as Brian Russell Roberts emphasizes, for a decentralized perspective on the United States "as an archipelagic and oceanic nation-state," or, in short, "the Archipelagic States of America."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Conceptualizing Archipelagic Mobilities

Wöll¹,

Gfoellner²,

Pisarz-Ramirez³

et al. 2023

Transnational American Studies

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This special forum of JTAS brings together the work of international scholars from the fields of archipelagic American studies, island studies, and mobility studies. It is the result of two thematic workshops in Leipzig, Germany organized by the collaborative research center "Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition" and the Vienna research platform "Mobile Cultures and Societies" that set out to investigate the relationship between transnational studies, archipelagic studies, and mobility studies. In seven articles, an interview, and an exploratory conversation, the twelve contributors open up and navigate new paths of thinking through the intersections of archipelagicity, mobility, US-American imperialism, and decoloniality. As part of a rising tide of critical voices that express discontent about global neoliberal regimes of im/mobility and their representation, the contributors concurrently identify and answer to contemporary needs of renegotiating spaces, places, identities, and power relations. Archipelagic epistemes, the authors demonstrate across a diverse range of topics, provide a lens through which to critically interrogate traditional binaries of continentalism and islandness. They challenge colonial discourses of static, self-contained islands and bring into focus the role of im/mobilities and relational entanglements.As Édouard Glissant noted in his conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, archipelagos "are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real. …They open us up to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting." 1 The contributions to this special forum operate within that "sea of wandering" as they open into and move across varied literal and figurative archipelagos; they demonstrate how transnational imaginaries and discourses become part of archipelagic formations, both in contexts of imperialism and resistance to its dominant epistemes. Significantly, arch-

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Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago

Cited by 29 publications

References 7 publications

Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

A Sea of Stars? Towards an Astropelagic Reading of Outer Space with Jacques Lacan and Hannah Arendt

Introduction: Conceptualizing Archipelagic Mobilities

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