{"pk":42995,"title":"Borderwaters: Archipelagic Geometries between Indonesia and the United States","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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 \nnon\n-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.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives  4.0","short_name":"CC BY-NC-ND 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"borderwaters"},{"word":"nonhuman agency"},{"word":"non-Euclidean geometry"},{"word":"Miguel Covarrubias"},{"word":"Transnational American Studies"},{"word":"JTAS"}],"section":"SPECIAL FORUM: (Im)Mobilities","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7010021b","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Brian","middle_name":"Russell","last_name":"Roberts","name_suffix":"","institution":"Brigham Young University","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2020-02-21T01:24:15-08:00","date_accepted":"2020-02-21T01:24:15-08:00","date_published":"2020-06-28T21:25:11-07:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/42995/galley/32045/download/"}]}