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{
    "pk": 43171,
    "title": "Layered Maps: Carceral and Fugitive Archipelagos in Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "This essay offers an archipelagic reading of Walter Mosley’s detective novel \nDown the River Unto the Sea\n (2018). I argue that the spatial imaginary of the novel constitutes a layered map of the Americas that registers continental visions of the US nation-state but cognitively remaps and breaks up this space into various archipelagic constellations. I read the novel as contributing to a specifically African American mode of the archipelagic, which I trace along two trajectories: a focus on carceral archipelagos and im/mobilities, and a negotiation between what David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh have called “interstitial” geographies, which focus on relationality, and “abyssal” geographies, which posit and critique antiblackness as the world’s foundational violence. In my reading, both trajectories sit firmly within the concerns of archipelagic studies but significantly extend the paradigm’s scope. The first trajectory depicts the US nation-state both as imperial continent \nand\n as racialized carceral archipelago and sets these layers off against visions of fugitive archipelagos that afford Mosley’s characters temporary islands of safety or respite, but never grant them the contiguity that undergirds Western fantasies of nation-state sovereignty. The second trajectory employs both interstitial and abyssal analytics to address the question what an \"imagined community\" can mean in a starkly antiblack world. Via the intertwined stories of two protagonists, the detective Joe King Oliver and the prisoner A Free Man, Mosley’s novel envisions African American responses to systemic betrayal within the US—being sold \nDown the River\n—and pushes, geographically and ideologically, beyond constellations of the nation-state and citizenship—\nUnto the Sea\n.",
    "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": "mobility studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "antiblackness"
        },
        {
            "word": "carceral geographies"
        },
        {
            "word": "archipelagic American studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "Walter Mosley"
        },
        {
            "word": "Down the River Unto the Sea"
        },
        {
            "word": "Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler"
        },
        {
            "word": "interstitial geographies"
        },
        {
            "word": "Transnational American Studies"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Special Forum: Archipelagic Spaces and Im/Mobilities",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36p422dv",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Nicole",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Waller",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Universität Potsdam",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2023-04-16T05:11:24Z",
    "date_accepted": "2023-04-16T05:11:24Z",
    "date_published": "2023-05-28T07:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/43171/galley/32166/download/"
        }
    ]
}