{"pk":43174,"title":"Archipelagic Translation: Mobility amid Every Language in the World","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This article proposes a three-way reinflection among the categories of mobility, archipelagic thought, and translation. It draws on the work of several island-oriented thinkers, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Édouard Glissant, and Craig Santos Perez. Via Te Punga Somerville, I develop a conceptualization of archipelagic translation that is decolonizing, decontinentalizing, and reliant on interisland waters as places of being and meaning. Subsequently, via Glissant’s emphasis on translation as a crucial form of archipelagic thinking, I emphasize a translation less of betweenness (from one language to another) and more of amidness (a translation in the presence of every language of the world). Finally, and by recourse to Perez’s \nfrom unincorporated territory\n poetry series, I elaborate on a view of archipelagic translation as a renaming of the world in which translational equivalents break down and translation happens amid the push and pull of materiality and metaphoricity. Thus, Perez’s work offers both a conceptual template for and an example of archipelagic translation. As I navigate through the work of these three thinkers, the article’s three major preoccupations—mobility, archipelagic thinking, and translation—exist in a constant, reinflecting, and reconstituting dynamic in relation to one another. In the conclusion, I turn toward the potential for the mobilities of archipelagic translation to reroute recent work in Transnational American Studies that takes up questions of language, multilingualism, and translation. Further, the conclusion looks toward the archipelagic’s sense of \namidness\n as key to a planetary restructuring of scholarly approaches to mobility, archipelagic spaces, and translation.","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":"translation poetics"},{"word":"Craig Santos Perez"},{"word":"Alice Te Punga Somerville"},{"word":"Edouard Glissant"},{"word":"from unincorporated territory poems"},{"word":"archipelagic American studies"},{"word":"Transnational American Studies"}],"section":"Special Forum: Archipelagic Spaces and Im/Mobilities","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45m979mr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Brian","middle_name":"Russell","last_name":"Roberts","name_suffix":"","institution":"Brigham Young University","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2023-04-18T17:44:51Z","date_accepted":"2023-04-18T17:44:51Z","date_published":"2023-05-26T07:18:12Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/43174/galley/32169/download/"}]}