“Le monde entier s’archipélise” Édouard Glissant writes in Treatise on the Whole-World (“The whole world is becoming an archipelago,” my translation. Traité du Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 164). As sea levels rise, this late-twentieth-century pronouncement is taking on a literal significance to match its conceptual import—what is the coast of southern Louisiana, for example, if not a growing chain of islands atop an increasingly submerged continental shelf? Recent literary and historical studies of the hemispheric Americas are expanding to explore the porous, shifting membrane between the continental and the insular in a variety of productive ways. Works such as Archipelagic American Studies edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens (Duke University Press, 2017), The Nineteenth Century and the Latino Continuum: Literature, Translation and Historiography by Carmen Lamas (Oxford University Press, 2021), Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2022), and the volumes in the Liverpool University Press series...

You do not currently have access to this content.