Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision  1
1. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies  45
2. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form  82
3. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid 111
4. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores  159
5. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America  202
Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes  248
Notes  275
Bibliography  323
Index  359

Brian Russell Roberts is Professor of English at Brigham Young University, coeditor of Archipelagic American Studies and Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, both also published by Duke University Press, and author of Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era.