With a career spanning more than fifty years as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual, Édouard Glissant produced an astonishingly wide range of work, including poems, novels, essays, pamphlets, and theater. In Think Like an Archipelago, Michael Wiedorn offers a fresh interpretation of Glissant's work as a cohesive and explicitly philosophical project, paying particular attention to the last two decades of his career, which have received much less attention in the English-speaking world despite their remarkable productivity. Focusing his study on the idea of paradox, Wiedorn argues that it is fundamental to Caribbean culture and thought, and at the heart of Glissant's philosophy. The question of difference has long played a central role in the literary and philosophical traditions of the West, however to think differently, Glissant suggests focusing elsewhere: on the post-plantation societies of the Caribbean, and the Americas more broadly. For Glissant, paradoxical lessons drawn from the natural and cultural realities of the Caribbean can point to new ways of thinking and being in the world: in other words, to the creation of what Glissant calls a "new category of literature," and in turn to the attainment of his utopian political vision. Thinking through such paradoxes, Wiedorn demonstrates, can offer new perspectives on the old questions of totality, alterity, teleology, and the potential of philosophy itself.

A career-spanning assessment of Glissant’s work as a philosophical project. With a career spanning more than fifty years as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual, Édouard Glissant produced an astonishingly wide range of work, including poems, novels, essays, pamphlets, and theater. In Think Like an Archipelago, Michael Wiedorn offers a fresh interpretation of Glissant’s work as a cohesive and explicitly philosophical project, paying particular attention to the last two decades of his career, which have received much less attention in the English-speaking world despite their remarkable productivity. Focusing his study on the idea of paradox, Wiedorn argues that it is fundamental to Caribbean culture and thought, and at the heart of Glissant’s philosophy. The question of difference has long played a central role in the literary and philosophical traditions of the West, however to think differently, Glissant suggests focusing elsewhere: on the post-plantation societies of the Caribbean, and the Americas more broadly. For Glissant, paradoxical lessons drawn from the natural and cultural realities of the Caribbean can point to new ways of thinking and being in the world: in other words, to the creation of what Glissant calls a “new category of literature,” and in turn to the attainment of his utopian political vision. Thinking through such paradoxes, Wiedorn demonstrates, can offer new perspectives on the old questions of totality, alterity, teleology, and the potential of philosophy itself. “The book’s use of the central concept of paradox is both original and convincing, and allows Wiedorn to reframe many of the issues surrounding Glissant’s thought in a new and illuminating way.” — Celia Britton, author of Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance

Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich volumetakes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to a global, Anthropocenic framework. This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and rather, as models. The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy.. The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of islands, oceans and constellations.

Is there an allure of spoiled places? Spoil islands are overlooked places that combine dirt with paradise, waste-land with “brave new world,” and wildness with human intervention. Although they are mundane products of dredging, these islands form an uninvestigated archipelago that demonstrates the potential value and contested re-valuation of landscapes of waste. To explore these islands, Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago navigates a course along the U.S. east coast, moving from New York City to Florida. Along the way, a general populace squats, picnics, and reflects on the islands, while other forces are also at work. New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses first deplores then adopts Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, UN Secretary General U Thant meditates on the East River’s Belmont Island, businessman John D. MacArthur rejects the purchase of Peanut Island, artist Christo surrounds Miami’s spoil islands, Key Westers debate the futures of two spoil islands that mark their sunset view, and artist Robert Smithson augments this archipelago materially and conceptually. Historical and contemporary stories highlight each island’s often contradictory ecologies that pair nature with infrastructure, public concerns with private development, rationalized urbanism with artistic impulse, and order with disorder. Spoil islands put you in places you normally wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—be. To examine these marginalized topographies is to understand emergent concerns of twenty-first-century place-making, public space, and natural and artificial infrastructure. Today, spoil islands constitute an unprecedented public commons, where human agency and nature are inextricably linked. Spoil Island will be of interest to anyone working in the areas of architecture, cultural history, cultural geography, environmental studies, or environmental philosophy. Linking the islands with their environmental aesthetics, Charlie Hailey provides a lively and critical topography of places that play a part in current events and local situations with global implications.

While our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.After two decades of working with indigenous communities, Gleb Raygorodetsky shows how these communities are actually islands of biological and cultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. They are an “archipelago of hope” as we enter the Anthropocene, for here lies humankind’s best chance to remember our roots and how to take care of the Earth.We meet the Skolt Sami of Finland, the Nenets and Altai of Russia, the Sapara of Ecuador, the Karen of Myanmar, and the Tla-o-qui-aht of Canada. Intimate portraits of these men and women, youth and elders, emerge against the backdrop of their traditional practices on land and water. Though there are brutal realities—pollution, corruption, forced assimilation—Raygorodetsky's prose resonates with the positive, the adaptive, the spiritual—and hope.

“A masterpiece of the epistolary novel told in diary entries . . . beautifully translated . . . deeply felt”—from an award-winning and bestselling Danish novelist (Bookforum) A penetrating study of a woman who, in the wake of her domineering husband’s death, must embrace her newfound freedom and redefine herself Set in rural Denmark in the early 20th century, A Change of Time tells the story of a schoolteacher whose husband, the town doctor, has passed away. Her subsequent diary entries form an intimate portrait of a woman rebuilding her identity, and a small rural town whose path to modernity echoes her own path to joyful independence. “An engaging, honest, and beautifully written look at love, loss, and self-realization.” —Kirkus Reviews

A collection of blistering, darkly humorous stories that upend the idyllic image of the Greek holiday island. Seeking to escape the paralyzing effects of the Greek economic crisis, a group of Athenian friends move to an Aegean island in the hopes of starting over. Viewed with suspicion and disdain by the locals, they soon find themselves enmeshed in the same vicious cycle of money, power, and violence they thought they had left behind.

A composer’s tour of a mysterious chain of islands reveals startling truths in this “brilliant, meditative fantasy” by the multiple award-winning author of The Prestige (Barnes & Noble) Alesandro Sussken is a composer living in Glaund, a fascist state constantly at war with another equally faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to fight; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally Alesandro catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into the music he composes. But all knowledge of the other islands is forbidden by the military junta, until he is unexpectedly sent on a cultural tour. And what he discovers on his journey will change his perceptions of his home, his music, and the ways of the islands themselves. Bringing him answers where he could not have foreseen them. A rich and involving tale playing with the lot of the creative mind, the rigors of living under war and the nature of time itself, this is multi award-winning, master storyteller Christopher Priest at his absolute best.

Recipient of a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award Recipient of a Bologna Ragazzi Non-Fiction Special Mention Honor Award A Kirkus Reviews Best Middle Grade Book of 2019 From celebrated author and illustrator Ashley Bryan comes a deeply moving picture book memoir about serving in the segregated army during World War II, and how love and the pursuit of art sustained him. In May of 1942, at the age of eighteen, Ashley Bryan was drafted to fight in World War II. For the next three years, he would face the horrors of war as a black soldier in a segregated army. He endured the terrible lies white officers told about the black soldiers to isolate them from anyone who showed kindness—including each other. He received worse treatment than even Nazi POWs. He was assigned the grimmest, most horrific tasks, like burying fallen soldiers…but was told to remove the black soldiers first because the media didn’t want them in their newsreels. And he waited and wanted so desperately to go home, watching every white soldier get safe passage back to the United States before black soldiers were even a thought. For the next forty years, Ashley would keep his time in the war a secret. But now, he tells his story. The story of the kind people who supported him. The story of the bright moments that guided him through the dark. And the story of his passion for art that would save him time and time again. Filled with never-before-seen artwork and handwritten letters and diary entries, this illuminating and moving memoir by Newbery Honor–winning illustrator Ashley Bryan is both a lesson in history and a testament to hope.

A deeply humane new collection by a luminary of Bengali literature A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen's rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human. When she warns, "know that blood can be easily drawn by lips," her words tune to the fierce and biting depths of language, to the "treachery that lingers on tongue tips." At once compassionate and unsparing, conversational and symphonic, these poems tell of a rope shivering beneath an acrobat's nimble feet or of a twisted, blood-soaked umbilical cord -- they pluck the invisible threads that bind us together.