Journal of Transnational American Studies

This interview between Barbara Gfoellner and Jonathan Pugh explores archipelagic thinking, transnational American Studies, the concept of islandness and recent debates in Black Studies. Notably, it draws out two distinct ways, or analytical approaches, in which American Studies can be taken beyond understandings of the nation-state as a fixed and bounded object. Both seek to move beyond modern frameworks of reasoning, a linear telos of progress, fixed grids of space and time, which are widely argued to have supported American exceptionalism. The first, more common analytical approach, can be situated within the broader “relational” and “ontological” turns that have swept across the social sciences and humanities in recent decades, involving turns towards such tropes as assemblages, networks, flows, mobilities, post- and more-than-human approaches. The second analytical approach, what Pugh (in his current research with David Chandler) calls “abyssal thought,” has yet to emerge as prominently, but poses a significant challenge to the relational and ontological turns. Central for abyssal work is how, as we learn from W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, the world cannot be separated out from the violence that forged the antiblack modernist ontology of “human as subject” and “world as object.” For abyssal work, however, the task is not to rework the subject of modernity in terms of relational ontologies and epistemologies, but to problematize and to undo the human and the world. This interview explores how the abyssal project is thus nonontological and nonrelational, deconstructive rather than productive, deworlding as opposed to world-making.