Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

Abstract

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

The virtues of insularity: Pondering a new chapter in the historical geography of islands

“…We need to dismiss the figure of the 'isolated island' as largely a caricature, and instead reframe 'isolation' as precisely the consequence of distinctive, localised, comings together of relations which create a 'separated' or 'isolated' (island) space. Islands' isolation, along with their distinctiveness and separateness, are the product of specific materialisations of complex spatial and temporal inter-relations in a particular (island) locale, rendered possible by the engirdling and entangling sea (Baldacchino, 2018;Daou & Pérez-Ramos, 2016;Pugh & Chandler, 2021).…”

Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world

“…In this article, we have heuristically distinguished the analytics of Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation, and Storiation, but no doubt there will be many other ways of examining how the figure of the island is being brought into relational thought in contemporary Anthropocene thinking. Thus, we see this article – developed further in our book Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (Pugh and Chandler, 2021) – as just an initial opening for a new critical agenda for island studies in the Anthropocene.…”

The Anthropocene Islands agenda

“…Rather, our approach seeks to draw out, heuristically, what we perceive to be broader patterns or strains of contemporary thought. Thus, as we illustrate in this commentary, and in much greater length in our book (Pugh and Chandler, 2021), Glissant's rich body of work is today being drawn upon in various ways, and not all of these ways fall within a singular analytic. 2.…”

“…In other words, if relational vibrancy is too rich, too intense -if the island becomes a world without cuts and distinctions, without anthropologists, critical scholars, or policymakers who are able to 'grasp', tell, or produce stories about islands and islandersthen we are left with the island of withdrawal and 'in-difference'. This is an important line of thought, one that we have begun to pay attention to elsewhere (see Pugh, 2020;Pugh and Chandler, 2021).…”

“…We believe that it is this liminality which enables islands to be so productively worked with as geographic forms for developing but also for opening up and potentially problematising Anthropocene thought. However, just to be clear, the particular project of Anthropocene Islands, as we outline it in the paper and book (Pugh and Chandler, 2021), is not a work of philosophy. Perhaps, if anything it could be seen as non-philosophy; there are no metaphysical claims, our concern is with how islands are worked philosophically.…”