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

Abstract

Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. Here the dominant problematic of contemporary Anthropocene thinking has rapidly turned away from modernity’s human/nature divide to that of ‘relational entanglements’. Thus, Anthropocene scholarship is taking a particular interest in geographical forms and cultures which are held to bring this problematic to the fore for more intensive interrogation. In this article, we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’, or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable, and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. We explain how islands have shifted from the margins in a number of international debates, becoming key sites for understanding relational entanglements, enabling alternative forms of thought and practice in the Anthropocene.

The asymmetrical anthropocene: resilience and the limits of posthumanism

“…The production of truths through resilience techniques are poetic as much as empirical, for they bring about a particular re/ordering of human-more-than-human relations in response to the problematic of the Anthropocene. 23 This is not confined to "natural" processes, as illustrated above in examples of designers apprehending oysters' living and dying as building wave-attenuating breakwaters, or ecologists and biologists approaching historic Everglades' hydraulic flows as buffering salt water infiltration to urban aquifers. Common resilience techniques such as simulations, community-based scenario exercises, or resilience indices make affectively present a world of complex, multi-scalar interconnections and fast-paced, emergent shocks and stressors, and transform how individuals and communities are able to sense, know and relate to their surroundings 24 .…”

Slippery Entanglements: Spiritual and Gendered Experiences of Uncertainty in the Riverine Context of Bengali Char lands

“…Religions 2021, 12, 906 2 of 17 water and islands have been singled out as useful concepts to "think with" in the context of the Anthropocene (Crate 2011;Chandler and Pugh 2021a;Hastrup and Hastrup 2016;Helmreich 2011;Jensen 2017;Krause 2017;Steinberg and Peters 2015;Stensrud 2016). The climate crisis is very much tied to certain water-related disasters, including flooding, rising sea levels, melting ice, erosion, drought and excessive rainfall.…”

Island ceremony and submerged worlds

“…In tracking the shift from modernist resilience ideas to non-modernist patchwork thinking, Chandler and Pugh crucially link contemporary relational thinking to the work of Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant, who first theorized 'the infinite island' as a site of 'relation', along with the poet-theorist Chandler and Pugh's (2021) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only become emblematic sites within a wide range of Anthropocene scholarship, but also 'generative forces' at the center of Anthropocene thinking. At the core of their analysis is the idea of 'relational entanglements', which are embodied through the four organizational devices they have identified of resilience, patchworks, correlation and storiation, each being different modalities of relational thinking.…”

“…

Chandler and Pugh's (2021) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only islands after the end of the world. Dialogues in Human Geography.)

…”