Resilience: The Power of Interactive Life

Chapter 2 examines the heuristic of ‘Resilience’, through which island ontologies have been most obviously adopted by mainstream academic and policy-thinking. Resilience is conceptualised here as an analytical field through which islands have emerged in postmodern framings of governance, as an alternative to linear thinking about progress and sustainability in the Anthropocene. Resilience seeks to capture the art of adaptation or of adaptive change. Working with islands has been significant to the rise of Resilience thinking because islands are imagined to have powers of creative and productive differentiation and individuation, faced with unprecedented changes and challenges. The chapter also turns to the work of Charles Darwin, and the power he attributed to islands as powerful, adaptative, differentiating ‘engines’ for life itself. Island life has become a high-profile symbol of non-linear emergence and diversification as islands are seen to enable contexts to intensify and magnify interactive feedback effects as well as acting as a baseline for understanding ‘vulnerability and resilience’, relational contingencies and ‘system effects’ that cannot be accessed directly by way of modern frameworks of reasoning. The island, as an important figure for working through the central problematic of relational entanglements, makes it particularly generative and productive for Resilience thinking in the Anthropocene.

There are Only Islands After the End of the World

Summarising the contemporary shift towards working with islands in the Anthropocene in a set of concepts, this introduction outlines the key tropes of ‘relational entanglements’, ‘relational awareness’ and ‘feedbacks’ in writing on islands. Working with islands plays an increasingly notable role in Anthropocene thinking as it is precisely with islands that these relational effects come to the fore. Island ‘differences’ – the attributes, relational affordances and powers associated with islands – have put working with islands to the forefront of Anthropocene research and theory. Outlining the rationale for the structure of the book this chapter highlights the key elements of a critical agenda for island studies: focusing upon relational ontologies (Resilience and Patchworks) and relational onto-epistemologies (Correlation and Storiation), and ultimately the importance of island studies in the Anthropocene. To understand why and how Anthropocene thinking is as it is today, is only possible if we are able to more fully consider how and why working with islands is playing such an important and generative role.

Conclusion: A Critical Agenda for the Anthropocene

This conclusion restates the argument of the book that the engagement with islands in many debates today is not merely caught up in the slipstream of contemporary social and philosophical trends but is important to the ontological and onto-epistemological framing and tools of the Anthropocene. It clarifies that the book undertakes an analysis of the ‘work’ that thinking with islands, island imaginaries, island writers, artists, poets, activists, and island problematics is doing in these debates. Not only thinking about, but ‘with ‘islands has become an important resource for alternative and non-modern relational ontologies and understandings in the Anthropocene. The authors suggest that there is a need to not only critically focus upon how the modern episteme reductively grasps islands but to also establish a new critical research agenda focused upon how islands are being enrolled in debates about the Anthropocene as key sites for understanding relational entanglements and in the generation of many different forms of relational ontology and ways of knowing. Working with islands or relational thought per se is not one homogenous ‘other’ to modernist or mainland approaches, and so the chapter clarifies why it is important to start a new conversation about how we engage in working through the rich variety of possibilities and opportunities that these approaches afford. In conclusion the chapter elaborates upon how the authors see this book as an initial opening for a new critical agenda for island studies in the Anthropocene.

Storiation: Holding the World

In Chapter 5, the authors give shape to an approach called Storiation. Central to Storiation is registering the ongoing afterlives, hauntings and effects of such significant forces as colonialism, modernity, global warming, nuclear radiation, rising sea levels, and waste production; where islands and island cultures regularly emerge as important sites for investigation. What distinguishes the Storiation analytic is the holding together of entities and effects, registered through islands and islander lives, intra-actions and effects. For authors like Timothy Morton the (island) future then becomes entangled with the past as the ‘afterlife’ of relational effects continue to reverberate in ‘strange’, ‘weird’ or ‘quantum’ ways. The chapter examines how the analytic of Storiation is today being widely developed in Anthropocene philosophy, critical Black and Indigenous Studies which all increasing turn to engage islands as key sites of relational entanglements and associated island scholars and literatures. Of particular importance is the work of the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s onto-epistemology of ‘tidalectics’ profoundly disrupts mainland, continental and modern frameworks of space-time, and binaries of human/nature. In Tiffany Lethabo King’s Storiations of Black and Indigenous life, she employs such methods as ‘critical fabulation’ and ‘speculative bricolage’ in order to hold together the traces, ghosts and afterlives of colonialism embodied and constitutive of the present. Thus, the chapter charts Storiations of the differentiating powers of colonialism, of the emergence of tidalectic psychologies living on in the wake, of island dances, Vodou loa and shamanistic practices, of species long extinct, of the consumerisms that haunt islands in strange ways.

Patchworks: The Ontology of the World

Chapter 3 turns to ‘Patchwork ontologies’. Compared to Resilience, Patchwork ontologies shift debate towards affirmation and replace the modernist imaginary of islands with a more open ontology of spatial and temporal becoming. While this remains a relational understanding, Patchwork ontologies are more disruptive, destabilising the ‘solutionist’ or instrumentalising aspects of Resilience; making them more open, less governmentalising and human-centred. This is reflected in the work of the many ‘Patchwork ontologists’, critical thinkers, artists, designers, experimenters and poets who today frequently turn to islands and islander life to draw out how entanglements of relation are never fixed. Patchworks instead attend to disturbances and how islands are powerful ways of expressing processes of world-making. A key figure here is Glissant, and his focus upon ‘giving-on-and-with’ ‘Relation’, which pushes thinking with islands to the point that we can never stand outside and grasp (island) relations, only immerse ourselves in the texture and turbulence of the weave. For patchwork approaches, thinking with islands then becomes a ‘verb’ (Teaiwa) and practice of ‘staying with the trouble’, opening ourselves to relational affects – an immersive process of becoming which is today being developed by a wide engagement with islands and islander life.

Correlation: Registers of Change

Chapter 4 analyses how Correlation approaches maintain a knowing human subject and a world of patterned regularity amenable to policy intervention. Here, the island emerges as a ‘correlational technology’ where changes are seen as early indicators of climate change. Central however, is an (onto)epistemology of inter-relation and correlation rather than one of linear cause-and-effect: we move from a temporal and spatial line of movement to one of synchronicity. Correlational modes are deployed for sensing global warming, rising sea levels and other shifting planetary conditions. As islands are reinterpellated as ‘living laboratories’, the authors argue that the island is seen as enabling the generation of onto-epistemologies operating on correlative not causal principles. In addition to such correlational practices as the evolutionary patterns of island life, there is the widespread celebration of Indigenous islanders’ correlational abilities, useful in the ‘forecasting of extreme weather conditions’. Such approaches have received a high-tech boost in the Anthropocene, taking the algorithmic form of the, ‘if this … then that’ logic associated with Big Data, the Internet of Things and the trope of the ‘smart island’. Here, prolific use of Big Data combined with extensive networks of sensors or tracking social media on islands enables rapid policy responsiveness. The authors demonstrate how working with islands as sites for understanding relational entanglements and feedbacks plays an important role in the generation and exponential development of Correlational onto-epistemologies in broader Anthropocene thinking.