Islands have a vexed relation to the carceral imaginary. Environmentally distinctive and geographically confined by water, islands have frequently been considered prime locations for harboring captives; among them the interned, the detained, and imprisoned. The tropical island, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued, “was increasingly rendered as inaccessible” through the misrepresentations engendered by European colonialism. By virtue of its perceived inaccessibility, the supposed carcerality of insular space would become normalized within Western ideas of islands. As Édouard Glissant describes in Le discours antillais, “c’est seulement pour ceux qui sont amarrés au continent Europe que l’insularité constitue prison” . In contrast, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo suggests in La isla que se repite with respect to the Caribbean, “La insularidad de los Antillanos no los impele al aislamiento, sino al contrario, al viaje, a la exploración, a la búsqueda de rutas fluviales y marinas” In this vein, the continental trope of islands as sites of enclosure merits reassessment in light of oceanic worldviews and archipelagic thought.

Building on the work of Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific island writers and artists, this seminar seeks to further develop and complicate Michel Foucault’s suggestive notion of the “archipel carcéral” which itself builds on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag Gulag, In Surveiller et punir Foucault uses that phrase to characterize the network of carceral institutions that littered Europe during the “great confinement.” And ever since, the figure of speech has transited throughout the theoretical work of myriad intellectuals. But how can we reconsider this image in both the literal sense and in the imperial terrain, i.e. through the transient, make-shift, and permanent spaces of internment that were built in the tropical island chains of European colonies? To explore this question, we will convene scholar-critics thinking through creative practices that make visible the aesthetic, political, and cultural resistance which refuses to take carceral insularity for granted.

Topics suggested for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• Narratives of incarceration in island spaces  
• Islands, infection, and quarantine
• Tropical island discourse/islomania/climate determinism
• Archipelagic theory
• Island prison escapes
• Islands as refuge for exiles
• Securitization, defense spending, and surveillance of insular space
• Islands and the impact of climate change
• Transcolonial points of incommensurability vis-a-vis carceral regimes
• Racialized women captives and/or fugitives
• Colonialism, empire, and islands