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Incompossible Islands: Thinking the Fictional, the Real and the Virtual in Times of Ecocide

Type: Virtual

Virtual Session

Description

Climate change is no longer experienced as temporary rupture but as a chronic condition entwined with sociopolitical and economic processes such as global inequality, populism, racism, wars, algorithmic governance, capitalist extractivism, neocolonialism. Islands are one site where the effects of ecocide become palpably real for human and nonhuman life. While entire archipelagos are projected to disappear imminently, new islands—actual and virtual—are designed and built so that the affluent can insulate themselves from this crisis. Mark Zuckerberg’s buying and closing off areas of an island in Hawaii from local communities to build a private compound is a case in point. So is the virtual replication of the Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu on the Metaverse in order to 'preserve' it after its impending disappearance in reality. These are entangled processes, as the energy consumption for producing utopias of insulation and digital islands accelerates the vanishing of actual islands and their communities.
Against the backdrop of these socioecological crises, we propose islands as vehicles for rethinking the relation of fiction and reality. Islands have had, and still have, contradictory meanings and functions both in literature and in real life: as clearly demarcated places, places of transit, communication, biopolitical control, experimentation, containment, surveillance and confinement (of refugees, political prisoners, criminals, psychiatric patients, contagious subjects), exile, travel, colonial conquest, flow of goods and people, military bases, storage and waste disposal etc. They have also been theorized in contradictory ways, as figures of insularity, exclusion (Foucault), utopianism, escapism, decoloniality and relationality (e.g. Glissant’s archipelagic thinking). In literature, island utopias are being reconfigured, e.g. through new conceptions of ‘weird’ utopianism (Garforth & Iossifidis) as an unsettling force that fosters spaces for the otherwise within our world. We see this seminar as a platform for bringing together ‘incompossible’ islands—islands belonging to incompatible ontological or epistemological planes—in new archipelagos through speculative cartographies that help to envision desirable futures. We invite interdisciplinary conversations on literary, actual, speculative, weird, virtual, digital, spectral, disappeared or disappearing islands that help us read reality, fictionality and virtuality through each other and rethink figurative uses of islands through the materiality and stark visuality of islandic climate catastrophes.

Papers may address:
—literary island narratives
—island utopias, revisited
—philosophies/theories of islands or archipelagos
—speculative/utopian/weird cartographies
—spectral/virtual/digital islands
—islands, climate change & futurity
—islands and (neo)colonialism
—islands as spaces of confinement/containment/necropolitics
—islands as agents in transdisciplinary research

Schedule

Friday, May 30, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Incompossible maps, weird geographies: Lost, disappearing, and digital islands in real life, literature and virtual reality
Maria Boletsi — Universiteit Leiden (Leiden University)
South Sea-sickness: Virality and Virtuality in U.S. “Hawaiian Fevers”
Briand Gentry — University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Incompossible Islands: Insurance and Echo in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel
Ilios Willemars — Universiteit Leiden (Leiden University)
Saturday, May 31, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Utopian Fugitivity in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Grace Wang — Universiteit van Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam)
The Energy Island as Incomposite Techno-Utopia
May Ee Wong — Universiteit Utrecht (Utrecht University)
Michaela Buesse — Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden)
Incompossible Island and Ecological Utopia: Huxley’s Island as a Nexus of Isolation, Sustainability, and Global Vulnerability
Cui Chen — Shandong University
Sunday, June 1, 2025
12:30 PM CDT - 2:15 PM CDT
Room: Virtual Conference

Papers

Cartographies of Resistance: Island Ecologies and the Novel Form in The Last Wave and Latitudes of Longing
Sejal Mahendru — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ecologies of Confinement and the Reality of the Unreal
Neni Panourgia — Columbia University
Culture(d) Medicinal Practices: Transcorporeality and Resilience on Zakynthos Island, Greece
Sophia Emmanouilidou — Ionian University, Greece, Department of the Environment