Incompossible Islands: Thinking the Fictional, the Real and the Virtual in Times of Ecocide
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
Papers
Speaker Bio
Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Leiden University. She is the author, among others, of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford UP, 2013) and Specters of Cavafy (U of Michigan P, 2024), and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (Metzler, 2 vols; 2018/2023).
Speaker Bio
Briand Gentry is a doctoral candidate in the department of Film, Television, and Media at theUniversity of Michigan. Her dissertation examines how and why Hawaiʻi and Hawaiianness became a ubiquitous presence in U.S. entertainment cultures from 1893-1937. Her project blends historiographic methodologies with media theory to interrogate the role an imperial imaginary of otherworldy paradise played in mediating, racializing, and configuring affective responses to industrial imperial capitalism.
Speaker Bio
Ilios Willemars is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University. Ilios is the author of The Political Life of Placeholders: Poetics of Sacrifice in Digital Video Art (forthcoming, Católica University Press 2024) and editor of The Replaceability Paradigm: Replacement and Irreplaceability from Dante to DeepDream (De Gruyter 2024). Ilios currently works on a project titled Contagious Territories, and is interested in the figure of the island as a fictional space.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Grace (Zitong) Wang is a Research Master’s student at the University of Amsterdam. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Arts, Media, and Society from Leiden University in 2024, having begun her studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decoloniality, queer bodies in urban spaces, and the aesthetics of accented bodies.
Speaker Bio
May Ee Wong is Assistant Professor in Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture Studies. Her research critically examines the built and mediated ‘environment’, as articulated through design, speculative narrative and projective discourse.
Michaela Büsse is a postdoctoral fellow at TU Dresden and RIFS Potsdam. Her interdisciplinary and visual research focuses on spatial and material transformations in contexts of speculative urbanism, climate change mitigation, and energy transitions.
Speaker Bio
Cui Chen
Ph.D. (2017, Leiden University), is an associate professor at Shandong University. Her research focuses on the notion of the savage in relation to representations of Native Americans and on theoretical attempts to dismantle the Eurocentric notion of the savage in Western discourse.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am a PhD Scholar at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. My research focuses on questions of environmental justice in global Anglophone literature, specifically the interstices between theory and praxes in the novel. My forthcoming dissertation is titled Climate Change, Security States, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. I am also involved in an oral history project on PFAS exposure in North Carolina that combines my interests in public humanities and ecological justice.
Speaker Bio
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Prison Education Program, Academic Adviser Justice-in-Education Initiative, Columbia University; co-director of Leros Humanism Seminars. Books: Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity (1996), Ethnographica Moralia (ed. 2008), Dangerous Citizens (2009), Covid-19 Autoethnographies of Incarceration (ed. 2020), Leros. The Grammar of Confinement (2020). Essays in: Anthropology and Humanism, Mousse, Documenta 14, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, angelaki, Past co-Chair of New York Academy of Sciences, Anthropology Section, past co-editor of Anthropology and Humanism, past co-editor of Journal of Modern Greek Studies.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sophia Emmanouilidou received her Ph.D. from the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, with distinctions in 2003, and on a full scholarship from the Foundation of National Scholarships in Greece (IKY). She was a Fulbright grantee at the University of Texas, Austin, and the John F. Kennedy Institute (JFKI) for North American Studies, Freie Universität of Berlin. She has published several articles on Chicana/o literature and identity-focused theories. Her interests include border cultures, social studies, spatial hermeneutics, ecocriticism and ecofeminism. She is the co-editor of the volume Transnational Interconnections of Nature Studies and the Environmental Humanities (2020), Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, vol. 3 (2019) and the Special Issue of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 81(2020). Her latest project is editing the Greek translation of Tino Villanueva's So Spoke Penelope (Vakhikon Publications 2022). As of May 2022, she serves as the Program Coordinator for The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA) (see: https://mesea.org/ )
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