Call for Papers | Incompossible Islands: Thinking the Fictional, the Real and the Virtual in Times of Ecocide (ACLA Seminar)

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