Key Debates in Island Studies
Reading Group
We are currently doing something different with the reading group and it is shifting from an open to closed format.
If you want to take part in the following new project, then please contact
Kasia Mika k.mika@qmul.ac.uk
Questioning the Relation Turn in Island Studies
In recent decades much island scholarship has been dominated by the relational turn. This has sought to engage islands as sites for generating relational ways of thinking about being and knowing, aiming to challenge the violent hubris of top-down modern and colonial reasoning, the human/nature divide, and a telos of linear progress. As discussion intensifies around colonialisms, problematising the appropriative hand in its many manifestations, this reading group will explore what recent developments are doing to repay the favour, expose and challenge the relational turn. Are relational ontologies and epistemologies increasingly being understood as too productivist, framing the island and islander as all-too-available, whether for instrumentalization or for a well-meaning ethics of care for the Other? Does it matter? It would seem that a range of discontents are emerging: from developments around opacity, fugitivity and marronage on islands, to understandings of island cultures as desedimenting ontological framings, to re-readings of how the figure of island in Western philosophy, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze, has long strained against the reworking rather than ending of the modern human and world.
Thus, the new reading group seeks to examine the possibilities of a contemporary shift in how the figure of the island is being/ can be/ rethought. We will read both conceptual and empirical work, not always explicitly about islands, but which seeks to explicitly engage the growing prominence of relevant tropes such as negation, opacity, refusal, the non-generative, non-relation, withdrawal, and ending.
Our aim is to work towards as special edition of a journal on this topic. But we do not want to be specific about a journal or deadline yet. At this stage, we think it would be more useful to just use the reading group to help shape our thoughts on what seems like a topic of growing importance and to see how things evolve.
The group will take place the last Friday of every month at 3pm.
Next meetings:-
February 28, 2025, 3pm London Time
We will be reading two articles this month:-
‘No future of island studies: Embracing island studies in plural’, Adam Grydehøj, Island Studies Journal, 18(2), 2023, 295-305, https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.421
‘Typical Islands, Borrowed Islands: Epistemological and Intellectual Decolonialization in Island Studies’, Gang Hong, Island Studies Journal, 18(2). https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.394
March 28, 2025, 3pm London Time
"Desert Islands and the Origins of Antirealism." Jure Simoniti. In New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy. Ed. Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 41–72. Bloomsbury Collections. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350101791.ch-003.
April 25, 2025, 3pm London Time
We will be reading two articles this month:-
DH Lawrence ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’
"The Man Who Loved Islands": A Lacanian Reading, Ben Stoltzfus, The D.H. Lawrence Review , Vol. 29, No. 3 (2000), pp. 27-38, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44235658
Previous reading group meetings:-
3pm Friday 31st Jan:- Deleuze ‘Desert Islands’ essay plus Preface to end of chapter 2 Kleinherenbrink’s ‘Against Continuity’
3pm Friday 6th Dec: Harney and Moten’s (2021) All Incomplete.
3pm Friday 1st November: Ramírez-D'Oleo, D. (2023). This Will Not Be Generative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
June meetings 2024: Tues 25th June (9.30-10.30am London Time) and Thursday 27h June (5pm-6pm London Time):- Anteaesthetics, by Rizvana Bradley
March meeting: Tues 26th (9.30-10.30am London Time) The Outer Harbour: Stories by Wayde Compton (note we will just do the island chapter)
February meetings: Tues 27th (9.30-10.30am London Time) and Thursday 29th (5pm-6pm London Time) The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa
January meetings 2024: Tues 23rd Jan (9.30-10.30am London Time) Galka, J. (2022). Mollusk Loves: Becoming With Native and Introduced Land Snails in the Hawaiian Islands. Island Studies Journal, 17(1), 102–122. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.383
https://islandstudiesjournal.org/article/84744
November meetings 2023: Tues 28th Nov (9.30-10.30am London Time) and Thursday 30th Nov (5pm-6pm London Time):-
Reading: Gfoellner, B. (2023). “We Are Still Here Holding Fast”: Stillness in the Wake of Hurricane Irma in Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia. Island Studies Journal, 18(1), 143–160. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.411
October meetings 2023: Tues 24th Oct (9.30-10.30am London Time) and Thursday 26th October (5pm-6pm London Time):-
Key theme: islands and the end of the human. The book ‘Annihilation’, by Jeff VanderMeer.
June meeting 2023: Tuesday 27th June (9.30-10.30am London Time) and Thursday 29th June (5pm-6pm London Time).
Key theme - colonialism, decoloniality, and island studies. We discussed …
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2021). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Tabula Rasa, (38), 61-111.
Freely downloadable here https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf
May 23rd and May 25th 2023 (5pm-6pm, London time) we discussed 'decolonising the university and island research'. Selected paper
Nadarajah, Y., Burgos Martinez, E. E., Su, P., & Grydehøj, A. (2022). Critical reflexivity and decolonial methodology in island studies: interrogating the scholar within. Island Studies Journal, 17(1), 1-23.
Freely downloadable here https://islandstudiesjournal.org/files/ISJ.380.pdf
29th April, 2021:- 10am LONDON TIME time slot - Sheller M. (2020) Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Kasia Mika). Introductory Chapter can be found here.
5pm LONDON TIME time slot - Sheller M. (2020) Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Mimi Sheller). Introductory Chapter can be found here.
27th May, 2021:-10am LONDON TIME - Perez C.S. (2020) “The Ocean in Us”: Navigating the Blue Humanities and Diasporic Chamoru Poetry, Humanities 2020, 9, 66. doi:10.3390/h9030066 E-pub ahead of print https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/3/66 (Introduced by Craig Santos Perez ).
5pm LONDON TIME - Perez C.S. (2020) “The Ocean in Us”: Navigating the Blue Humanities and Diasporic Chamoru Poetry, Humanities 2020, 9, 66. doi:10.3390/h9030066 E-pub ahead of print https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/3/66 (Introduced by Jon Pugh).
24th June, 2021 10am LONDON TIME - Hayward P. (2012) The constitution of assemblages and the aquapelagality of Haida Gwaii. Shima, 6(2), 1-8. Available here (Introduced by Christian Depraetere).
5pm LONDON TIME - Hayward P. (2012) The constitution of assemblages and the aquapelagality of Haida Gwaii. Shima, 6(2), 1-8. Available here (Introduced by Valérie Vezina).
29th July 2021 - (note there are two short readings for this session). 10 am LONDON TIME - Teaiwa K. M. (2011) ‘Recovering Ocean Island,’ Life Writing, 8(1), pp. 87-100. Article available here (presented by Katerina Teaiwa) and Teaiwa K. M. (2020) Visualizing Banaba: Art and Research about a Diffracted Pacific Island. Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, 3(1) 10.5070/R73151194 Article available here (presented by Katerina Teaiwa).
5 pm LONDON TIME - Teaiwa K. M. (2011) ‘Recovering Ocean Island,’ Life Writing, 8(1), pp. 87-100. Article available here (presented by Katerina Teaiwa) and Teaiwa K. M. (2020) Visualizing Banaba: Art and Research about a Diffracted Pacific Island. Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, 3(1) 10.5070/R73151194 Article available here (Introduced by Delilah Griswold).
30th September, 2021 10am LONDON TIME - Flores T. and Stephens M.A. (eds) (2017) Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Durham. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Kasia Mika). Intro to the book available here
30th September, 2021 5pm LONDON TIME - Flores T. and Stephens M.A. (eds) (2017) Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Durham. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Tatiana Flores and Michelle Stephens) Intro to the book available here
28th October, 2021 - 5pm London Time. Davis, S. (2020) Islands and oceans: Reimagining sovereignty and social change. University of Georgia Press. (Introduced by Sasha Davis). Intro to book available here.
27th January, 2022 - 5pm LONDON TIME. Wakefield S. (2020) Anthropocene Backloop: experimentation in unsafe operating space. Open Humanities Press. Free book download. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/anthropocene-backloop/ (Introduced by Stephanie Wakefield).
24th February, 2022. 5pm LONDON TIME - Roberts, B. R. (2021) Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America. Duke University Press. Introduction available here https://www.dukeupress.edu/borderwaters (Introduced by Brian Russell Roberts)
April 21st, 2022. 5pm LONDON TIME - Glissant É. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Introduced by David Chandler).
September 29th, 2022. 5pm LONDON TIME - Benítez-Rojo A. (1997) The Repeating Island. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Mónica Fernández Jiménez).
October 27th, 2022. 5pm LONDON TIME - Alexis Pauline Gumbs ‘M Archive: After the End of the World’. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Anne-Sophie Bogetoft Mortensen).
November 24th, 2022. 5pm LONDON TIME Sophie Chao ‘In the Shadow of Palms: more-than-human becomings in West Papua’. Duke University Press. (Introduced by Elena Burgos Martinez) Introduction to book herehttps://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-palms