island conversations
podcast series

I  first became aware of your work with regard to Bermuda, and the Landship. So, how did Bermuda fit in with that?

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Yes, so Barbados - Barbados and the Landship, everyone always says Bermuda … The Landship is fascinating because, I think, it’s when I started to get really involved with relational thinking, and you know, it's funny you should say that because that was when I was turning fully to island studies. … I became really aware of your work and, you know, the relational thinking with islands that was really developing at that point. So, the Landship is a paper published in Social and Cultural Geography, you can get, 2016, if people are interested (9). And it's a kind of a dance and social welfare organization that is, I guess, kind of unique to Barbados … although there used to be lots all over the region. And it's this fascinating relational institution where they re-enact what took place on ships, slave ships and steamships. So, it really brings in the … ship, but it's on land. So, it's a social welfare organization that takes place on land, that's a cultural performance. And it also played a really important role in the development of welfare in the early 1900s in Barbados. So, I just find it a fascinating institution, because it brings in those long histories of oceanic and ship connections, it's a re-enactment on the islands as a land+ship. And at the same time, it was, you know, for, for ex-slave populations that had emerged through emancipation, and were going into independence. And it was an important social cultural organization … providing welfare to poor people and things. So, it's a really lovely illustration of the sorts of things that that you and I write about, about islands being these kind of relational forms. And in this case, also how that form becomes a social welfare organization.

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Yes, it was a great topic and a great analysis … you did. I've been to Barbados where I wasn't aware of that particular custom. So, I thought it was insightful. I mean, one of the paradoxes about island studies is that island studies [journals] have published very little material on the Caribbean, because the Caribbean tends to be covered in specialist journals. And it's very thinly covered, it's something that I think … we should try and engage with more, but there's almost also a kind of ‘Caribbean-centric’ thinking, where it's seen that the Caribbean is the focus rather than global islands. This is the focus in some of the work I've seen anyway. But there are many islands…

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I could not agree more, Phil, you know, I worked in the Caribbean for nearly 10 years before I'd thought about it in terms of island studies. And as a young academic, you're not … made cognizant of those kinds of ways of thinking. But you know, you think about Glissant or great Island writers like Braithwaite, these are Island scholars, even though they're writing about a particular region … I couldn't agree with you more Phil is what I'm saying.

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It's a fascinating area. I mean, I've spent most of my time in Trinidad and Tobago, down south, which are … almost an overlooked area within Caribbean writing as well for their complexities. But the whole history of relations between Trinidad and Tobago and of internal racial differences in Trinidad … there's obviously theses by the dozen that could emerge from there… So, this is your beginning and you rapidly became inserted into island studies, the formal sector, because you've been involved in the Island Studies Journal for several years now as a contributor, but most recently as the theme editor responsible for material addressing aspects of the Anthropocene. Can you tell us a bit about your general involvement with the journal and also the importance you attach to the journal and also to what you bring to the journal?

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So yes, I have been very involved with Island Studies Journal, and … obviously, Godfrey [Baldacchino], and now Adam [Grydehøj], have just done … just exceptional work … getting this going. I think you're probably picking this up. I mean, for me, it's the ‘vibe’ that's important, that attracts me to anything, you know … I talked about my longer history and my concerns about academia and the way it works. And I think for me, what's great is that the two key … islands related journals Shima and Island Studies Journal, are open access, and open, you know, in the sense that they provide platforms for people to just explore ideas … Sure, there's canons of literature … but my sense … watching Shima and Island Studies Journal is there's an openness to do a whole range of interesting things. So, the fact they're open to people who live on a small island in the middle of the Pacific, and often poor communities in Barbados, or the Caribbean or wherever, is crucial for me. …  This makes Island studies, it gives it a character … which I think is absolutely important. And I think the other thing that's really important for me is that both Shima and Island Studies Journal are also informally and … formally linked to all these different innovative spaces and conferences and workshops and things that exist … if you're talking about the Anthropocene part that I have, the ‘Anthropocene Islands’ section … it's linked to a monthly reading group, which you've been involved in, an early career monthly group. And it's linked to all sorts of other areas … that we're working on with the Anthropocene Islands project (10). So, for me what I like about Island Studies Journal, just as much as Shima, is that it’s part of these open networks for exploration, and that they’re open, they're free, which is just wonderful when you think about how much it costs to subscribe to some journals!

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Yeah, we had an interesting discussion in Hong Kong, at one of Adam’s conferences he organized, as part of, you know, the organization that he ran - Island Dynamics… And the issues came up about the journals being free access and … the other journal that's an open access journal, Island and Marine Cultures from Korea as well. And also Adam’s journal, Urban Island Studies. So, for a period, there was four open access journals, and I think through the various routes, it's arrived as an open access field, which is now a big strength. I've heard it said by young academics who come in that the first thing they can do is they can get the entire canon of material published in Shima and the Island Studies Journal just open access. And we noticed with Shima, a very rapid pick-up of material from the last issue, because people haven't had to go through particular hoops, you know, in order to … to get that stuff. So, I entirely agree with you about the field being good. Also, you've personally done very well, with the reading groups attached with early career academics. Can you tell us a bit about what motivates you to do that? And how they've gone?

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Well, yes. And I think it has … gone well, and it is going well. And I think you hit the nail on the head because … when you were talking about Shima and … Island Studies Journal, and I think there's something about islands’ work as a group of people, as these networks that we've gradually formed over the last couple of decades or so, which is open to early career. And I think … it's important to establish that ‘vibe’, you know, I feel there are fields of studies where early career people don't feel they can speak, they don't feel they can stand up and say something because they're nervous or whatever. So, I think it's really important to establish these spaces. I worried about calling it ‘early career’ but we, Maggie Henry and I, that kind of run this [early career group], decided to keep that because then it's this … safe space where people can just say whatever they want about some concept, like resilience or something like that, and just explore spaces and for thinking about these things. So, I think that Island’s work, it's beholden on us to really think about early career scholars … and provide those spaces where they can develop their ideas in any way they kind of choose, you know, so that's what's

been important to me about that aspect of the Anthropocene Islands project.

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Yes, it is. I mean, the field is not overburdened with … aging white male kind of power. I mean, a lot of the people obviously set it up in the early days are aging white males, but I mean, I think that some are going over the horizon and some are getting out of the way so there is a space for early career researchers to come in, unlike some disciplines that seemed kind of you know ‘logjammed’? ....

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That's right … And yes, I think that's really important … [because] … loads of people work on islands! I know I am part of ‘Island Studies’ as a kind of thing … but what's important is that there are a lot of people that work with islands, and so … I'm just interested in anyone that works on islands, whether an artist, a poet, a biologist, or geologist, or whatever … if we think that actually… it is the island that's the center, and not a field of study or a discipline, then that changes the ‘vibe’ and the dynamic of how people interact, I think …  because [with] an island [there] is something there you can see, ‘Geography’ is an abstract concept … so, it's centering the island or the archipelago, or you bring it in that way, rather than kind of the other way around.

I agree. Going back to your work on the Anthropocene, the most obvious … occasion … for doing this interview about your kind of overall perspectives, is the recent book you've done with David Chandler, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds, which I, and a number of others, think is really important contributions to the field. And in a way it is … like, we all need to up our game a bit, because you guys have come back, and you've thought through the paradigms underlying particular ways of conceptualizing thinking and theorizing about islands and you've got a kind of a narrative of how they go and you've got an agenda for the future. So apart from basically praising you for doing it, it's a great project. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of that project and what you're hoping to achieve with it? I mean, was it based on like, looking at islands within geography and islands and Island studies and thinking ‘we've got to get perspective on this in order to gain disciplinary wisdom?’ Was that … the starting point?

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Mmm, that cropped up at points. First of all though, thanks, Phil. It means a lot that you in particular would say that about the book. It was a big project, and then, you know, to get that response from you is, is wonderful. And the genesis is actually what I kind of mentioned earlier, which is just my friendship with David Chandler that I have. You know, I've known him for 20 years, and we have this kind of obsessive interest in tracking wider shifts in critical thought. So what we were kind of just chatting about as friends, every so often, was the trope of ‘relational entanglement’ starting to emerge as a – if not the – dominant trope of much contemporary thinking in the Anthropocene, after the waning faith in modern reasoning, you know, so the Anthropocene Islands project and book, that kind of emerged from that. [We started] off with “Okay, so relational entanglement seems to be this recurrent trope and theme and Anthropocene thinking”… and the islands work … was less a kind of planned response to this. It wasn't like we just went “let's forward Island studies or islands”, it was that we kind of realized … as we're reading, more and more generically about the Anthropocene, islands were just cropping up everywhere, you know, in debates about resilience, or the key thinkers of Anthropocene thinking seem to be turning to islands more and more. And we were like, “well, this is interesting” … and slowly, we just started to see how, whether it's mainstream policymaking, or critical thought, activism, arts [or] humanities work, these things [islands] that were so on the periphery of debate 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, were just cropping up in every area of research. We were starting to get our heads around this, and we thought, “well, they're [islands] not just symbols … of rising sea levels or global warming or intensified hurricanes. They're not the symbolic figures of the Anthropocene, they're [also] kind of doing work in these debates. They're being kind of engaged, and perhaps sometimes appropriated, but they're being worked with as generative for the way in which concepts like resilience and that kind of thing play out…

What the book does is chart how they [islands] become these generative figures for Anthropocene thinking and … Anthropocene thinking is a huge area of thought. But like any thought, it doesn't exist purely in the head, you know, humans are in the world. And, you know, geography matters to how we develop our thoughts. So therefore, geographical forms matter to how we develop our thoughts. So, it would kind of be inevitable that, as a trope like ‘relational entanglements’ becomes key to think with, that academics and policymakers turn to geographical forms that enable them to work that through and develop thought within that way. So, you know, I think that what the book does, is it turns to how the figure of the island moves from the periphery to the centre for this generation of relational thinking, about relational ways of being and knowing in the Anthropocene, and becomes generative for Anthropocene thinking more broadly – whether that's in your work on the aquapelago, which we engage quite a lot in the book, or broader critical thinking, or the poetry of the Anthropocene, wherever, the island becomes this kind of generative figure. And the Anthropocene Islands project is just a kind of expansion of that, the book is just a start. [The book] just talks about a few different ways in which islands become generative for Anthropocene thinking. And what we want to do in the broader network of the Anthropocene Islands project is generate the spaces we were talking about earlier, for people to think through the various and different ways in which islands are becoming generative for broader Anthropocene think.