Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

Review 'A must read ... In this long-awaited book, [Pugh and Chandler] open up a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.' - Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University 'This is an essential book. By thinking with islands, Pugh and Chandler articulate new ontologies and epistemologies to help us understand the relational entanglements of the Anthropocene. The four analytics they propose--Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation, and Storiation--offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.' Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai'i, Manoa 'All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary - if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.' - Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg Makes 'the compelling case that islands have never been merely geocultural objects of study, but rather, generative conceptual 'objects' [for understanding and engaging] the wider, planetary, relational matrix within which the conditions of the Anthropocene era were created.' - Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University ''What if we were to start not with the great drama of the world's falling apart, but with a myriad of smaller stories of its coming together? ... a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling'. -- Nigel Clark, Lancaster University 'Replete with "aha!" and "huh!" moments, this book offers insights for all of us ... who may not have recognised ... the value of "thinking with" islands more purposively.' - Lauren Rickards, RMIT University ' ... a must-read ... elucidates novel understandings of islands not only as patches of intensified Anthropocene proliferation, but as sites to examine the intricate relationships between life, matter, and meaning in a changing world.' - Adam Searle, University of Cambridge 'Anthropocene Islands establishes Pugh and Chandler as two critical and agenda-setting thinkers within island scholarship ... [It] cogently argues that islands have become emblematic figures of the Anthropocene and are moreover influencing the manner in which Anthropocene thinking is developing. ... a timely and essential contribution ...' - Adam Grydehøj, Editor-in-Chief, Island Studies Journal Product Description The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene - an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity's capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island's liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as 'entangled worlds', which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly impor