Like all thought, contemporary Anthropocene thinking is developed through how we think with the world and geographical forms. This paper makes the original and bold claim that thinking with islands establishes the core methodological and conceptual framework for contemporary Anthropocene thinking more generally. Thus, I go beyond the more obvious point that Anthropocene scholarship regularly engages islands as the emblematic figures of transforming planetary conditions (rising sea levels, global warming, intensifying hurricanes, plastic pollution, loss of Indigenous cultures, nuclear radiation and so forth). Instead, I examine how Anthropocene scholarship conceptually draws upon islands, islanders and islandness to develop core relational ways of thinking about being and knowing in the Anthropocene. Examining the power of thinking with islands in the Anthropocene I heuristically categorise today’s leading debates according to the key paradigms of ‘Resilience’, ‘Patchworks’, ‘Correlation’ and ‘Storiation’, concluding with a new critical agenda for Anthropocene thinking which foregrounds the importance of geography in the development of thought.
Mots clés : Anthropocene|islands|relational|ontology|epistemology
A102444JP