Course Credits (3)
Islands populate our contemporary imagination through survivalist and reproductive reality shows, Caribbean and Mediterranean tourist escapism, maximum security prisons old and new, and recurring scandals of offshore banking and tax havens. While it might at first appear as an exceptional, rarefied, and fragmentary geography, the island is in reality central to literary and spatial production in racial-colonial modernity, to the imagined boundedness of the nation-state and its practices of governance, to capital’s operations of enclosure and circulation, and to a global machinery of connection and separation that constitutes the world as such. In fact, the form of the island has been interpreted and translated by literary and philosophical texts in ways that are deeply constitutive of the imperial histories that have shaped our present. In this interdisciplinary course, we will read across literary and cultural studies, critical geography, political theory, and the natural sciences to approach their island as a place, a space, a fantasy, and a method. While island imaginaries can be dated back to antiquity, our course begins when Columbus first lands onto an island in 1492 and surveys the maps that follow and grow from that landing and its ensuing colonial conquests. In the Age of Discovery, the mapping of the world was carried out through the gradual connection of fragmentary islands, translating conquest and imperial expansion into the production of a continuous geography that we know today as “the world.” Our objective will be twofold: first, to draw out the histories and epistemologies that deploy the island as a worldmaking method – as a site of discovery and invention, contact and exchange, unification and separation, governance, containment, etc. – and second, to develop our own set of island methodologies. We will situate the island within a dynamic interplay of confinement and freedom, boundedness and openness, and connection and separation. We will move back and forth between the vibrant plurality of its ecology, sociality, and topography to the rigidifying abstractions that render it as a deserted, unitary, and utilitarian space. We will tease out the function of the island in seminal European texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and we’ll travel from the islands of the Mediterranean to the islands of the Caribbean and back as we make sense of how our global political and cultural geography has been constituted. The course will include a semester-long mapping project, and an excursion to a significant island within our own geography.
About Professor Taher
Maysam Taher is a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis in the School of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University.