Worlding the World Otherwise? Islandness as a Critical Problem

Influential strands of Island Studies have spent decades moving from the island as a bounded object towards relational, processual and generative islandness. This paper turns that critical achievement back upon itself by asking what work islandness is now being made to do. It situates this question within a wider orientation of contemporary thought, in which calls to ‘world the world otherwise’ increasingly seek critical purchase through relationality, attentiveness, immersion, care, opacity, fugitivity, and more-than-human responsiveness. The paper asks what is at stake in this shared reliance on worlding, and how world came to acquire such authority. Extending the abyssal analytic, it returns to late medieval Latin Christendom and early modern European expansion to trace a historical transformation in which the work once secured by external and divine ground increasingly passes into world. On this account, the familiar Enlightenment narrative in which Man replaces God is not only incomplete but misleading, directing critique toward the subject while leaving the authority acquired by the demand that world must hold less examined. The modern ‘Geographical Subject’ emerges as one historically commanding bearer of the work, not its source, and that subject’s current displacement need not bring the work to an end. Today, islandness itself increasingly becomes another bearer—recruited to connect, salvage, repair, remain open to and furnish other futures. The paper is diagnostic and asks why transformation so readily takes the form of further worlding, and why what has already borne violence is so readily assigned the work of bearing another world.