Island Worlds in Literature and Film, 5 cr

Exactly 300 years ago, Daniel Defoe published the first edition of Robinson Crusoe, which has not only become known as the first major novel in English but also had a decisive influence on Western ideas about islands: islands as we tend to imagine them – small, isolated and uninhabited spaces far away in the ocean waiting to be explored and mastered – are largely ‘continental’ inventions tied to a long history of colonial oppression and violence. In the first part of this seminar, we will take Robinson Crusoe as a starting point for a critical examination of these island fantasies and their continued effects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century tourist and escapist fantasies from John Ford’s film The Hurricane (1937) to the recent television series Lost (2004-2010). In the second part of the course, we will engage with very different conceptions of islandness by turning to Pacific and Caribbean island imaginaries. Thus, we will explore how texts like Samoan author Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) and Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987) imagine islands as spaces of interconnection shaped by literal and metaphorical ocean currents. We will conclude the seminar by discussing the poems of Singaporean author Alvin Pang and Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019) as planetary texts that place islands at the crossroads of a global archipelago shaped by transnational flows of water, people and ideas. Throughout the course, we will also engage with theoretical perspectives on islands and archipelagoes including Hawaiian scholar Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s discussion of indigenous sea-based ontologies in Waves of Knowing, Epeli Hau‘ofa’s notion of oceanic interconnectedness “Our Sea of Islands” and Édouard Glissant’s relational philosophy.