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Here is my reflection on the element of water, and specifically the topic of Island as Isolation: the metaphor of the island is seen as “other,” a place with boundaries that is self-contained, the place where land and water meet. The Island as an utopia, with its own logic, capital, was especially interesting to Renaissance Europeans. Shakespeare played with this in The Tempest, with Prospero using his Island Logic to outwit his adversaries, who were still operating under “worldview,” and thus was Proespero’s “magic.” The Island as a metaphor was a way for mainlanders to dissect their own worldview by contrasting it to that of “Island Logic.” It would behove one to understand Island logic, because in this way one could understand the working of worldview by contrast. To study and understand the characteristics of an utopia is to recognize, and avoid, its opposite.

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Elemental Politics (Water) Carolyn Walker

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Humans seem incapable of conceiving of water as anything other than centered on the human. For centuries we have seen water as a tool and even in saving its inhabitants we must anthropomorphize them to feel any sympathy. I do not have the answer, but I wonder what water might be if we decenter the human. What power might it hold?

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A response in which a girl waxes poetic about the human and natural politics of water through the lens of floods, oceans, rivers, and lakes. Topics include Noah, Hurricane Katrina, whale song, animal research, the Delaware Water Shed, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and a little bit of hope, as a treat.

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Boundary Imposition & Imagination: The Politics of Water

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Boundary Imposition & Imagination: The Politics of Water

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In this piece, I grapple with anthropocentric politics of water as they focus more on commodifying and bridging over than interacting with water. I discuss these politics in terms of mainlanding as a practice (stemming from what we observe in the image of More’s Utopia), particularly how it impedes the breadth and depth of what we are able to imagine separate from more water-centric epistemologies.

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Attunement - The Politics of the Sea and the Island

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In this attunement, I reflect on how boundaries attribute to reflexivity when the mainlanders approach the islands, and how islands become the continental enterprise under mainlanders' fantasy and political ambition. Then, I view the relationship between the continent and the island as humans and whales/dolphins with an illustration from a Taiwanese novel.

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Water, to me, is always politicized by its inability to escape human encounter. Water is both scarce (drinking water/drought) and overabundant (rising sea levels). However, I use this reflection as a space to move away in some senses from water as resource/non resource (drinking water v. sea water). This leads me to consider the island as a space both a part of and also separate from water as an element. I think through, with the help of Greene, Steingo, and Bank, how islands are political landscapes in early modern travel literature. I look at More's Utopia and Bacon's The New Atlantis in particular. We might ask how we can use the imaginary and very politicized qualities of the early modern island to hold the mirror up to ourselves as we interact with a massive element that exists beyond its "human" usage.

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This week, as I read about islands, I found myself thinking about the abundance of water on our planet. Namely, I was drawn to the idea that the ocean exists as simultaneously accessible and not accessible, depending on who you are and how you define access. In my piece I explore this paradox of (in)accessibility through the relationships between humans and animals and humans and capitalism.

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Leslie Molina Garcia Politics of Water-2

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Leslie Molina Garcia Politics of Water-2

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The Island as a Fortress: Politics of the Insulating Seas

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The Island as a Fortress: Politics of the Insulating Seas

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In this paper, I borrow from Roland Greene’s “island logic,” or the knowledge that the insularity of islands offer “that counters the totalities of institutions and regimes” (138), to argue that ocean waters are imagined as a protective force that allows for alternative modes of worldbuilding to exist without becoming subsumed under the philosophy and structure of dominant society. John Mandeville’s record of the Isle of Amazons and Gonzalo’s ruminations in Shakespeare’s The Tempest gesture to the idea that beyond the ocean waters, there may be a world elsewhere that operates with a different logic from the “mainland.” While such politics challenge the worldview deemed natural, it harbors the danger of overlooking the ocean’s role as a “social environment” (Steingo 39) in which knowledge is garnered from travel across waters and mischaracterizing the inhabitants of islands as disconnected from civilization.

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The Island as a Fortress: Politics of the Insulating Seas

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The Island as a Fortress: Politics of the Insulating Seas

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In this paper, I borrow from Roland Greene’s “island logic,” or the knowledge that the insularity of islands offer “that counters the totalities of institutions and regimes” (138), to argue that ocean waters are imagined as a protective force that allows for alternative modes of worldbuilding to exist without becoming subsumed under the philosophy and structure of dominant society. John Mandeville’s record of the Isle of Amazons and Gonzalo’s ruminations in Shakespeare’s The Tempest gesture to the idea that beyond the ocean waters, there may be a world elsewhere that operates with a different logic from the “mainland.” While such politics challenge the worldview deemed natural, it harbors the danger of overlooking the ocean’s role as a “social environment” (Steingo 39) in which knowledge is garnered from travel across waters and mischaracterizing the inhabitants of islands as disconnected from civilization.

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Does water have a politics? Undoubtedly. But what are those politics, and more broadly, how do we define the politics of an element?

A politics, is, as far as I can contextualize it, not in fact explicitly political in the sense the term is used today. The politics I ascribe to water does not necessarily have positionality, rather, it has rules by which it operates, and in context of the anthropocentric nature of human politics, literature, and art, it is the human factor that accounts for how the consequences of water’s politics are manifested...

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Thinking of Elemental Politics in Walcott and Bank.

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In this attunement, I raise political and ethical questions about the visibility of water. For many, the element has become so embedded into our everyday lives, we no longer see it. Others are systemically isolated from this privileged outlook. Is water reflective? Is water reflective of us?

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In this attunement, I ask a rhetorical question: if you were stuck on a deserted island, what three things would you bring with you? I reflect on how this question led me to a politics of water through my mother's storytelling, and I use the critical literature to touch on the ways in which our conceptions of the island (beginning with early modern travel narratives) — such as the deserted island trope — might indeed be a legacy of the colonial imagination.

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Politics and the Ocean - Caroline Barron

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Politics and the Ocean - Caroline Barron

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These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I, Whose hart with feare doth freeze, with love doth fry.

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This is my reflection on the power of water to be both a connector and an isolator of peoples. As we consider historical discussions of water as a means of exploration as well as separation, we can also consider its weaponization as such in the modern day.

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ATTUNEMENT, ELEMENTAL POLITICS #1 "Water"

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Fantasia - Flight of the Whales clip

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Nathan Alexander (Nathan Alexander Music)

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Fantasia 2000: Flight of the Whales | Rescore

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For a little nostalgia

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Nathan Alexander (Nathan Alexander Music)

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Fantasia 2000: Flight of the Whales | Rescore