Opportunities and Challenges: The Caribbean Involvement in the Free Trade Area of the Americas

This Article will examine the region\u27s participation in the process leading to the establishment of the FTAA, and the benefits and challenges associated with its involvement in this hemispheric undertaking. Part One of the Article sets out the rationale for the establishment of the FTAA and the structure of the negotiations. The section also identifies some elements of the unique nature of the proposed grouping. Part Two discusses the challenges facing Caribbean countries as they participate in multilateral trade negotiations, including the FTAA. In Part Three, the Article critically reviews the early stages of the integration process in the Caribbean and examines the most recent developments in the process, particularly in the context of the process of globalization and liberalization. This is followed by Part Four, which discusses the Caribbean\u27s participation in the FTAA

Conclusion: A Critical Agenda for the Anthropocene

This conclusion restates the argument of the book that the engagement with islands in many debates today is not merely caught up in the slipstream of contemporary social and philosophical trends but is important to the ontological and onto-epistemological framing and tools of the Anthropocene. It clarifies that the book undertakes an analysis of the ‘work’ that thinking with islands, island imaginaries, island writers, artists, poets, activists, and island problematics is doing in these debates. Not only thinking about, but ‘with ‘islands has become an important resource for alternative and non-modern relational ontologies and understandings in the Anthropocene. The authors suggest that there is a need to not only critically focus upon how the modern episteme reductively grasps islands but to also establish a new critical research agenda focused upon how islands are being enrolled in debates about the Anthropocene as key sites for understanding relational entanglements and in the generation of many different forms of relational ontology and ways of knowing. Working with islands or relational thought per se is not one homogenous ‘other’ to modernist or mainland approaches, and so the chapter clarifies why it is important to start a new conversation about how we engage in working through the rich variety of possibilities and opportunities that these approaches afford. In conclusion the chapter elaborates upon how the authors see this book as an initial opening for a new critical agenda for island studies in the Anthropocene

Becoming Indigenous: The ‘Speculative Turn’ in Anthropology and the (Re)colonization of Indigeneity

The indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the West tries to cope with planetary crises imbricated in the legacies of modernity and settler-colonialism. As such, indigenous methods and practices are increasingly constructed as offering futural possibilities for ‘becoming’ rather than belonging to the archives of an underdeveloped past. Central to this transformation has been the speculative or ontological turn in anthropological discourse, which we argue has opened up new possibilities for a Western and colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This turn is the subject of this article and is critically engaged with to pursue a number of avenues which problematise this form of ‘ontopolitical anthropology’. The reduction of indigenous lives to the speculative ‘other’ of Western modernity inherently tends to reify or ‘exoticise’ indigenous thought and practices or, as we state, to ‘ontologize indigeneity’. This, we argue, is particularly problematic in the context where critical imaginaries of precarious ‘life in the ruins’ tend to affirm contemporary governmental approaches rather than challenge them. Ironically, rather than opening up alternative possibilities, these approaches reduce the reality of indigenous struggles and sufferings to a mere foil for the speculative imaginaries of a privileged white Eurocentric academic elite

There are Only Islands After the End of the World

Summarising the contemporary shift towards working with islands in the Anthropocene in a set of concepts, this introduction outlines the key tropes of ‘relational entanglements’, ‘relational awareness’ and ‘feedbacks’ in writing on islands. Working with islands plays an increasingly notable role in Anthropocene thinking as it is precisely with islands that these relational effects come to the fore. Island ‘differences’ – the attributes, relational affordances and powers associated with islands – have put working with islands to the forefront of Anthropocene research and theory. Outlining the rationale for the structure of the book this chapter highlights the key elements of a critical agenda for island studies: focusing upon relational ontologies (Resilience and Patchworks) and relational onto-epistemologies (Correlation and Storiation), and ultimately the importance of island studies in the Anthropocene. To understand why and how Anthropocene thinking is as it is today, is only possible if we are able to more fully consider how and why working with islands is playing such an important and generative role

Islands and the rise of correlational epistemology in the Anthropocene: rethinking the trope of the ‘canary in the coalmine’

Once on the periphery of international debate, today small islands are seen by many as key to unlocking new ways of thinking about climate change and developing new practices of adaptation in the epoch of the Anthropocene. These approaches differ starkly from modernist, linear, causal frameworks that construct islands as vulnerable objects that require ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’. Instead, islands become instruments of productive knowledge, laboratories for investigation and learning, fundamental to an alternative, correlational, epistemology. In analysing these approaches, we take the prolific trope of islands as the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ in order to draw out the ontological implications of instrumentalising islands as ‘correlational machines’ in the Anthropocene. We raise fundamental problems with this literal instrumentalisation of islands and islanders, drawing out how these logics reduce island life to merely sensing and attuning to the co-relational entanglements of the Anthropocene, rather than offering higher normative aspirations for political change