Continental Aftermaths?
Ireland in the More-than-Human World

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in the title text of a posthumous collection of essays Desert Islands (2004), makes a distinction between two kinds of islands, continental islands and oceanic islands. Continental islands are islands that break off from a continental landmass, the result of a rupture or dislocation which separates them from a larger landmass – the signature note here is separation. Oceanic islands, on the other hand are sui generis, the result of coral formations or an undersea volcano eruption. These are the originary, essential islands, islands placed under the sign of creation or recreation. What these two island types posit is two ways of imagining islands. On the one hand, the notion of island as separate, elsewhere, disjunctive, broken off. On the other, the island as the place of radical origin, where you begin all over again, where new worlds are imagined and ushered into being. So where do we situate the island of Ireland in the post-Brexit world, is it more continental or oceanic? In the context of the climate emergency (rising sea levels, increased flooding, coastal erosion) and the advent of Brexit, this lecture will argue for the urgent necessity to place this question of islandness at the heart of our cultural and political thinking. Thinking about islands has traditionally been displaced on to Ireland’s offshore islands, often in the frame of nostalgic forms of salvage archaeology. However, the environmental crisis has brought to the fore the physical materiality of the island of Ireland and its increasing ecological vulnerability. So how can we use an island imaginary to reimagine our future? What difference does it make to shift the central organising principle of Irish life from land to sea? What is the importance of other island imaginaries, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, for the development of a positive version of island-being in Ireland? If utopias (Hy-Brazil) like prisons (Alcatraz) are typically located on islands, we need to decide what kind of island future we want, the island as a place of cultural and political possibility or as an outpost of environmental degradation and cognitive confinement.