New Geographies #8 Island
New Geographies
Edited by Daniel Daou, Pablo Pérez Ramos
September 2016 Designed by Chelsea Spencer ca. 190 pages 20.4 x 25.5 cm ISBN 978-1-934510-45-2 $24.95 Distributed by Harvard University Press
From Thomas More’s Utopia to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to O. M. Ungers’s archipelago, insights derived from “island thinking” are commonly extrapolated across scales and fields. The recurrence and appeal of the island metaphor lie in its capacity to simplify the complex and frame the apparently unbounded. Yet the island seems to confront current ontological mainstreams in the geographic: globalization’s motifs of openness and interconnectedness, and ecology’s privileging of environmental processes and flows over forms and boundaries. This volume proposes an epistemological pulse between the loss of the exterior implied in the planetary upscaling of territorial interpretations, and the need to rearrange new boundaries in an environment frequently explained through the process-oriented lens of ecology.