'sinking Islands' and the Post-National Imagination

Islands have emerged as prominent figures of thought in discussions around the Anthropocene, including climate change and the ‘relational entanglements’ (Chandler & Pugh, 2020) that the current moment demands we contend with. Within some environmental discourses, ‘sinking islands’ like the Maldives, Tuvala and other ‘frontline island states’ have become cynically allegorised as ultimately-expendable laboratory spaces where the urgency of the global climate crisis is made manifest (Farbotko, 2010; DeLoughrey, 2019). This paper begins from the position of rejecting the inevitability of such a future, engaging the existential risks posed to low-lying islands by rising sea levels as a challenge that demands alternative conceptions of political belonging and organisation. As the international system reveals its structural inability to deal meaningfully with climate change, and as international law grapples with the implications of ‘state death’ and the various ways in which displaced communities may be relocated and classified within the existing framework of nation-states, this paper questions what alternative forms of political community are made imaginable when we contemplate the loss and/or preservation of ‘homeland’. This speculative project is grounded in existing research about the approaches, identities and ideas of climate-vulnerable islanders while taking seriously the proposition that ‘we are all [already] islanders’ (Spivak, 2012).