Islands, because of their size, boundedness by the sea and supposed isolation, have served and continue to serve as laboratories for experiments including military, nuclear, touristic, scientific and ecological ones, as well as for forms of forced labor and migrations. Colonial writers also used islands as the intellectual test sites for utopias, dystopias and other such social and philosophical experiments. This has all been to the detriment of islanders, many of whom propose a radical alternative to colonial narratives. Students will be invited to reflect on the instrumentalization of the Global South island through novels, graphic novels, plays, short stories and films by Césaire, Perec, Hergé, Coetzee, Kincaid, Verne, Chamoiseau, Spitz, Jemisin, and the writers of the X-men series.
