Islands of Negation

Jonathan Pugh

Related terms: abyssal critique, Anthropocene, anti-Blackness, failing better, fugitivity, marronage, New Weird Fiction, opacity, refusal, suspension, unlearning mastery

This entry introduces the new trope of ‘islands of negation’ to draw out how recent debate has criticised the dominant frameworks through which the environmental humanities have operated, understood, and engaged the world. The environmental humanities have been shaped by a profound ethical and ontological reorientation toward modes of relation, entanglement, and affirmation. Concepts such as more-than-human assemblages, relational ontologies, and an ethics of care have emerged as hopeful tools for reimagining life in the Anthropocene. Here, ‘islands’ have become emblematic sites for the development of such imaginaries – spaces of relational excess, non-linear temporality, and ecological experimentation. The counter-trope of ‘islands of negation’ seeks to move otherwise by engaging the growing interest in refusing the hand of affirmation, hope and the promise of relation, resisting incorporation into dominant epistemological regimes. When even resistance can be appropriated, ‘islands of negation’ ask: what would it mean to unlearn mastery without replacing it with another form of capture?

To briefly reflect upon the thrust of the recent critique, the key concern is that much work in the environmental humanities continues to privilege the knowing subject (the environmental humanities scholar), capable of linguistically, aesthetically, affectively, speculatively or otherwise revealing the world and the Other to us. The fissure of the human/nature divide may have been troubled empirically through the development of post- and more-than-human approaches, but not ontologically, where the ontological security of the modern subject imbued with the capacity to sense, attune to, and read the world is maintained. Indeed, for many of those engaged in this now quite extensive critique, the collapse of the human/nature divide at an empirical level – enabling more of the world and the Other to be generatively brought in – only serves to further enhance the privileged position of the environmental humanities scholar.

For Dixa Ramirez-D’Oleo (2023), Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, prominent in the environmental humanities, is critically illustrative. Haraway’s (2016, 145) focus upon “turbulent but generative” captures a worldview that not only foregrounds relation as always already vibrant becoming, but also as available for the environmental humanities scholar to attune to and reveal to us. For Ramirez-D’Oleo, such work thereby extends the appropriative gaze of colonialism through its:

...positivist or additive propensity. The ‘more’ is just as likely to be rhetorical as physical or biological... [In] Haraway, ‘more’ is also bound with pathos. ‘Caring’, she writes, ‘means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning’... These writings encrust generativity with seemingly positive descriptors (e.g. ‘caring’ ‘loving’, ‘thick’, and so on), disguising the destruction also taking place. (4)

Likewise, for Harney and Moten, object-oriented approaches, also prominent in the environmental humanities, reveal how the object “given in and as speculation, constitutes proof of the very idea of ownership” (2021, 109). The collapse of the human/nature divide has precisely enabled more of the world to be brought in, as Timothy Morton, a leading figure in the object-oriented tradition, illustrates:

if you … take the anthropological block, inhibition, away, what you get is that everything in the universe gets to access everything else. And the way that everything accesses everything else is such that nothing is ever exhausted (Morton, quoted in Terada, 2023, 105).

A second recent critique is that dominant framings in the environmental humanities maintain the legacies of modern thought, as in Hegel’s seminal definition, where the modern subject is precisely the person who opens up to the generativity of relationally (un)making themselves and the world. By contrast, the ‘savage,’ notably from Africa for Hegel, does not. As Rei Terada (2023, 33) observes:

maintaining a relational view of the world is already for Hegel what it is for contemporary theory, a safeguard against reduction to identity. In the name of this safeguard, the relation must be utter, ‘nothing else than’ relation relating to nonrelation in continual breakdown and transformation.

For Tyronne Palmer, illustrative of this is “the affirmationist logic of affect theory … [where] affect is positioned as an ever-renewable material resource: as that which marks the inherent relation and potentiality of all modes of mattering, a central element in the realisation of new worlds” (2023, 122). Thus, for a leading figure in the environmental humanities, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 65), the task is to reach out, affectively with an aesthetics of care, attuning to the Other and world, “making affective engagements an explicit part” of scholarship. By contrast, as Rizvana Bradley has powerfully drawn out:

although empathy is frequently elaborated in the name of solidarity with black liberation, more often than not, such instances of empathetic identification serve as the mechanisms for the (non-black) liberal subject’s renewal of their subjectivity in and through the projective objectifications of empathy. [Whilst, for the Other to] contemplate one’s vestibularity to and expulsion from that world order is to foreground an irrecuperable challenge to every legible grammar of ethics, aesthetics, and politics (2023, 26–7).

The more general thrust of recent critique is that many frameworks of reasoning which characterise environmental humanities work, despite claiming otherwise, maintain a modern tradition: the Other and world are embedded in and suborned to spatial and temporal becoming, understood as generative for the subject to read and speculate with as productively engendered availability.

Unlearning Mastery

To think with islands of negation is to trace the recent slow erosion rather than a sudden break from this critical point of departure. It is to dwell within suspension – not the suspension of a bridge or a fixed link, but within the generativity of the failed transmission. This method resonates clearly in Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery (2018), which critiques the liberal humanist impulse to achieve ethical mastery over others, even in anticolonial or feminist discourse, and instead proposes a productivist ethics of vulnerability and failure. Here, the island is not a metaphor for discovery, naming, and relational legibility, but for unlearning itself. The external researcher, as reflected in the anxiety of their contemporary positionality statement, increasingly worries about their capacity to represent the materiality of the island, the Other and the world. Thus, the rapid change in direction towards productivism in the university, where the external researcher obtains resources to ‘co-become’ with the materiality of the island and the islander as the pathway to generate meaning and understanding. The generativity of meaning and agency is not obtained from ‘outside’, from the reflective researcher speculating upon and reading the world from a distance, but becomes the productivity of the experimental arrangement of the ethnographical encounter itself.

Harney and Moten (2021) develop this logic further through the concepts of fugitivity and incompleteness. In their formulation, refusal is not simply the opposite of engagement, but a mode of generative existence framed by the question ‘what if the purpose of criticism is suspension?’ (158) An island of negation does not seek a new world but is a zone of collective opacity. Illustrative, the Rastafarianism of Tuff Gong, of ‘dread’, is understood by Harney and Moten as a contemplative encounter with the forces of history, of racialisation, which reduced the slave to nonbeing; such that marronage engenders a kind of “non-temporality” and “non-spatiality”, functioning as a “block” (19-20) which suspends colonising, obtaining, notions of space and time – marronage as this ‘unwatchable place we make when we watch with one another, having refused to watch one another’ (20). Again, the focus is not confined to the anthropocentric, but incorporates the emergence of island materialities, spatialities and temporalities which ‘block’ or ‘suspend’ the external gaze and its capacity to read or speculate upon them.

The point of this analytical register, of unlearning mastery and fugitivity, is that they seek to disrupt the relational gaze, suspending the slide of the framings that dominate much environmental humanities work, noted above, into recuperation. Islands are not sites of ontological promise but of epistemological refusal. They do not host new worlds but mark the failure of the modern subject and its gaze to remain intact. Islands of negation seek to move against the ontological security of the environmental humanities scholar who claims to make the world available, who mobilises the relational becoming of the world as generative, and thus, often unwittingly, maintains colonial legacies.

In speculative aesthetics, this move toward negation finds further analytical resonance. The genre of New Weird fiction – with its shifting borders between the human, nonhuman, and unknowable – engages islands not as stable territories but as dissolving coordinates. Works by writers like Jeff VanderMeer deploy island settings to unmoor narrative certainty. In Annihilation, for instance, the strange topography and creatures of Area X, an island-like quarantine zone, confound classification and resist capture:

[T]he longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all about nature, about ecosystems ... I was completely adrift, and dislocated … (175).

The Limits of Epistemological Refusal

The critical strategies surveyed thus far – unlearning, opacity, fugitivity, and aesthetic dissolution – offer modes of resistance that trouble the colonial grammar of relationality and the modern imperative to master. They build upon and seek to offer alternatives to the recent critical concerns over dominant reasoning adopted in the environmental humanities.

Islands of negation, as refracted through these lenses, seem to stage a powerful counter-world of unfinished thought, fractured subjectivity, and strategic refusal. For a moment, it feels as though there is a place to inhabit that is not complicit, not grasped, not known.

But what if, in our search for such critical alternatives, we have mistaken epistemological recalibration for ontological rupture?

To truly assess the power and limits of islands of negation, we must place them against a different register – one that does not seek better failure or more ethical opacity, but instead insists on confronting the violent ontology that precedes and exceeds all gestures of epistemic intervention.

The Abyssal Critique and Ontological Violence

There is a moment in the structure of critique when the ground shifts – not as an epistemic reorientation but as a vertiginous exposure to something more foundational. The gestures of refusal, opacity, and unlearning, for all their poetic and political weight, reach their limit here, not because they fail to disrupt, but because they still presume the stability of a world in which disruption is meaningful.

The limits of islands of negation become visible not in their content, but in their positioning. Each of the critiques surveyed above ultimately operates within a horizon of choice and agency. Even refusal presumes a subject who can refuse, suggesting a progressive arc, a temporality of development. These gestures do not undo the world; they simply reposition the critic within it.

To grasp this, we can enter the terrain of what can be called ‘abyssal critique’ (Pugh and Chandler, 2023; Chandler and Pugh, 2024). Here, ‘the abyss’ is not literally in the world, yet another fungible object for the subject to attune to and speculate through its material, cultural, and other conditions (which would be to repeat the violence of the relational ontologies and epistemologies noted above). Rather, the abyss marks the violent limit of the possibility of thought in the world. The reason why anti-Black scholarship has been at the forefront of the above recent critiques of the environmental humanities is because, following Fanon and recent developments in Afropessimism, Blackness clarifies a world where people are not simply excluded or marginalised, but structurally positioned as enabling the relational world to exist through their negation. As Fanon said, for the Black to become in the world, it has no other choice than to learn to become White. Why such debate is so important for the environmental humanities more generically is because it clarifies how refusal to embrace a relational ontology, to understand one’s very being as always already available and in the generative flux of becoming, is to code oneself as unintelligible, as lacking being. Then the refusal to embrace this world always already leaves the Other open to accusations of rejecting the demand for open-ended becoming (the sine qua non of the modern human). My point, the modern project, enabled by dominant frameworks in the environmental humanities, maintains the limits and possibilities of this world. We see this in all the different dominant frameworks of the environmental humanities noted above. The Other and the world are always already there, available, vibrant, sutured and constituted as in dynamic becoming. The scholar subscribing to such an approach may see the continued colonial legacies of Western international development programmes seeking to embrace the ‘undeveloped’, generatively opening up the possibilities for them to become otherwise. But we can also see clear colonial legacies in contemporary approaches in the environmental humanities, opening-up the Other and the materiality of the island through experimental ‘co-becoming’; again, with the environmental humanities scholar themselves as the agent, reading, sensing, and releasing the relational potentiality of the Other and the world through co-becoming with them. Nothing has changed. The subject that does not open itself out to relationality generativity is precisely that which can have no purchase in this world and cannot be put to work.

Seen in this light, the island of negation, rather than offering shelter from relational capture, is exposed as yet another iteration of the world’s foundational exclusions. The turn to unlearning may soothe the ethical conscience of the critic and enable productivism to flourish in the university, but it does not touch the violence that makes the critic’s position possible in the first place. Thus, the value of unlearning mastery must be measured differently, not as a solution, not even as disruption, but as symptoms of a desire that cannot bear the abyss. In the face of the abyss, the island is no longer a method – it is constitutive of the violent ontological foundation of the world, which repeats itself without end.

Conclusion

There has recently been a strong backlash against dominant modes of reasoning in the environmental humanities. This entry has relayed some of the key concerns around the privileged position of the subject, which extends the appropriative hand, bringing more of the world in, through developing frameworks of reasoning which collapse the human/nature divide at an empirical level. The critical concern about this is that there remains the ontological security of this subject who attunes to the world and Other, linguistically, aesthetically, speculatively, and affectively, taking on the role of making them available to us. In short, as colonialism becomes an increasing concern in the academy, scholarship in the environmental humanities, like elsewhere, is having to reflect upon how it reworks rather than ends colonial legacies.

This entry has posited the trope of ‘islands of negation’ to characterise what, for many currently seems like an answer to this problem, as a method of suspending mastery, of withdrawing from the grasping relationality that governs the environmental humanities. There is power in opacity. There is an aesthetic and ethical charge in fugitivity, suspension, and the unlearning of mastery. These gestures matter. They help mark the boundaries of the knowable. They stage what it means to fail better within the ruins.

But they do not end the world.

Abyssal critique is not an argument for despair, though it resists the comfort of hope. It is, rather, an invitation to remain with the discomfort that there may be no outside-no, no ‘world of many worlds’, no retreat, no gesture of suspension that does not already presume participation in the world it claims to critique. And perhaps the most devastating realisation is that even our critical tropes, even our beautifully fractured islands of negation, are not immune to this logic.

Environmental humanities, for all its radical turns, still dreams of the world. But there may be no world to salvage – only a sea of violent ontology.

References

Bradley, Rizvana 2023. Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2021. All Incomplete. New York: Minor Compositions.

Palmer, Tyrone S. 2023. "Affect and Affirmation." In The Affect Theory Reader 2, eds. Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, 122-140. Durham: Duke University Press.

Pugh, Jonathan, and David Chandler. 2023. The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene. London: University of Westminster Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ramírez-D'Oleo, Dixa. 2023. This Will Not Be Generative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press.

Terada, Rei. 2023. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness & Political Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014. Annihilation. London: Fourth Estate.