Storiation: Holding the World

In Chapter 5, the authors give shape to an approach called Storiation. Central to Storiation is registering the ongoing afterlives, hauntings and effects of such significant forces as colonialism, modernity, global warming, nuclear radiation, rising sea levels, and waste production; where islands and island cultures regularly emerge as important sites for investigation. What distinguishes the Storiation analytic is the holding together of entities and effects, registered through islands and islander lives, intra-actions and effects. For authors like Timothy Morton the (island) future then becomes entangled with the past as the ‘afterlife’ of relational effects continue to reverberate in ‘strange’, ‘weird’ or ‘quantum’ ways. The chapter examines how the analytic of Storiation is today being widely developed in Anthropocene philosophy, critical Black and Indigenous Studies which all increasing turn to engage islands as key sites of relational entanglements and associated island scholars and literatures. Of particular importance is the work of the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s onto-epistemology of ‘tidalectics’ profoundly disrupts mainland, continental and modern frameworks of space-time, and binaries of human/nature. In Tiffany Lethabo King’s Storiations of Black and Indigenous life, she employs such methods as ‘critical fabulation’ and ‘speculative bricolage’ in order to hold together the traces, ghosts and afterlives of colonialism embodied and constitutive of the present. Thus, the chapter charts Storiations of the differentiating powers of colonialism, of the emergence of tidalectic psychologies living on in the wake, of island dances, Vodou loa and shamanistic practices, of species long extinct, of the consumerisms that haunt islands in strange ways.