Playing with the Anthropocene: board game imaginaries of islands, nature, and empire
Playing with the Anthropocene: board game imaginaries of islands, nature, and empire
The figure of the island as a metonym for the planet is central to many allegories of the Anthropocene. These allegories build upon pre-existing discourses of islands as remote, vulnerable, and timeless, and often portray contemporary island nations as helpless, doomed, and disposable. This article focuses on one allegorical terrain that has received limited discursive and cultural analysis: analogue board games. Board game representations of islands are relevant to island studies both due to the popularity of island themes and because of the resonances between common island imaginaries and the form of board game play itself. Looking at three explicitly island-themed board games (Taluva, Vanuatu, and Spirit Island), I explore the extent to which these games reiterate or contest discourses of islands as sites of ahistorical insularity and alterity. I investigate the presence and absence of islanders in these fictional landscapes, the relationship between these ludic cartographies and imaginaries of ecological collapse and environmental intervention, and the articulations of nature, humanity, and empire that are literally at play. Particularly in the case of Spirit Island, these board game representations reflect the potential for the figure of the island to be reconfigured in order to imagine the Anthropocene otherwise.
85–101
Fair, Hannah
ac8ce812-836e-4032-900e-b767a775bac1
1 May 2022
Fair, Hannah
ac8ce812-836e-4032-900e-b767a775bac1
Fair, Hannah
(2022)
Playing with the Anthropocene: board game imaginaries of islands, nature, and empire.
Island Studies Journal, 17 (1), .
(doi:10.24043/isj.165).
Abstract
The figure of the island as a metonym for the planet is central to many allegories of the Anthropocene. These allegories build upon pre-existing discourses of islands as remote, vulnerable, and timeless, and often portray contemporary island nations as helpless, doomed, and disposable. This article focuses on one allegorical terrain that has received limited discursive and cultural analysis: analogue board games. Board game representations of islands are relevant to island studies both due to the popularity of island themes and because of the resonances between common island imaginaries and the form of board game play itself. Looking at three explicitly island-themed board games (Taluva, Vanuatu, and Spirit Island), I explore the extent to which these games reiterate or contest discourses of islands as sites of ahistorical insularity and alterity. I investigate the presence and absence of islanders in these fictional landscapes, the relationship between these ludic cartographies and imaginaries of ecological collapse and environmental intervention, and the articulations of nature, humanity, and empire that are literally at play. Particularly in the case of Spirit Island, these board game representations reflect the potential for the figure of the island to be reconfigured in order to imagine the Anthropocene otherwise.
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Playing with the Anthropocene Accepted Version
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84743-playing-with-the-anthropocene-board-game-imaginaries-of-islands-nature-and-empire (1)
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Published date: 1 May 2022
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Local EPrints ID: 494764
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/494764
PURE UUID: 1adaca22-b901-471d-91e1-3703a991cab0
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Date deposited: 15 Oct 2024 16:43
Last modified: 04 Dec 2024 03:26
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Author:
Hannah Fair
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