HOW TO SEE AN ISLAND: on the art, theory, and politics of islands in césaire, césaire, and deleuze.

As the depiction of a relatively unpeopled view of a portion of land, Kōjin Karatani once suggested a link between the rise of a Western concept of "landscape" and the solitary interiority of Cartesianism. He showed that while aesthetic views of nature existed for centuries in Japan, an interiorized relationship to "landscape" in Japanese art and literature did not appear until the period of intense Westernization. Yet, landscapes and their "missing people" have also been sites for imagining alternative models of community and politics, particularly among those whose lands have endured colonial fetishization and exploitation. Instead of repudiating its aestheticization, how are these renarrativizations and revisualizations of landscapes used to dramatize and weaponize processes of becoming and self-invention? Such questions about the relationship between art, landscape, and the politics of becoming are carried forth through a conversation between texts about islands by Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, and Gilles Deleuze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]