Manar Moursi Website
"Island Phantasmagoria: Exploring the Political/Philosophical Underpinnings of Fictional Islands and Imagining a Future of Plastic-Pirate-Island-Utopias"
MIT Thresholds 38, ed. Orkan Telhan, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2010
I set sail from Plato’s Atlantis and keep cruising—through PayPal-funded “seasteads,” quarantine barges, Dubai’s branded archipelagos, pirate republics, feminist abortion ships, and the pop-up desert oasis of Burning Man—to see how islands, whether real or dreamed, have always doubled as social laboratories. Along the way I map the ways each fabricated shoreline rewrites the social contract: sometimes as a carceral dump site, sometimes as a libertarian start-up, sometimes as a fleeting anarchic commons. As I navigate this archipelago of examples, I watch climate change spawn new coastlines and plastic gyres swell into continents. Those visions force me to ask what modes of governance, solidarity, or exploitation will surface when tomorrow’s populations become de facto islanders on floating garbage patches and engineered reefs. My voyage convinces me that the old dream of “beginning anew” at sea can harden inequalities just as easily as it can liberate us—unless we learn to metabolize mobility, impermanence, and shared ecological limits into designs that are genuinely democratic.
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