Semester:
Offered:
THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Usha Rungoo (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 73J 4 credits (spring term)
Writers like Shakespeare and Daniel Defoe and philosophers like Denis Diderot imagined alternatives to their society via social experiments on islands. Science fiction writer H.G. Wells, in his Island of Doctor Moreau, described a “mad scientist” experimenting on human-animal hybrids in a closed-off island far from the eyes of the world. Outside of the fictional and philosophical realm, islands were and are positioned as sites of experimentation. Eighteenth-century scientists circumnavigated the world to observe the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti and Charles Darwin’s research on the Galapagos contributed to his theories on evolution. More sinister is the history of forced migration experiments to islands. In 1940, the Nazi government in Germany proposed to relocate the Jewish community of Europe to Madagascar. About a century before, when slavery was abolished, the British empire found a replacement for labor in Asian indenture, and designated Mauritius to be the first test site for what it called Britain’s “mighty experiment”. The Transatlantic slave trade itself had its first iteration in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). To this day, islands continue to be used as natural laboratories. Islands are considered small, naturally delimited by the sea, and isolated; for these reasons, experiments and events are thought to be easily observed and controlled, without consequences on “civilization”. For years, the US and France conducted nuclear tests on Bikini and French Polynesia respectively; islanders and island ecologies are still bearing the heavy consequences of irradiation and radioactivity.
Students will reflect on how islands came to be viewed as spaces of “anything-goes” experimentation, by considering various texts, graphic novels, children’s tales, short stories, novels, films and television series, advertisements, brochures, maps, paintings, even diplomatic and military cables. Activities will include visits to archives and collections at Harvard libraries and museums, a trip to Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, and a visit from Shenaz Patel, the author of Silence of the Chagos, an assigned novel for the seminar.
Students will be exposed to a variety of materials around the topic “islands and experiments”, and will be asked to reflect on the ethics of experimentation on and of islands and the consequences on human life and the environment. They will further be invited to consider “islands and experiments” from a personal perspective. Are universities an island? Are campuses and residential houses? Can other spaces be considered islands? What are the parameters of these islands and the consequences on its community and the broader community?