Abstract
Taking Tim Robinson’s essay “Islands and Images” (1996) as its starting point, this chapter examines the island as a spatial figure articulating contradictory conceptions of the world and of subjectivity. Islands have offered “the delusion of a comprehensible totality” (Robinson) and a readily accessible (and visual) identity ever since the “insular moment” of early modernity (Conley), but they have simultaneously functioned as figures resisting geometrical abstraction. Reading Robinson’s essay alongside discussions of islands by Jacques Derrida and Benoit Mandelbrot, I argue that islands are not only connected to a modern march towards visual spatial control, but have also challenged a cartographic view of space and, correspondingly, a view of subjectivity as clearly demarcated and mappable. The final part of the chapter turns to Georg Christoph Munz’s Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus (1711) to discuss the floating island as a mobile figure of a relational spatiality and, correspondingly, of identity conceived in terms of dispersal, flows and transitions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
My translation. The original French reads: “Les navigateurs qui aperçoivent de loin une île ‘sur la mer’ la reconnaissent sans hésitation possible et la distinguent d’un continent […] ce qui permet de définir l’île comme d’étendue limitée, permettant de l’embrasser d’un seul coup d’œil à une certaine distance.”
- 2.
- 3.
I am alluding here to the title of a collection edited by Baldacchino, A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader (2007).
- 4.
Jean-Michel Racault, “Utopias, Travels and Insularity,” workshop at the University of Zurich (9 May 2014).
References
Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2005. Editorial: Island—Objects of Representation. Geografiska Annaler 87 (4): 247–251.
———, ed. 2007. A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies and Agenda Academic.
Ballantyne, R. M. (1858) 1995. The Coral Island. London: Penguin.
Barron, W. R. J. 2002. The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation. Exeter: Exeter University Press.
Conley, Tom. 1996. The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Cosgrove, Denis. 2001. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2011. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2. Ed. Michel Lisse et al. and trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gillis, John R. 2003. Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds, 1400–1800. In Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, 19–31. London: Routledge.
———. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave.
Glissant, Édouard. (1990) 2007. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Graziadei, Daniel, et al. 2017a. On Sensing Island Spaces and the Spatial Practice of Island-Making: Introducing Island Poetics, Part I. Island Studies Journal 12 (2): 239–252.
———. 2017b. Island Metapoetics and Beyond: Introducing Island Poetics, Part II. Island Studies Journal 12 (2): 253–266.
Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen.
Kiening, Christian. 2006. Das wilde Subjekt. Kleine Poetik der Neuen Welt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Kinane, Ian. 2017. Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lestringant, Frank. 2002. Le livre des îles. Genève: Librairie Droz.
Létoublon, Françoise, Paola Ceccarelli, and Jean Sgard. 1996. Qu’est–ce qu’une île? In Impressions d’îles, ed. Françoise Létoublon, 9–27. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail.
Loxley, Diana. 1990. Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Mandelbrot, Benoit B. 1983. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
More, Thomas. (1516) 2003. Utopia. Trans. Paul Turner. London: Penguin.
Munz, Georg Christoph. (1711) 2004. In Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus. Floating Islands: A Global Bibliography, ed. Chet Van Duzer, 1–68. Los Altos Hills: Cantor Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Pugh, Jonathan. 2016. The Relational Turn in Island Geographies: Bringing Together Island, Sea and Ship Relations and the Case of the Landship. Social and Cultural Geography 17 (8): 1040–1059.
———. 2018. Relationality and Island Studies in the Anthropocene. Island Studies Journal 13 (2): 93–110.
Riquet, Johannes. 2017. Island Spatialities. In The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr., 214–229. London: Routledge.
———. 2019. The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robinson, Tim. (1976) 1996. Islands and Images. Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other Writings, 1–17. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
Shakespeare, William. (1611) 2000. The Tempest. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Sheller, Mimi. 2003. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge.
Tuan, Yi–Fu. 1990. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press.
Van Duzer, Chet. 2006. From Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe: A Survey of Early Western Island Literature. Island Studies Journal 1 (1): 143–162.
Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. 2007. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wylie, John. 2012. Dwelling and Displacement: Tim Robinson and the Questions of Landscape. Cultural Geographies 19 (3): 365–383.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Riquet, J. (2019). Islands as (Floating) Images: Towards a Poetic Theory of Island Geography. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21773-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21774-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)