On sensing island spaces and the spatial practice of island-making: introducing island poetics, Part I

Abstract

This two-part paper, co-authored by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, introduces a larger project on the poetic construction of islands in island fictions across media, genres, and geographical regions. Traditional island scholarship tends to discuss islands as tropes for a set of preconceived and fixed meanings (such as isolation, imprisonment, paradise, remoteness, etc.) and thus often bypasses the complex poetic processes through which islands come to be in literary texts. Our intervention in the debate seeks to offer a precise analysis of the practices and operations through which islands are conceived and reconceived. The two parts of this paper examine different modes of island (re)conception in 20th-and 21st-century island fiction. They discuss fictional islands as particularly mobile spatial figures that raise the question of what an island is, refusing to offer easy answers and allowing for a reconsideration of the role of islands in contemporary discourse. Against potentially essentialist accounts of what islands 'are' and 'mean', our close readings of key moments within island narratives engage with the processes through which island spaces are constructed in different media. In this first part, we develop a phenomenology of fictional islands that focuses on the ways in which island topographies are constructed through the senses and through spatial practices. In our analysis, islands emerge through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch (and frequently a confluence of these sensory experiences) or they are (re)conceived through the movements across and/or interaction with their topography.

Island metapoetics and beyond: introducing island poetics, Part II

“…Part I of this double article outlined the various ways of theorizing the conception of islands through sensory impressions and spatial practice (Graziadei et al, 2017). We noted that the textual construction of islands often prioritizes the role of vision, with its attendant imperialist assumptions.…”

Island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature

“…From the examples of island constructions analysed in the first article (Graziadei et al, 2017a), it appears that the depicted relationship to an island is rarely that of already being there, but instead is one of arrival, discovery, travel across the sea towards the island and the -often unexpected -encounter with an 'other' space. In this way, the multi-sensory re-reading of fictional islands remains connected to established island narratives ultimately linked to colonial conquest and appropriation of island spaces from the outside.…”

“…It seems that women tend to appear as the, often mythical, enticing or longed-for, inhabitants of islands, starting with Circe and Calypso, for example, but rarely, just as in other traditions of travel literature, as their explorers, not even in the alternative island narratives considered here, such as the novel The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Graziadei et al, 2017b) with the female character Faustine as part of an artificially recreated projection of a past island life, or the computer game Dear Esther (Graziadei et al, 2017a), where the woman named Esther is an absent memory on the island, its explorer a male character. While the conception of islands is shown to be highly varied and multi-layered in contemporary literature and other media, one could ask whether the gender pattern of island narratives does not remain far more limited and clichéd.…”

“…The two articles by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, Daniel Graziadei, Britta Hartmann, Ian Kinane, Johannes Riquet and Barney Samson (2017aSamson ( , 2017b, depart from a view of islands as representational or symbolic spaces, be they the traditionally self-enclosed insular spaces or the more open and hybrid spaces of counter-narratives, towards a focus on the fictional, poetic creation of islands. Thereby, they emphasise how island spaces emerge in texts through the depiction of various perspectives on them, of which the, often predominant, description of visual perceptions is only one.…”

Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene

“…A concern for relational island geographies is prevalent today in a wide range of geographical locations; for example, in research on the Caribbean (Dash, 2006;Pugh, 2016;Sheller, 2009), China (Hong, 2017), Chile (Hidalgo et al, 2015), Taiwan (Tsai, 2003;Lee et al, 2017), New Caledonia (Korson, 2017), New Zealand (Kearns & Collins, 2016), Sardinia and Corsica (Farinelli, 2017), the Aegean , Oceania (Farbotko et al, 2016), and the archipelagic Americas (Roberts & Stephens, 2017), but also in research on archipelagic information systems (Vaitis et al, 2007), island literatures (Crane & Fletcher, 2017;Redd, 2017;Graziadei et al, 2017), island diasporas (Martínez-San Miguel, 2014), and translocal social movements (Davis, 2017). In many different ways there has been a concerted effort to radically decentre notions of the static island and instead emphasize mobile, multiple and interconnected relational forms (Baldacchino, 2006;Clark & Tsai 2009;Fletcher, 2011;Hau'ofa;2008;Mountz, 2015;Sheller, 2009;Steinberg, 2001).…”