Preliminary Material -- Island Theory: The Antipodes /Matthew Boyd Goldie -- Writing Against the Tide?: Patrick Chamoiseau's (Is)land Imaginary /Maeve Mccusker -- A Distinctive Disaster Literature: Montserrat Island Poetry under Pressure /Jonathan Skinner -- Rethinking Identity and Belonging: 'Mauritianness' in the Work of Ananda Devi /Ritu Tyagi -- From Slave to Tourist Entertainer: Performative Negotiations of Identity and Difference in Mauritius /Burkhard Schnepel and Cornelia Schnepel -- “Amid the Alien Corn”: British India as Human Island /Ralph Crane -- Journalism and Identity: The Red-Top Hangover and Erosions of 'Island Mentality' in Postcolonial Ireland /Mark Wehrly -- Western Blood in an Eastern Island: Affective Identities in Timor-Leste /Anthony Soares -- “No Man is an Island”: National Literary Canons, Writers, and Readers /Lyn Innes -- Impure Islands: Europe and a Post-Imperial Polity /Paulo de Medeiros -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

This book examines transnational identities, integration and linguistic practices on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. Within the context of major historical events and migratory flows, the author considers the significance of the multicultural small island space, ideologies regarding long-standing as well as emergent identification practices and language use, and conceptualizations of belonging, focusing in particular on the Madeiran Portuguese diaspora. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary migratory flows opens up a compelling discussion concerning the maintenance and use of heritage languages in a multilingual environment, allowing a rare comparison of the symbolic role as ethnic identifiers of Jersey French, Standard French, English, and more contemporary migrant languages such as Portuguese. The author analyses the role of language in social integration and the potential for consequent shifts in group allegiances, as well as receptor community ideological and legislative responses, concluding with a hypothesised look at the future of migration to Jersey. This book advances research on migration, transnational lives and language use in an era of globalization, and will be of particular interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociolinguistics, multilingualism, migration studies, and intercultural communication.

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.

From tourist paradises to immigrant detention camps, from offshore finance centres to strategic military bases, islands offer distinct identities and spaces in an increasingly homogenous and placeless world. The study of islands is important, for its own sake and on its own terms. But so is the notion that the island is a laboratory, a place for developing and testing ideas, and from which lessons can be learned and applied elsewhere. The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies is a global, research-based and pluri-disciplinary overview of the study of islands. Its chapters deal with the contribution of islands to literature, social science and natural science, as well as other applied areas of inquiry. The collated expertise of interdisciplinary and international scholars offers unique insights: individual chapters dwell on geomorphology, zoology and evolutionary biology; the history, sociology, economics and politics of island communities; tourism, wellbeing and migration; as well as island branding, resilience and ‘commoning’. The text also offers pioneering forays into the study of islands that are cities, along rivers or artificial constructions. This insightful Handbook will appeal to geographers, environmentalists, sociologists, political scientists and, one hopes, some of the 600 million or so people who live on islands or are interested in the rich dynamics of islands and island life.

A close look at how wylers, a popular musical style from the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, expresses a unique mode of relation in the postcolonial Caribbean. In Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that this speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity; women’s bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy; and the material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media-based resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—thus neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but also the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance. The archipelago and its speeds ultimately emerge as a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.

Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. Through an analysis of a variety of texts ranging from literature to prison correspondence to tourist questionnaires it exposes the ways in which nationalism relies on fictions of insularity and intactness, which the island and island tourism appear to provide. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island form exposes an anxiety about boundaries and limits on the part of the postcolonial nation. In appropriating island tourism, the new nation tends to recapitulate the failures and crises of the colonial nation before it. Starting with the first literary tourist, Robinson Crusoe, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism goes on to show how authors such as JM Coetzee, Romesh Gunesekera, and Julian Barnes have explored the outlines and implications of islandness. It argues that each text expresses a profound discomfort with national form by undoing the form of the island through a variety of narrative strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres. By throwing the category of the island into crisis, these texts let uncertainties about the postcolonial nation and its violent practices emerge as doubt in the narratives themselves. Finally, in its selection of texts that shuttle between South Africa, Great Britain, and Sri Lanka, equalizing the former colonial metropole and its outposts, it offers an alternative disciplinary mapping of current postcolonial writing.

The authors investigate the exceptional political economy of the ten inhabited islands whose territory is divided amongst two or more countries: that are unitary geographical spaces but fragmented polities.

This volume explores the many facets and ongoing transformations of our visual identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its chapters engage with the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual across a range of media. They are attentive to how the medialities and (im)materialities of modern image culture inflect our conceptions of identity, examining the cultural and political force of literature, films, online video messages, rap songs, selfies, digital algorithms, social media, computer-generated images, photojournalism and branding, among others. They also reflect on the image theories that emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Charles S. Peirce to twentieth-century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent theories by Jacques Rancière, W. J. T. Mitchell and others. The contributors of Imaging Identity come from a wide range of disciplines including literary studies, media studies, art history, tourism studies and semiotics. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership interested in contemporary visual culture and image theory.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent. England's islands were difficult to govern, and were prone to neglect, yet their strategic value far outweighed their size. Though vulnerable to foreign threats, their harbours and castles served as forward bases of English power. In civil war they were divided and contested, fought over and occupied. Jersey and the Isles of Scilly served as refuges for royalists on the run. Charles I was held on the Isle of Wight. External authority was sometimes light of touch, as English governments used the islands as fortresses, commercial assets, and political prisons. London was often puzzled by the linguistic differences, tangled histories, and special claims of island communities. Though increasingly integrated within the realm, the islands maintained challenging peculiarities and distinctive characteristics. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and the insights of maritime, military, and legal scholarship, this is an original contribution to social, cultural, and constitutional history.

In the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social diversity and cultural difference, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter. Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham reveal how early historical encounters created colonial hierarchies, but also how conflict has been creatively resisted through shared social practices in particular contact zones including islands, port cities and the ‘super-diverse’ cities formed by enhanced international migration and globalization. Drawing on research experience from across the world, including new fieldwork in Louisiana, Martinique, Mauritius and Cape Verde, their account provides a balance between rich description and insightful analysis showing, in particular, how identities emerge and merge ‘from below’. Moving seamlessly between social and political theory, history, cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography, the authors point to important new ways of understanding and living with difference, surely one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.