Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Photo: Munim Wasif ‘Water Tragedy’ Series, Shortlisted Prix Pictet 2008.
The idea of “island” deserves to be rethought today. Long a topos where bygone colonial powers articulate various fantasies underlying their world historical projects, the island has in recent past added to itself an element of dystopian exigency by becoming a place of choice, a target, so to speak, at which the more bellicose of the foes of the new imperial cents launch their military attacks. Just as Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu was chosen as the site of a surprise air raid sixty years ago by Japan, itself a relatively small island nation dreaming big of hemispheric domination, the island of Manhattan was selected lately by al Quaeda as a target of opportunity where the phallic symbols of American capitalist global hegemony were toppled by missiles of a hitherto unthinkable kind. Either in literary-geographic imaginations or through real encounters between cultures, island has historically been a site where the self meets the Other and, through this meeting, fashions and refashions itself in a process of asymmetrical mimicry characteristic of what we call colonialism.
From Plato through Descartes to today’s cruise ship commercials, island is often described as a place of escape, a place to escape to, as well as a place to escape from. Suspended in space and time, the distant island easily and understandably offers itself as a pole of projection for the less traveled in the metropoles, receiving investments that are at once psychical, symbolic, material, and, by extension, geo-political. An elsewhere both known and unknown to the empire, the island challenges any easy cutting of open space constitutive of colonizing centers’ territorial practices, marking from afar the ambiguity of empires’ very own boundary by locating itself as a liminal opening of and to the Other, an Other-opening, where, in spite of or because of its being distant and isolated, all the tensions and anxieties, conflicting desires and fears, associated with identity formation, exploration and conquest, are staged in full colors.
In Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower examines the checkered romance between empires and islands as it is reflected in the Western literary and popular cultural imaginations during the past five hundred years. Drawing on ideas vigorously mobilized by postcolonial studies, the book seeks to provide, says the author, “a detailed unpacking of the psychological draw of the castaway genre and analysis of how it worked as a tool of European imperial culture (p. ix). The book comprises six chapters. It begins by invoking the scene of “Monarch-of-All-I-survey,” a moment when a seafaring White European man (e.g., Robinson Crusoe, John Daniel, and many others) first gazes from a mountain top at the vista of an island on which he, as if by fate, is stranded. To the likely readers of the book, it is not hard to see how this scene effectively sets in motion the analyses to come. Veni, vidi, vici: inasmuch as the castaway’s searching gaze takes in what it surveys from an elevated position, the colonial project cannot but be one of possession, control, and imposing law and authority upon the Other–human, animals, plants, and minerals alike. Having established an illustrative starting point, the different chapters discuss in turn the various strategies adopted by the castaways-colonialists not only to maintain their mental health when facing an unknown land and its menacing inhabitants but also to justify colonialism by neutralizing the violence it exercises as either flowing from divine rights or demanded by its civilizing mission.
Central to Weaver-Hightower’s investigations is a set of psychoanalytically inspired concepts familiar to readers of contemporary critical discourses. In Chapter One, for example, the Kleinian notion of identification and Didier Anzieu’s work on the “skin ego” are adopted quickly to explain castaway-colonist’s frantic attempt to discipline his own body and, in so doing, to control what lies outside of him through projective incorporation. In this chapter and in others as well, as the reader will soon find out, the same quick application of theory to texts takes place. The result is a series of textual analyses that reiterate the messages heard time and again in recent literature in critical cultural studies at large and in postcolonial studies in particular. The reader may be less than satisfied if he/she is looking for a sustained engagement between texts and theory; his/her reward in reading this book is likely to come from the author’s choice of an interesting topic and her concerned discussions of the texts many of us read years ago.
Much has been written about things colonial or postcolonial, and most of these writings are products of chiefly Western or Westernized scholarship. While this book makes a fine addition to the current literature of postcolonial studies, it also makes clear the need for an equally critical examination of the many counter-stories told by the islands about the empires. If the island, as the book demonstrates, has always been “exclusively included” in the empire’s imaginary of the Other, empires are also “inclusively excluded” by the islanders when they tell stories about the Whitemen, stories in which the beginning of what one calls the Age of Discovery means only the start of catastrophes for the other. Like the empires that descend on them with their own narratives of conquest and exploration, islands themselves never stop telling stories about the visitors who come and go. They speak back and they should be heard. Indeed, postcolonial criticism would mean nothing if it did not facilitate the other post of postcolonialism to be sent back to the center and, in keeping with its avowed principle, to postcolonial critics themselves as well.
Review by: Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts, USA
-Ondine