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. (Continued)