Ten per cent of Earth’s population—over six hundred and fifty million people—live on forty-eight sovereign island states, and many thousands more live on subnational island jurisdictions peppering the coastlines, lakes, and rivers of Earth’s continents.
Over the last three decades, academic, writing on islands has grown rapidly. To date, effort has focused on island ecologies and environments, island heritage and culture, and island vulnerabilities and resilience. In much of that work, characteristics such as isolation, insularity, small size, or dependency are presented uncritically and taken for granted.
That islands have been understood as the exoticized-other, isolated, and dependent—this much is known. Yet such tropes hinder a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the island condition and island prospects, and ignore the salience of the archipelago—an assemblage that invokes connection, mobility, and multiplicity across land- and sea- and sky-scapes large and small, real and imagined.
New ways of thinking and writing about islands and island futures are needed. Rethinking the Island series seeks to comprehensively investigate the range of topological and topographical characteristics that may lie at the heart of the idea of ‘islandness’. The books in this series will work from a twin understanding that the island is central to conceptions of self, place, and planet, and that the idealization of islands is upheld by strong associations between their materialities and their status as powerful imaginaries…
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