Islands as (Floating) Images: Towards a Poetic Theory of Island Geography

Abstract

Taking Tim Robinson’s essay “Islands and Images” (1996) as its starting point, this chapter examines the island as a spatial figure articulating contradictory conceptions of the world and of subjectivity. Islands have offered “the delusion of a comprehensible totality” (Robinson) and a readily accessible (and visual) identity ever since the “insular moment” of early modernity (Conley), but they have simultaneously functioned as figures resisting geometrical abstraction. Reading Robinson’s essay alongside discussions of islands by Jacques Derrida and Benoit Mandelbrot, I argue that islands are not only connected to a modern march towards visual spatial control, but have also challenged a cartographic view of space and, correspondingly, a view of subjectivity as clearly demarcated and mappable. The final part of the chapter turns to Georg Christoph Munz’s Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus (1711) to discuss the floating island as a mobile figure of a relational spatiality and, correspondingly, of identity conceived in terms of dispersal, flows and transitions.