Utopian and insular spaces in Chinese literature: An island approach

In response to the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to the relationship between island utopia and Chinese literature, this paper studies the imagination of both island and insular geographies in Chinese ‘utopian’ literature using an island-sensitive approach. Employing an expanded and constructive conception of the island, the paper examines the heterogeneity of Chinese island and insular imaginaries in literary works from diverse historical periods, especially in relation to the dominant western model of the remote tropical oceanic island. Based on the finding that the alterity of Chinese island and insular imagination lies as much in its depiction of spatial ambiguities as in its mixing of diverse figures, I reflect further on the benefits and perils of adopting a west-inflected island approach in examining the imaginary landscapes of utopianism and insularity in Chinese literature. It is argued that Chinese island literature is more a reading effect enabled by an imported theoretical approach than any inherent tradition in itself. In the end, two paths for innovating island aesthetics and epistemologies in cross-cultural contexts are proposed.

Literary and cultural (re)productions of a utopian island: Performative geographies of colonial Shamian, Guangzhou in the latter half of the 19th century

In the second half of the 19th century, Shamian was established and developed as a colonial island enclave in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Simultaneously, literary and cultural imaginations, depictions, and narrations of the place produced a discourse of Shamian as a utopian island: geographically insular and bounded, environmentally beautiful and peaceful, socially exclusive and harmonious, and technologically progressive and advantageous. This paper examines contemporaneous (predominantly English) literary and cultural representations of Shamian as a colonial utopia and their interrelations with the island’s spatial formation and evolution. These texts (primarily written and pictorial descriptive, non-fictional accounts) reflected the spatial reality but also promoted spatial practices that reinforced the physical utopian island. This process exemplifies the theories of performative geographies in island studies and intertextuality in geocriticism, showing how a place’s spatial representations and reality are mutually constructed. Adopting a conceptual model of intertextual performative geographies, this paper investigates the dynamic interplay of these literary and cultural texts with the spatial reality, arguing that literary and cultural representations of Shamian (re)produced the colonial enclave as a utopian island, both conceptually and practically.

Factors influencing the level of Social Responsibility of marine tourism companies and restaurants: The island of Fuerteventura

This research aims to analyse the factors that affect the level of commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of marine tourism companies and restaurants. This commitment can be conditioned by economic reasons, stakeholder pressure, difficulties in implementing socio-environmentally responsible actions, and adaptation to change, as reflected in the innovative activities of companies, as well as by the degree of collaboration with public and private agents. This study was carried out on the island of Fuerteventura. A Likert scale questionnaire with 39 items was designed to collect the data, which was processed using a combination of factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. The results show that innovation, stakeholder pressure, and economic reasons have positive effects on companies’ commitment to CSR, while poor collaboration with public and private actors and implementation difficulties have negative effects. Given that this sector is highly regulated and depends on different public authorities to carry out its activity, collaboration with the public administration must be improved to reduce barriers for companies and their activities. Moreover, when an island’s economy depends almost exclusively on tourist activity, it is essential to develop responsible tourism. This requires public authorities that organise and promote sustainable uses of the territory, while encouraging dialogue and facilitating mechanisms for private initiatives, as well as socio-environmentally responsible companies.

The ‘other’ within: Striving for health equity in the Maldives Eva-Maria

Relations within are quintessential in anthropological fieldwork — and in archipelagos in particular. The domestic sea is incorporated in the national consciousness connecting an archipelagic nation but distinguishing individual islands with a strong emphasis on the centre. The Maldivian archipelago displays this spatial organization of a socio-political and economic centre and a dependent island periphery. In the national consciousness, the capital island, Male', contrasts with “the islands” — a distinction which is particularly evident in the public health sphere, where striving for health equity encounters geographical and socio-political obstacles. Using the topic of the inherited blood disorder thalassaemia as a magnifying lens, this paper asks how different actors are making sense of health inequities between central and outer islands in the Maldivian archipelago. Intra-archipelagic and international mobilities add to the complexities of topological relations, experiences, and representations within this multi-island assemblage. Yet, my study of archipelagic health relations is not confined to a mere outside look at the construction of the ‘island other’ within the archipelagic community. It is a situated investigative gaze on disjunctures, connections, and entanglements, reflecting my methodological-theoretical attempt to unravel my own involvement in island–island relations and representations — my being entangled while investigating entanglements.

Decolonial thinking: A critical perspective on positionality and representations in island studies

Scholars conducting research on and about islands face the challenge of countering the epistemic and methodological dominance of external perspectives on islands with an insular internal view, while also avoiding essentializing the island or reproducing Western perspectives. Islands have always been—and in some cases still are—confronted with a colonial gaze. Thus, to avoid producing hegemonic epistemology, we call for critical reflection on how islands are represented in our research, which theoretical concepts are referred to, and what knowledge is produced by applying them. Furthermore, we appeal for a reconsideration of the researcher’s positionality within the field and their role in knowledge production. This special section is a contribution to the decolonial project within island studies.

Growing hope: Island agriculture and refusing catastrophe in climate change adaptation in Fiji

In both media and policy, climate change is broadly framed as the promise of catastrophe for small island states such as Fiji. This framing is often used to attract adaptation investment in islands, the targets and directives of which are frequently market-based and oriented toward economic-growth development models. In Fiji, this takes the form of land tenure policy and efforts to attract investment to support agricultural modernization. Such a pattern is the source of scholarly and activist critique that climate change adaptation is nothing more than a repackaging of neoliberal development. This paper seeks to situate such critique alongside parallel attention to climate change adaptation practices emerging from alternative, hopeful frames and aimed at less national development driven efforts. In doing so, it centers adaptation as a space of unsettled struggle and asks, in what ways do climate change adaptation practices in Fiji align and conflict with dominant framing of island vulnerability and climate catastrophe, and how might they suggest alternative adaptive interventions that renegotiate these frames? Specifically, this paper focuses on efforts to promote ‘traditional’ agriculture throughout Fiji as an endogenous and hopeful form of adaptation, and one consistently opposed to efforts at agricultural modernization as an adaptation strategy.

Female migration in the Cape Verde islands: From islandness to transnationalism

Following island studies scholars’ suggestion to think “with the archipelago” in order to denaturalize and de-territorialize the object of study and grant more attention to decolonization processes and mobilities, this paper uses a gender perspective and multi-sited ethnographic research to explore changes in Cape Verdean identity perception related to islandness and migration issues. The tension between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’ is significant in the case of Cape Verde, where the relationship between the island and islanders represents a condition of being in the world. The sea opens to the outside, but it also closes off and imprisons islanders within the borders of the island. Before the 1970s, when most Cape Verdean migrants were men, inside/outside boundaries were played out as gender boundaries along the male/female opposition: external/internal, Terra Longe (the outside world)/Terra Mamaizinha (the motherland), danger/security. On the isle of Santo Antão, however, this has been changing with the gradual feminization of emigration to Europe. This shift has revolutionized the previous sense of home, giving rise to a new form of transnational female family that connects places of immigration and places of origin while also reorienting Cape Verdean female belonging from insular to transnational.

Future past I am a coolie-al…and I reside as an invisible island inside the ocean: Tidalectics, transoceanic crossings, coolitude and a Tamil identity

The politics of Tamil working-class identity in Malaysia continue to be articulated in subaltern terms, employing term such as ‘coolie’, which is elsewhere an archaic usage from colonial days. Yet the power of the coolie narrative appears salient, and the coolie odyssey is far from over. Drawing upon the author’s longitudinal work with a Tamil squatter settlement in the heart of the city of Kuala Lumpur in the Malay Archipelago, this paper moves from third to first and then second narrative to capture the broad range of ruptures and transformations of Tamil sensibilities, a ‘coolitude’ that grew a pattern of life which emerged from a journey that began on the sea. In this article, the author envisions the ‘black ocean’ as an invisible island; shaped by colonial and imperial histories, racial capitalism and ocean crossings. These transoceanic crossings carried the weight of Tamil histories, rooted in the seas as an invisible island—as both the rupture of an identity and a translation from western namings and discourses. What remains is the ‘island’, rooted in the seas as a colonial wound of history, a tidalectic between transoceanic migration, personhood and language. This community is more than just its resilience, its assertions of power, its affair with identity and belonging, and its response to deep social inequalities in its homeland. It is also a space of a poetics of resoluteness to recover an identity that is not fractured, not alienated from place and transoceanic crossings. This paper attempts a retelling of a hidden hyphen that held the labourer and the personhood apart, but also together. It navigates through the concept of tidalectics first postulated by Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Braithwaite (2003) in conjunction with Valentine Daniel’s (2008) The Coolie and Khal Torabully’s (1992) Coolitude. The paper seeks to understand more deeply the performativity of the hyphen as an invisible island inside the ocean.

Demographic carrying capacity model: A tool for decision-making in Rapa Nui

The increase of population in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has fueled concerns within the community, given the uncertainty of its impacts. These concerns have driven a socio-political process that triggered the enactment of Law 21,070, which regulates the access and permanence of visitors in the territory as a way to cushion the pressure on different environmental, social, and infrastructure components that affect the local quality of life. However, for its application, this law requires technical foundations that allow restrictions to be applied and, therefore, knowledge about the demographic capacity of the territory is also needed. To this end, a dynamic model was built, which consists of different variables that are sensitive to population growth and also can be projected into the future, thus delivering timely information for decision-making. This paper describes the socio-political context for the creation of this instrument, as well as its elaboration process and main results.

Firm local embeddedness in an insular region: The Åland Islands compared to Finland

The present study analyzes the difference between the Åland Islands — an insular and peripheral part of Finland — and Finland as a whole in terms of firm local embeddedness. The analysis utilizes matched employee-employer longitudinal data for all businesses in Finland, including the Åland Islands, from 2006 to 2014. Local embeddedness is modelled both as tenure (the number of years a key stakeholder in a firm has lived in the same municipality as the firm) and by calculating the geographical distance the key stakeholder lives from the focal firm. Contrary to our expectations, we find that for our tenure measure of local embeddedness, firms are actually less locally embedded in the peripheral region than in the larger country. However, our distance measure of local embeddedness performs as expected with firms in the peripheral region. We hypothesize that that there may be an optimal level of local embeddedness, above which a local firm does not necessarily gain by further increasing its local embeddedness.