Empire Islands
Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest
Exposes the castaway story’s place in the support of colonialism
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues that by helping generations of readers to make sense of—and perhaps feel better about—imperial aggression, the castaway story in effect enabled the expansion and maintenance of European empire. Drawing on readings of works from Thomas More's Utopia and The Tempest to lesser-known works, Weaver-Hightower examines themes of cannibalism, monstrosity, and the concept of going native.
With its imaginative use of cultural and psychoanalytic theories, Empire Islands offers a trenchant and engaging analysis of castaway stories, illuminating their historical and contemporary significance for a world newly attuned to imperial issues.
Peter Hulme, University of Essex
Through a detailed unpacking of the castaway genre’s appeal in English literature, Empire Islands forwards our understanding of the sociopsychology of British Empire. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues convincingly that by helping generations of readers to make sense of—and perhaps feel better about—imperial aggression, the castaway story in effect enabled the expansion and maintenance of European empire.
Empire Islands asks why so many colonial authors chose islands as the setting for their stories of imperial adventure and why so many postcolonial writers “write back” to those castaway narratives. Drawing on insightful readings of works from Thomas More’s Utopia to Caribbean novels like George Lamming’s Water with Berries, from canonical works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest to the lesser-known A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel by Ralph Morris, Weaver-Hightower examines themes of cannibalism, piracy, monstrosity, imperial aggression, and the concept of going native.
Ending with analysis of contemporary film and the role of the United States in global neoimperialism, Weaver-Hightower exposes how island narratives continue not only to describe but also to justify colonialism.
With its imaginative use of cultural and psychoanalytic theories, Empire Islands offers a trenchant and engaging analysis of castaway stories, illuminating their historical and contemporary significance for a world newly attuned to imperial issues.
Peter Hulme, University of Essex
Weaver-Hightower offers a cogent, literate consideration of why islands have figured so persistently in English literature.
Choice
There is much to be gleaned from Weaver-Hightower’s extensive research.
Leonardo
Empire Islands is a work of considerable scholarship that brings a fresh look and deeper understanding to literature set on islands and it is a valuable contribution to the wider field of island studies.
Island Studies Journal
Contents
Introduction Islands and the Narrating of Possession
1 Monarchs of All They Survey
2 Disciplined Islands: White Fatherhood, Homosocial Masculinity, and Law
3 Voracious Cannibals, Rapacious Pirates, and Threats of Counterincorporation
4 “Falling to the Lowest Degree of Brutishness”: Wild Men, Monsters, and the Bestial Taint
5 Island Parodies and Crusoe Pantomimes: Resistance from Within
6 The U.S. Island Fantasy, or Cast Away with Gilligan
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Related Publications
Lying on the Postcolonial Couch
The Idea of Indifference
Exposes the complicity of language and its uses in the colonial project
The Tragic History of the Sea
Compelling stories of shipwreck, adventure, and death on the high seas, now back in print.
Tempest in the Caribbean
Places sexuality at the center of Caribbean responses to Shakespeare’s play
The Colonization of Psychic Space
A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression
Reveals the psychic and social costs of racial and sexual oppression
Cannibal Democracy
Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas
Cannibalism as a metaphor for racial assimilation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil
From Cannibals to Radicals
Figures and Limits of Exoticism
In this fascinating analysis, Roger Célestin examines the concept of exoticism from a historical and literary perspective. Through close readings of works by Montaigne, Diderot, Flaubert, Barthes, and Naipaul, Célestin examines the way these writers have challenged representations of cultural identity in their time.
Caliban and Other Essays
Cultural and literary essays by a Cuban poet, essayist, and professor of philology who is known for his meticulous efforts to dismantle Eurocentric colonial and neocolonial thought. “Caliban”—the first and longest of the five essays in this book—has become a kind of manifesto for Latin American and Caribbean writers; its central figure, the rude savage of Shakespeare’s Tempest, becomes in Retamar’s hands a powerful metaphor of their cultural situation—both in its marginality and its revolutionary potential.