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IF INSULARITY IS A DISCERNIBLE DISCIPLINE, it is because it has a history. The most recent episode of that history is now called 'island theory', which has appeared in the last thirty years or so as a group of writings about island locations, characteristics, biologies, inhabitants, and cultures. When Frantz Fanon considered the fraught moments of a newly emerging "national culture," he characterized the cultural production immediately following a nation's independence as ideally embodying the "fluctuating movement" of the people who shaped a culture and "just as quickly [called] it all into question."1 The kind of continual questioning that Fanon describes might also be said to exemplify the field of island theory. The latter consists of, and continues to grow as, a series of provisional gestures characterized by "fluctuating movement" and challenges that immediately call into question its disciplinary boundaries, its choice of historically significant moments, and the relations among its disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical parts.
The following discussion begins with an overview of the recent field of island theory in the arts and sciences, including its challenges to established representations of islands and its remaining uncertainties. Here we will consider island space, island habitation, and island culture, the latter including communication among islands, islander agency, and island temporality. The components of island theory that will be distinguished arise most directly out of considerations of the Pacific rather than other archipelagic zones (for example, Indonesia, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean). However, the components are drawn in part from discussions of other locations, including what J.G.A. Pocock names the "Atlantic archipelago": i.e. England, Ireland, and other islands of northern Europe.2 Introduced into this discussion are the antipodes, which, as an island or group of islands on the other side of the world (antipodes, those whose feet are opposite), have been the epitome of northwestern perceptions of islands. To the European and (later) the American imaginary, the antipodes appear isolated from other land, humans, and human culture, and they perform a role of being necessarily opposite and sometimes opposed to the north-west and to continental, non-insular land-masses. Nevertheless, at the same time this essay emphasizes that they stand to the side of, or, as Eve Sedgwick suggests in another context, "beside" that history and disrupt it.3 Even...