Human Geography and Islands

Abstract

Work on islands has long played a critical role in the development of many academic disciplines that overlap and are intimately connected with the discipline of geography. Islands were central to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and have subsequently been for the development of ecological, sustainability, and resilience approaches that are prevalent in geography in the 2020s. Islanders were the focal points for Margaret Mead’s and Marylin Strathern’s developments of the discipline of anthropology, concerns for Indigenous geographies, and the counterpositioning of nonmodern reasoning to European or Western frameworks of reasoning. Islands and islanders have also long been a key focus for many who have critiqued the forces of colonialism, such as Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, and Derek Walcott, whose work is extremely influential for Critical Black Geographies. More recently, engaging islands and islanders shaped Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s influential reappraisal of how academic research itself can and should do better, reorienting toward more geographically appropriate Indigenous perspectives. What this is already telling us is that any bibliography compiled under the title of “Geography and Islands” needs to work beyond the boundaries of neatly defined academic disciplines. The focus is the geographical form, the island, and associated island cultures, and thus geographers who study islands regularly step outside fixed disciplines. Thus, this article presents a range of references that are categorized by way of key early-21st-century island themes and topics that will be of particular concern to geographers. Here, the decades since the late 20th century have seen the rise of a more distinct or focused field of academic inquiry, which has come to be known as “island studies.” The key characteristics of this field are its diversity, interdisciplinarity, openness, and extremely rapid growth—geographically, intellectually, and in the broad range of topics and subjects being engaged with in the 2020s. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the term “island studies” did not have much purchase. In the 2020s, due to the strong repositioning of islands within broader concerns—such as human-nature relations, current developments in environmental and resilience approaches, the ongoing legacies and effects of colonialism, Indigenous geographies, migration patterns, mobilities and movements of humans and nonhumans, geopolitical tensions and strategies, and the Anthropocene, as just some examples—the figure of the island has moved considerably more to the center of many debates (and particularly those debates that concern geographers). This article therefore also reflects the sense of dynamism, as well as the interdisciplinary nature, of work with islands as an exponentially developing field of research.