Progress report Political geography II: Islands and archipelagos Alison Mountz Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada Abstract This second of two progress reports on the subdiscipline of political geography explores islands and archipelagos as material sites and political concepts with which to understand spatial ontologies of power. The piece reviews thematic interests in the interdisciplinary field of island studies as well as those taken up by political geographers. Areas for future research are also identified. Keywords archipelago, imperialism, island, political geography, power, territory According to The Island Studies Reader, approximately 10% of the world’s population – some 600 million people – live on islands (Baldacchino, 2007b). The institutionalization of the field that endeavors to study islanders and their places is well underway: courses taught, chairs named, and journals and annual confer- ences organized. 1 Island studies is a well- established interdisciplinary field, an area of increasing interest to political geographers, and the focus of my second report on trends in scho- larship in the subdiscipline. I begin by exploring the ways that islands and archipelagos figure into critical approaches to power and politics among political geographers. I then review recent scholarship on islands by political geo- graphers, noting particular themes and ques- tions animating the field and subdiscipline. Finally, I explore areas for expanded research. What is an island, other than a body of land surrounded by water? Islands evoke infinite imaginaries, from dreams of development, escape, and exoticism to exploitation and impri- sonment. Islands are unique locations, which may fuel the tendency toward geographical ima- ginaries that orientalize an other. For writer Adam Nicolson (2007: 153), the island ‘is a place defined by its otherness, thriving on noth- ing more than its distance and difference from the mainland to which it is opposed’. To many, islands are simply home. In Edouard Glissant’s (1997) writing on the roots of slavery and post- coloniality in the Antilles, the figures of boat, island, and archipelago are deeply rooted in the corporeality of island histories, identities, and sovereignties. Given so many imaginaries, how does one begin to trace the contours of the field of island studies? Put simply, island studies endeavors to understand islands on their own terms, a line of inquiry also called nissology (McCall, 1994). The field is as varied thematically as the Corresponding author: Alison Mountz, Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada. Email: amountz@wlu.ca Progress in Human Geography 1–11 ª The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132514560958 phg.sagepub.com by guest on January 7, 2015 phg.sagepub.com Downloaded from