Island Studies Journal, 15(2), Book Reviews

The Aesthetics of Island Space says the following: "When I began this project, I was strongly influenced by a tradition of scholarship that viewed literary islands-specially literary islands from the English-speaking world-as supreme figures of bounded space and the fictions of modern individualism, nationalism, and colonialism that accompanied it.These valuable analyses alerted me to the ongoing importance of islands in the Western imagination, and to the ideological functions they served.But I have gradually come to understand that British and American island narratives challenge these ideologies as frequently as they consolidate them, and that they mobilize and destabilize space as much as they render it static and controllable.It is this neglected story of islands that I wish to tell in this book, which aims to reconsider the central role islands have played in rethinking space since the 'insular moment' […] of early modernity" (pp.vii-viii).Riquet speaks of a personal journey, but, of course, this is also part of a broader, collective journey which many other European and North America island scholars have been on over the past few decades as well-what I have elsewhere called 'relational turn' (Pugh, 2016), which focuses upon engaging and disrupting the modern imaginary of islands as "enclosed, autonomous, and static spaces" (p.viii).Throughout, Riquet generates the powerful sense that the coherence of modern frameworks of reasoning (spatial, psychological, phenomenological, and so forth) was never straightforward in practice; and that islands, ostensibly emblematic bounded spaces of coherence, have played a central role in this realization.The specific focus and "premise" of Riquet's book is:that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable cognitive and perceptual challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via the poetic and aesthetic engagement with islands.While scholarship has frequently emphasized the literary construction of islands as geometrical abstractions and easily comprehended spaces, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implies a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience.(p.7) Thus, Chapter 1 focuses upon the modern migrant condition, islands and after-affects in the New World; foregrounding tropes of arrival, departure and rupture, as well as open senses of space, emergence and possibility.The examples engaged are extremely appropriate, and really carefully chosen, including Angel Island and Ellis Island, but also The Tempest and Cecil B. DeMille's 1919 film Male and Female "which was made just before the United States put a curb on immigration" (p.26).The figure of the isolated island is profoundly questioned and overturned.Chapter 2 develops this theme and the disruption of modern frameworks of reasoning

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