- Fantasy Islands
In Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower brings us a portrait of a genre — narratives of the white male traveler lost on an island at the edge of empire — and explores the pedagogical centrality of this genre to the centuries-long project of explaining and naturalizing the European colonial project. A few of these texts, like Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest, have long been understood to reside at the center of the canon of literature about empire. In fact, Robinson Crusoe is understood to be so seminal a text that it gave its name to the genre: the Robinsonade. The vast majority of her examples, however, are far more obscure. Weaver-Hightower is interested in and indeed builds a complex genealogy of the genre, but prefers the terms “island narrative” or “castaway narrative.” She points out that these are more accurate terms because several examples of the genre precede Defoe’s book, and many later texts employ the props of Crusoe — islands, lost white men, survival of the individual in the eventual service of the imperial power — without directly engaging that book. But her renaming of the genre is more than simply an intervention into timelines [End Page 666] or intertextual intricacies. By downplaying the long-trumpeted singularity of Crusoe, Weaver-Hightower is able to bring some fairly basic questions about the genre to the fore. Why, incessantly, do these narratives focus on singular, lost white men surviving on small, uninhabited islands and encountering singular, often cannibal, nonwhite men and, sometimes, women? The colonial project was, after all, pursued on a continental scale by collectives of Europeans who encountered and engaged large numbers of established indigenous cultures. So why did the genre reduce these collectives to individuals? What about this man-alone formula was so pleasing, even comforting, to generations of readers?
The answer, for Weaver-Hightower, lies precisely in the scaling down, from the continent to the island and from the national to the individual. Noticing this scaling down in turn allows her to pursue the relationship — and for her it is constitutive — between the small, easily encompassed island and the singular, easily individuated white male body. This relationship leads her to the mildly psychoanalytic question, what can this genre’s fascination with the interrelation of deserted island and white male body teach us about the sociopsychology of empire? Deeply indebted to the work of Anne McClintock, Weaver-Hightower cites Imperial Leather as a methodological model, explaining that she uses what McClintock calls “a culturally contextualized psychoanalysis that is simultaneously a psychoanalytically informed history.”1 Weaver-Hightower is thus able to argue that reading about small-scale conquest literally implanted a useful imperial unconscious, and soothed readers trying to understand and digest the implications of imperial expansion. Reading these books distracted readers from the uncontrollable vastness of empire and taught them instead to feel empire as the “natural” impulse of the individual to survive. As Weaver-Hightower describes it in her introduction:
A complicated and ambivalent social system, then becomes contained in a subgenre, in the pages of a book, and in one man’s head. Just as Freud made the oedipal model seem natural as he internalized it and inserted it into “normal” psychosocial development, the authors of island narratives make imperial ideology seem natural by internalizing it and describing it in terms of the natural and logical behaviors of a castaway colonist surviving and “naturally” managing his own body. Producers of island narratives (both writers and the publishers who requested or responded to such tales) could thus subconsciously internalize the problems and paradigms of empire into a tale of a single, male colonial body — incorporating and thereby controlling — a single, uninhabited, bounded space. And in their pervasive consumption of island narratives, generations of colonial readers [End Page 667] could recognize and more easily manage their recodified, psychological, real-world desires.
(xxiii)
The book’s six chapters move thematically: we encounter cannibals, pirates, wild men, monsters, and, sprinkled throughout, homosexuals and rumors of homosexuals. Crusoe enters again toward...