Insularity—Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds ed. by Katrin Dautel and Kathrin Schödel (review)

It has been many years since I first encountered Predrag Matvejevic’s seminal work Mediterranean—A Cultural Landscape and leafed with utter fascination through his lyrical biography of the eponymous sea he loves so much. His depiction of islands and islanders in that book is particularly memorable for its understanding—at once limpid and fluid—of islands as protean and ambivalent sites of marine, human, cultural and imaginary life, eminent spaces of difference and differentiation. ‘One trait most islands share’, Matvèjevic writes, ‘is the anticipation of things to come’(Matvejevic 1999; 17). It was with this thought in mind that I approached the recently-published volume Insularity — Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds, co-edited by Katrin Dautel and Kathrin Schödel. And I was not to be disappointed. Debates on the question of ‘the insular’ that do not somehow indulge or submit to its literal or otherwise rehearsed connotations do not grow on trees. In this sense, this collection of essays is a breath of fresh air—in its resolve to retain and explore the dialectical and ambivalent identific-ations of insularity from myriad angles and in an associative and relational spirit. Teasing out the generous intellectual nuances of a subject-matter that has often, in past exegeses, been summarily consigned to routine and well-trodden perspectives, perhaps even rescuing it from the latter, is a distinguishing mark of this new publication.

One strength of this volume lies in its expansive address of the notion of the insular as an organic and breathing constellation of perspectives that exploit the topic’s oppositional evocations precisely in order to invoke the ambivalences, anxieties, and contingencies that emanate in the process. Its interests range from comparative literary scholarship and ‘the literary localisation of social utopias’ (13) to cultural critique, questions of artificial intelligence and the ramifications of the concept in the postcolonial humanities. The editors never lose sight of the volume’s underlying rationale: a profiling of insularity that explores the interaction between its experiential and discursive bearings, whilst upholding their commitment towards an interface—exciting and fraught in equal measure—between small-world and utopian discourses. The aptitude for both range and depth of analysis down this piste, as well as a speculative edge in various of its contributions, is one conspicuous strength of this collection: the essays explore both the ‘desirable’ and the ‘problematic’ tropes and manifestations of insularity, mindful, in the process, that the dynamics of the insular often operates at ‘sites of contending discursive constructions, spanning from aesthetic projections to political decisions enforcing insular exclusions’ (15).

Significantly, the editors choose to harness their approach to the questions of the insular addressed in the volume by underlining the spatial turn that critical and cultural theory and other fields of analysis opened up in the last four decades of last century—not least, of course, with Henri Lefebvre’s pioneering La Production de l’Espace. Insularity is similarly concerned with the impact of space on social processes, which the editors refer to in their critical introduction, as well as subsequent takes on the social production and processing of space foremost amongst which is Michel Foucault’s formulation of his ‘heterotopian’ space—also singled out by the editors as a conceptuality that influences and characterises several of the volume’s contributions.

The book, which brings together twenty-three contributions (including the introduction) around the question of insularity, had its beginnings in the interdisciplinary conference Insularity—Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds, which was organised by members of the Department of German at the University of Malta in November 2013 in Valletta, Malta. The book is divided in four sections which address theoretical approaches to insularity, insularity in German literature, the insular in comparative literature, and questions of interculturality and intermediality. This first section finds its strength in discerning and broaching some of the crucial, even indispensable conceptual debates and problematics concerning the...