Insularity: Small Worlds in Linguistic and Cultural Perspectives ed. by Heimath Ralf and Kremer Arndt (review)

This collection of sixteen articles arises out of a 2013 conference entitled ‘Insularity: Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds’. A set of papers, from the same conference, treating of literary representations has been published separately. The present volume gathers articles that treat mainly of linguistics and culture. The aim is ‘to light up the multiplicity’ of the notion of insularity.

The evaluation of the volume inevitably thus has to be a double one. There is, first, the intrinsic interest of each article, which taken together cover a wide range: from the use of ‘island’ as metaphor or figure in political, literary and linguistic theory to the significance of islands for a political or historical sociology; ‘insular’ mentalities among scientists, German-language pupils in Malta and inhabitants of the Danube Delta; ‘language islands’ (of German speakers in Romania, New Zealand or Palestine) and island languages (here represented by Maltese); and representations of ‘islands’ (from the change in representation of Malta, from an African island to ‘shield of Europe’ in the sixteenth century, to the representation of diaspora Romanians in contemporary Canada). Second, there is the evaluation of whether the diverse parts add up to a whole—that is, if the volume does ‘light up the multiplicity’ of the key term in a way that enriches our analytical understanding.

Arndt Kremer’s first article performs two key services. He convincingly establishes the significance of islands as literary figures and topoi—not just in various classics of Western literature (Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Kafka and Golding, to name a few) but also in contemporary literary and social theory. Given the importance of space in theory generally, and the distinctive ways space is treated by writers as diverse as Foucault, De Certeau, Deleuze and Derrida, how does the notion of island inform such theories (if at all) and how might such theories illuminate the notion? For the latter two writers, for example, islands were figurative places of transformation and imagination—rather than of closed mentalities resistant to change.

Having established why ‘insularity’ is a promising topic of interdisciplinary investigation, Kremer proceeds to explain—for those readers without a background in linguistics—the origins of the term ‘language island’. It is a term peculiar to German linguistics—‘language enclave’ or ‘language minority’ being preferred in the Anglo-American tradition—and its roots lie in the particular historical and sociological profile of German-language speakers in eastern Europe, the Americas and Africa. The explanation, however, also raises an implicit question for the reader: given that the key term, ‘language island’, is a metaphor whose referent could be equally signified by terms like ‘enclave’ or ‘minority’, to what extent is the term ‘language islands’ and the other uses of the term ‘island’ and ‘insularity’ linked, by more than a figure of speech, to the substantive issues highlighted by Kremer in the earlier part of his article?

The volume registers five uses. First, two articles use the notion of insularity in the ordinary-language sense: a closed mind with limited horizons. Stavros Assimakopoulos treats of insularity among practising scientists/academics: their resistance to interdisciplinary collaboration, their social preference for academics with the same research interests and methodological convictions. George Cremona concludes that Maltese pupils in their first year of studying German as a foreign language have a one-sided ideological view of Germany and Germans because of an insular mentality. Both articles are of intrinsic interest; Assimakopoulos, in particular, draws on relevance theory and the argumentative theory of reasoning to show why academic research proceeds the way it does (although it is odd that an article insisting on the value of interdisciplinary dialogue does not even allude to how its arguments fit in with the work of, say, Bruno Latour or Randall Collins). However, in both cases the image of ‘insularity’ seems to depend largely on the writer’s choice, not on the data: ‘silo thinking’ could have substituted ‘insularity’ among...