Between Islands: Colonial Legacies and Cultural Imaginaries

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores one aspect of the geo-cultural axis constructing the “between” of England as island-metropole and the colonised islands of the Antillean archipelago: that of the crucial significance of the figuration of “island” in the colonial cultural imaginary of the early modern period. It is suggested that the development of “island” as key topographical trope, signifying sea power as opposed to continental imperialism, was a crucial means through which the metropolitan English curated an image of how colonial expansionism might be given meaning, and be experienced, in such a way as to enhance and enrich, rather than overwhelm and impoverish, England as “small island.” Using material drawn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, the paper traces the emergence of, first, England imaged as island garden-paradise, and then, second, the transposition and translation of “garden-paradise” islands into the tropics. This is framed by two images: the first the late seventeenth-century Paston Treasure, and the second a late eighteenth-century portrait of two young women by David Martin. The first is used to illustrate the need to order and curate images of, and in response to, the ‘colonial’ as an experience of encounter and engagement with “Other” through processes of legitimated and authorised subjectification. The second is deployed to illustrate the extent to which the “insular” English cultural imaginary achieved and sustained an account of the beneficial-colonial overseas project and marginalised, to the point of suppression, the violence of the actual-colonial in/on remote “(small) islands.” The portrait of the two women is then used to project forward in time in order to make visible the continuing strength of the colonial legacy of paradise-islands in the contemporary English cultural imaginary: in particular, in the exotic out-of-world and timeless imagery deployed in tourist brochures. As a final coda, the paper ends with referencing the potential of an-other “between islands”: that of a complex network of inter-Antillean creolisation interrupting and challenging the legacy of the linear and centrifugal metropole-(post-)colonial island axis.