Making the island. Islandness, carcerality and unstable containment at the southern Spanish border

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does an island become a carceral space? How does islandness shift between openness and foreclosure? Border geographers have engaged carcerality as a relational and expansive quality. Islands figure prominently in these discussions. Although scholars have denaturalised islands as carceral spaces, the unstable character of islandness remains undertheorised in border studies and carceral geography. Building on qualitative research conducted in the Canary Islands in 2021, this paper bridges literature from carceral geography and island studies to argue that apprehending carcerality on islands obliges us to engage with islandness as a non-static process. Islands embody a tension between foreclosure and openness and thus there is a possibility that borders might emerge, thicken, move but also deflate and fade away. Containment on islands thus assumes four qualities: it is manufactured, it is multiscalar, it is racialized and it is fundamentally dynamic.