The literature of exploration, slavery, and colonialism is replete with islands. For explorers, islands have always been objects of desire, the in the vastness of the seas for which he questers long in their sojourn to bring under the cartographic system of the map and render them amenable to discursive control. The explorer's narrative, always pointing from the center to the islands located at the margins of the seas, is a narrative produced by the center, for the center, and of the center. In this respect, it is a narrative conditioned by the tropological/narrative con? ventions and discursive expectations, which govern that relationship. The investment in otherness, the tropes of its representation, and the entire symbology that went with it have become so well known as to bear no repeat? ing. And with the advent of the slave trade and colonialism and the movement from exploration to exploitation came a consolidation of these representations in a more malignant and sinister direction. To put it sim? ply, the blank spaces and virgin lands of an earlier discourse later metamorphosed into places of darkness (see, for instance, Smith). Several critics and commentators have charted the historical and dis?