If Islands Did Not Exist, It Would Be Necessary to Invent Them: Grappling With Divergent Ascriptions of Islandness in Island Studies

Island studies has had much to say about why understanding perceptions of islandness matters for understanding the world, and it has often questioned what islandness is. Island studies has nevertheless often taken for granted that islandness ought to be perceived and has often seen islandness as something good that requires preservation. The act of studying islands per se introduces the risk that a researcher will look for and look at islands without considering whether the islands they are seeing really exist to everyone, and whether they exist for certain other people in the ways the scholar believes them to exist. In this paper, we argue that there can never be a universally or objectively correct understanding of islands, as these are socially constructed geographical phenomena. Building upon the authors’ own personal engagements with questions of islandness in China, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland, and Fiji, we suggest it is important for scholars to think carefully about why and how islandness matters in particular places—or else to acknowledge what motivations and power relations drive them to ascribe island status.