Thinking Small: Islands and the Imperial Logics of Scale

Abstract: This essay examines how the meaning of small islands has shifted in our neoliberal present, in ways that reveal changing imperial, in particular US imperial, formations. Opening with a focus on Guam, I suggest that smallness not only invokes a long-standing colonial rhetoric about islands: namely, a relational logic used to render the island's subordination as natural. Rather, smallness has also become an absolute term; it can, and has, become, to borrow a phrase from the geographer Derek Gregory, a "vanishing point." Specifically, in the case of Guam—as well as increasingly islands around the world—their smallness has become integral to their use as exceptional zones of detention and disappearance. That is, a place can be made so small that it and the people on it (Indigenous populations, the world's displaced refugees, the renditioned in the global war on terror, and the islands themselves in the face of sea level rise) are not only rendered vulnerable and in need of "care" or "discipline" but made to discursively and, in turn, geopolitically, ontologically, and materially, disappear. The essay then turns to works by Jamaica Kincaid, Epeli Hau'ofa, and Édouard Glissant—and to other islands (Antigua, Tuvalu, and Nauru)—to explore countertopographical efforts that challenge the colonial and neocolonial logic and legacy of smallness while offering us other ways to imagine the postcolonial or decolonial scale of small islands in our contemporary world. Finally, the essay's conclusion identifies another source for this shift in the meaning of small islands: namely, climate change. The ideological erasure and disappearance that smallness facilitates, the essay argues, serves to both enable and obfuscate this increasing, and increasingly tragic, form of environmental violence.