Ryan Lee Storment

Other Spaces, Other Voices - Heterotopic Spaces in Island Narratives Ryan Lee Storment

Islands periodically manifest themselves within cultural texts as locations for fantasy and the exotic. Through this process they function as a literary trope. Most often they are served up as blank slates, much like early visions of the western United States, where we meet cultural 'others' or encounter exotic experiences. Island narratives depict conflicts between dominant and margial cultures and are driven by exotic and resistant voices as much as dominant ones. Narratives such as The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, and The Island of Dr. Moreau depict these conflicts, frequently representing these social conflicts between different kinds of spaces. There is a jump that comes when the island becomes reused in science fiction narratives, such as Star Wars, where it can be replaced by a spaceship or planet. Michael Foucault, Philip Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari's models of space help us understand these competing spatial and socio-spatial regimes, as well as premodern, modern, and postmodern organizations of space. This book is meant to address an academic audience and develops a new understanding of island spaces and the integral role they play.