Research Archive

This paper explores the role of local food markets in the planning and development of complex and dynamic everyday gendered spaces that contribute to island resilience and sustainable development. Based on the case study of Sakaemachi Market in Okinawa, Japan, the research analyses the market in the context of postwar reconstruction, gendered labor, and the politics of Okinawa, a society built on a village-based communal structure centered on shima. The name of the market, meaning ‘Prosperous Town’, anticipates its current role in the protection and promotion of kinship, locality, and collective care. Results show market narratives embedded in historical and spatial foundations that articulate the gendered memory of the evolution from postwar reconstruction to community formation. Results also show the market’s contemporary functions and social infrastructure, the intergenerational labor and cultural transmission involved, and the revitalization and resistance to redevelopment through a constant negotiation of change and continuity.

Scholars conducting research on and about islands face the challenge of countering the epistemic and methodological dominance of external perspectives on islands with an insular internal view, while also avoiding essentializing the island or reproducing Western perspectives. Islands have always been—and in some cases still are—confronted with a colonial gaze. Thus, to avoid producing hegemonic epistemology, we call for critical reflection on how islands are represented in our research, which theoretical concepts are referred to, and what knowledge is produced by applying them. Furthermore, we appeal for a reconsideration of the researcher’s positionality within the field and their role in knowledge production. This special section is a contribution to the decolonial project within island studies.

The pursuit of nissology, or island studies, calls for a re-centering of focus from mainland to island, away from the discourse of conquest of mainlanders, giving voice and platform for the expression of island narratives. Yet, studying islands ‘on their own terms’, in spite of its predilection for “authenticity”, is fraught with epistemological and methodological difficulties. The insider/outsider distinction does not work all that well when it comes to islands, where hybridity is the norm. This paper seeks to extend this debate, grappling especially with the contributions of Grant McCall and Peter Hay to the sparse literature. Five dilemmas related to indigenous island geographies are presented and discussed, in a semi-autobiographical style.

Between 1946 and 1975, dozens of islands and outports in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador were abandoned as part of a government resettlement policy. Families and communities were torn apart, and a culture and way of life that revolved around the fishery changed irrevocably. The practice, which continues to this day, has been well documented, particularly by artists and writers. Michael Crummey’s 2014 novel Sweetland is a recent iteration. The relationship between humans and place is complex: on an island, with compressed space and a very real boundary that is the ocean, emotional attachments to one’s place are often heightened and distilled. What happens when a person is displaced from his or her island; when bonds of attachment are severed and one’s mirrored double is destroyed? Sweetland offers a fictional lens through which we see an example of a mirrored relationship between an island protagonist and his island setting. Exploring themes of attachment to place, and what Barry Lopez calls a “storied” or “reciprocal” relationship with the land, this paper examines what happens to a man when confronted with leaving an island he knows as deeply as his own body and soul; and how the island reacts.

This article discusses the Indian film Ram Setu (2022) against the backdrop of 21st century public discourses, geological debates, legal proceedings and the general surge of politics revolving around the eponymous tombolo – Ram Setu/Adam’s Bridge (understood by geologists as a stretch of 103 patchy reefs or shallow shoals connecting India’s Rameswaram Island with Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island). It is important to question the locus standi of not only the filmmakers but also the film’s widespread critics. The bulk of the criticism against the film converged around the notion that the filmmakers had attempted to pander to growing Hindutva-oriented sentiments in India. What is more concerning, however, is that both the filmmakers and the film’s critics have remained silent on the tombolo’s aquapelagicity. While the film’s emphasis on archaeology as a methodology of reconstructing the tombolo’s past signals delusions of grandeur, the continued absence of a voice to highlight its geological history is equally disingenuous. Seen through the critical lenses of Island Studies, the film Ram Setu is seen to obscure holistic perspectives of the sacred aquapelago of Rameswaram Island, Dhanushkodi, Thalaimannar and Mannar Island and its entanglements with questions of Tamil fisher’s livelihoods and environmental heritages of the Sethusamudram region.

This essay builds a discussion of an Okinawan women’s contemporary feminist movement working on decolonization scholarship through a particular focus on islands and resilience. In doing so, I engage with Keiko Katsukata-Inafuku’s seminal essay titled “Creating an Okinawan Women’s Studies: Confronting Colonial Modernity with the Agency of ‘Unaiism’” (2016) to explicate the significance of her analysis of the festival while identifying where the focus of resilience and islands may add to the discussion. I argue that juxtapositions of islands and resilience offer a generative configuration of islands and islanders’ agencies, not as static, small, distant, backwards, and underdeveloped. I first return to the linkage of islands and feminism to show how the Unai Festival presented island feminist relationalities by convening women’s issues brought together in reconsideration of women’s epistemologies in Okinawa. Then I examine how proceedings of the first Unai Festival demonstrate the diversity of gendered experiences in Okinawa, which in turn constitutes a form of feminist resilience in solidarity with women on the islands of Okinawa and beyond.

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.