Empire Islands:
Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of
Conquest
by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2007
277 pp., illus. Trade, $70.50; paper,
$23.50
ISBN: 0-8166-4863-8; ISBN: 0-8166-4862-X.
Reviewed by Rick Mitchell
Department of English
California State University, Northridge
rick.mitchell@csun.edu
Rebecca Weaver-Hightowers Empire
Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies
of Conquest provides a comprehensive
overview of Western castaway tales, primarily
from the heyday of British imperialism,
and it includes a final chapter that leaps
to the present in order to examine some
recent U.S. films and TV castaway showssuch
as Cast Away and Survivor,
the "reality" TV programwhich the
author reads as cultural embodiments of
"neo-imperialism." This compendium-like
volume's primary focus, however, is on
Western, colonial-period, island castaway
stories, including some theatrical parodies,
such as British pantomimes from the nineteenth
century. While frequently referring back
to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,
as well as to other colonial tales, Empire
Islands emphasizes that popular "castaway
island narratives shaped a positive image
of the colonial enterprise and spread
fantasies of imperial legitimacy" (p.
39). According to the author, these narratives
"both recodify the larger dynamics of
colonization and consumption and psychologically
enable those processes by presenting them
as natural" (p. 39). Thus, island castaway
tales are powerful agents of colonial
socialization.
Although Empire Islands will introduce
most readers to some island castaway narratives
with which they are unfamiliar, much of
the volume covers familiar territory regarding
colonialism and Western literary production.
Yet the book does offer some fresh arguments.
Weaver-Hightower asserts, for example,
that although Western writers often refer,
metaphorically, to land claimed by colonizers
as female, the colonized island is more
male-like than other types of colonized
land masses. "(T)he body that the island
represents is a manly body," she says
early on, "meaning that Empire Islands
engages and challenges previous critical
work examining discourse of the colonizable
land as a female body" (p. xi). To help
prove her point, she shows how the "fantasy
of masculine bodily discipline" (p. 50)
within several castaway tales helps European
colonizers to be confident in "their control
and superiority over their Others" (pp.
50-51). The castaway's ability to maintain
heteronormative discipline over his body
while stranded on an island implies that
the male castaway deserves to possess
the island, which also becomes disciplined,
and thus male-like, as a result of the
castaway's actions upon it. The successful
male castaway/ disciplinarian, for example,
often domesticates island animals, creates
orderly plots of land for farming, builds
Western-like living arrangements, and
even "improves" indigenous peoples, who,
like Crusoe's Friday, become faithful
servants. The male fantasy of possessing
a land that he re-makes in his masculine,
disciplined image is, the book argues,
a crucial ideological element of the island
castaway tale:
"The popular narrative, which
dramatized those fantasies of
contrasting gendered bodies, recodified
fears of threatened or unstable
imperialism onto the circumspect,
safe island and further into the
well-managed body of the male
castaway at the center of the
island." (p. 51)
Subsequently, "island narratives often
worked to legitimize imperialism by depicting
colonization as a natural process of the
disciplined male body" (p. 193).
The writing of Empire Islands,
which features many relatively brief sections
of analysis, clearly entailed an enormous
amount of research. And for those seeking
a general survey of the Western, colonial
castaway tale and related criticism, this
book could suffice as an introduction.
Yet Empire Island's compendium-like
approach remains somewhat problematic,
since its relentless brief references
to a long line of critical works, recurrent
themes, and a variety of castaway tales
can make the work feel at times more like
an encyclopedia than a coherent, fully
developed volume of cultural analysis.
It is also unclear why the writer chooses
to focus primarily on colonial texts and
include a final chapter on Hollywood's
recent castaway stories while eschewing
significant discussion of radical, postcolonial
appropriations of popular castaway tales
such as Robinson Crusoe and The
Tempest. Weaver-Hightower does mention
several important postcolonial revisions
of these texts, such as Derek Walcott's
Pantomimean interrogation
of Defoe's Crusoe, which is a serious
drama and not, as Weaver-Hightower describes,
"a pantomime"Aimé Césaire's
A Tempest, and J.M. Coetzee's Foe,
yet she forgoes discussing them.
Critiques of Western colonial culture
and "neo-imperialist" Hollywood
can be useful, and there is much to be
gleaned from Weaver-Hightower's extensive
research. But a more dialogical approach
to the island castaway narrativeone
that would include, for example, analyses
of both Western colonialist tales
and revolutionary, postcolonial revisionscould
help to make Empire Islands more
relevant, today, when marginalized
communitiesincluding many from actual
islands, and from such metaphorical "islands"
as neoliberal free trade zones, "the border,"
and war zonesface increasingly complex
struggles against newer and perhaps more
virulent strains of unfettered imperialism.