Abstract
The figure of the island is today receiving increasing attention within geography and across the wider sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts more generally. The reasons for this are clear. Schematically speaking, on one hand, islands can be understood as isolated, separated and insular, something which sits extremely well with the contemporary rise in nostalgic sensibilities of bounded control (Brexit backlashes against international migration, the defence of nationalistic values, etc.). In these debates, the island becomes the exemplary site for the playing out of dystopian and utopian fantasies of containment. On the other hand, somewhat moving in the opposite direction, the island is also increasingly understood as the emblematic figure of boundary-defying, intensely relational and uncontainable forces. Here, the island has become the ‘go-to’ site for contemporary understandings of such seemingly uncontrollable forces as global warming, rising sea levels, the decline of once vast empires, nuclear fallout and many other key debates besides associated with transforming planetary conditions.
Sophia Davis’ Island Thinking: Suffolk Stories of Landscape, Militarisation and Identity is about the coast of Suffolk, England, and reflects this acutely paradoxical nature of islands – both isolated and intensively relational – extremely well. Situated against the contemporary backdrop of Brexit and growing nationalism, it explores how the English nation related to itself via its islandness in the middle of the 20th century after the fall of empire. Rather than engage high politics, Davis explores the countryside and mythical histories, deftly examining various layers of connection to ideas of islandness and England. The book pivots its analysis upon, on one hand, the drive to assert tropes of isolation and enclosure, and, on the other, the struggle to maintain this idea of insular island unity as the British empire was rapidly declining.
More specifically, the idea of England’s islandness is interestingly understood to work at a ‘double level, referring to the national “island” at the same time as the smaller islands within the archipelago’ (p. 4). I liked this approach very much indeed. Thus, after a comprehensive introductory chapter, chapter 2 explores the idea of an ‘island within an island’ (eastern Suffolk) as it was being described in 1950 via countryside writing ‘a genre that flourished in interwar Britain’ (p. 15), where the dominant tropes were those of nostalgia, isolation and insularity. Chapter 3 focuses upon wartime intruders and more contested understandings of islands during the war associated with airfields, anti-invasion strategies and structures. Chapter 4 more intensively turns to themes of militarisation and invasion examining how islands were used for military and scientific research associated with radars in the 1930s in order to make Britain an island fortress. Chapters 5 and 6 focus upon a different intruder, birds, and the role understandings of islands played in the growing interest in the protection of birds. Chapter 7 weaves together themes of nature and militarisation further by focusing upon the role of the island in atomic weapons research, and the book ends with a really effective summary Conclusion. While Davis does not overly engage with the burgeoning field of island studies’ theory, I think this book makes a particularly valuable contribution to understanding Englishness and islandness; especially for those interested in themes of militarisation and nature. It is for this reason that I would wholly recommend it.