Oceans, islands, closets and smells: decolonization through spatial metaphors

Abstract

Thinking with non-solid geographic forms to undermine the conceits and closures of the static, bounded territorial state is all the rage in decolonization studies. The table of contents of the book Territory Beyond Terra – Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Mudflats, Floodplains, Cities, Ice, Bodies, Boats, Shores, Seabeds – suggests just some of the spatial forms that can be used to rethink the space of the sovereign state. Indeed, as the editors of that volume note, even that list could be stretched further, to cover mediated, manufactured or extra-planetary spaces. Paul Carter places Decolonising Governance squarely within this literature, identifying the book as ‘a contribution to the evolving field of island studies, ocean studies and, in general, the turn away from nation-state territorialisations of the Earth’s surface’. In particular, he focuses on the decolonizing potential of the archipelago, which a succession of critical island scholars has highlighted as a spatial form that, paraphrasing Stratford et al., is ‘topologically sophisticated, inscribes difference into the heart of communication and which models perhaps radically re-thought forms of federalism and cosmopolitanism [... ] a creative region unlike the nation state, defined relationally around shared responsibility for the ocean, resisting the simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary, [and] reconceptualising the connections between islands’. Even as Carter lauds the archipelago’s potential to undermine static ontologies that underpin statist power, he is critical of how these island scholars have deployed the concept. Part of the problem is simply empirical. Not all archipelagos are the same and, depending on their size, the relative equivalence of their islands, their contextual position in a world of states, one archipelago may suggest a very different liberatory (or non-liberatory) politics than another. Another problem is that recognizing the ‘difference’ of an archipelago hardly guarantees that this ‘difference’ will be used to rethink the modes of understanding that conventionally guide social institutions and processes. A good example here, referenced by Carter, is Part IV of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which permits archipelagic states to designate the water between islands as ‘internal waters’, thereby reconfiguring a portion of ocean as within the bounds of state territory. This incorporation of the ocean as internal waters does force planners to reconsider assumed divisions between islands and oceans as well as the related privileging of the former (land, territory) as the domain of development and the latter (water, non-territory) as the external space of the in-between. Arguably, it also dislocates ‘static island tropes of particularity’, foregrounding ‘fluid inter-