Reopening the Island Archive

In her editorial to a recent issue of Canadian Literature, Christine Kim puts forward the importance of probing the terms, frames, and methodologies of Canadian literary studies today. Kim highlights the epistemological shift brought about by Indigenous scholarship in the past few decades, transforming the field through its thorough re-evaluation of questions of territory, nation, and sovereignty. So have diasporic writers and critics, especially Black and Asian Canadian, contributed to expanding and reframing literary studies effectively within and beyond the nation by identifying and tracing the itineraries of racial capitalism and colonial violences as connected to, but transcending, the specific history of Canada as a white settler project. Rethinking literary studies through the lens of those alternative genealogies, Kim argues, “reframe[s] Canada and Canadian not as terms or categories that anchor the field, but rather as problems to be thought through in relation to and via particular archives, literatures, histories, theorists, sites, and creative practices” (13).

 

This forum comes across as a potential site of that move, not only because its topic explicitly asks us to think beyond normative frameworks of literary studies in and about Canada, but also, and perhaps especially, because of the individual positions of the invited contributors, island-based and/or island-born scholars working from both inside and outside the country. This is a form of tracing a two-way tangential line of inquiry into the field from outside in and from inside out, as it were.

 

Speaking of positionality, if poststructuralism has instructed those of us working within Western academia on the elusiveness of any attempt to reach or produce objective knowledge, one of the many lessons learned through reading feminist, critical race, and Indigenous scholars is that personal situatedness matters and our readings are always enmeshed in a web of relations. As the editors of the collection Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island put it: “Embedded in the notion of positionality is the recognition that we are interconnected with those around us” (4).

 

So, let me mention my own position as a white woman scholar born and raised in the Canary Islands, an extra-peripheral territory in Europe where I live and work. I am also a settler of a land colonized by the Spanish since the fifteenth century, with Indigenous inhabitants (of Berber origin and known as Guanches on the island of Tenerife) who were massively exterminated or enslaved. Today, the modest remnants of their culture are a fascinating lure to the approximately sixteen million tourists who visit the islands every year.

 

I would like to bring forth that form of land occupation by eliciting the relationship between islands and global tourism. Tourism is by far the main economic activity in the Canary Islands and the creation and development of tourism-related businesses and infrastructures have been given priority by the authorities for nearly a century (Sabaté-Bel and Armas-Díaz 214). This is no wonder, when one learns that islands figure “among the most profitable spaces for tourism and real estate investment” (Armas-Díaz et al., 251), and the farther away they are from the centres of world-economy, the more they confirm their status as “peripheries of pleasure” (Louis Turner and John Ash, qtd. in Armas-Díaz 251). But, as many studies show, the commodification of nature by means of different forms of so-called green capitalism is a crucial strategy in the success of the tourist industry. These processes capitalize on an aesthetic approach to islands as paradises, spaces of spirituality, reconnection, tranquility, shelter, or protection in order to produce islands as spaces of exclusion within colonial and/or capitalist logics, their access a symbol of status and privilege for the very few. Putting the aesthetic and the material significations of the island in conversation with each other—for instance, its connotations as spaces for reconnection with nature vis-à-vis the ensuing monetization of nature, the gentrification of local life, the control and hyperoccupation of public space and so forth—problematizes the idea of economic growth and produces important areas of creative friction, to say the least.

 

I propose to read Michael Christie’s novel Greenwood (2020) in that contrapuntal mode. This text, I believe, traverses deep layers of this same discussion and re-opens crucial and interconnected archives in the colonial history of Canada and beyond. Partly set on a private island on the west coast of Canada in a near future when climate crises have led to the extinction of most trees from the world, the novel explores the connections among colonial extractivism, environmental destruction, and social injustice (class-based, racial, gendered, and sexual) through the spatial trope of Greenwood Island, a luxury heterotopia accessed only by the richest people in the world, who pay a high price to spend a few days in one of the last remaining old-growth forests.

 

If island territories have often served as experimental grounds for male and masculinized colonial projects, providing simplified self-contained spaces easily controlled by the imperial gaze (Weaver-Hightower), there also are multiple ways in which texts endow islands with the opposite meaning, as places of uncertainty, precariousness, and disorientation (Riquet). Christie probes these contradictory meanings through various narrative strategies. One of them is the reopening of the island archive. The following parts of my contribution to this forum are some preliminary notes in the analysis of that strategy.

 

Archive 1: Island Is/as Land

Christie’s Greenwood offers a rich myriad of entry points. It is a complex family saga, part futuristic climate fiction, and part historical novel. It clearly locates the history of logging and forestry at the centre of the white colonial project in Canada, piercing temporal frames and geographical locations through this extractivist logic that also impregnates the social and economic dimensions of land occupation throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Connecting the dots of these narrative threads, the two crucial signs that I believe bind the most disparate characters and stories together: the trees and the island.

 

Each of the four main characters, representing four generations of the Greenwood family between 1908 and 2038, is entangled in different ways with the lives of trees and the island where the trees are miraculously alive after an ecological catastrophe called The Withering. The island is named after the first Greenwood who bought the land, and that first transaction, cancelling the history of the land before him, seems to anticipate other essential erasures and gaps in the story. In fact, far from the linearity invoked by the image of the family tree, the narrative progresses through a Foucauldian genealogical method, in the sense that identitary expectations constantly break and reconfigure as we read on. And, as they do so, the island is also invested with shifting and often contradictory meanings and values.

 

Archive 2: Island of Desire

Harris Greenwood is a white settler who becomes rich in the first part of the 1900s through logging Canadian forests from East to West, whose approach to the trees resonates with the garrison mentality and who views nature in terms of extraction resources and capital accumulation. Yet, early in his life, he loses his eyesight, and this loss introduces an important degree of vulnerability into his otherwise impenetrable character, opening a sensory archive that diverts the narrative from the linear account of his economic success. Soon, he falls in love with a man who reads poetry to him in an Irish accent. When, escaping the homophobic society of the time, Harris and his lover find shelter on Greenwood Island, the meaning of the latter seems to shift from territorial private property to a space for fantasy and desire.

 

This transgression of the script, together with the fact that the island is saved from logging after a complex chain of events, may lead the reader to imagine the island as an exception to the process of nation-building through the exercise of violence on territories, humans, and non-human beings. Yet this separation turns out to be as precarious as the non-heteronormative love that sustains it, and, a century later, the outer frame of the story reinvents extractive capitalism through the trope of island tourism.

 

Archive 3: Pristine Island

In fact, in the futuristic part of the novel, the company that owns the island renames it the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, and this renewed branding exercise firmly locates the land back within the usual capitalist relations of production and consumption. Scholars have explained how islands have become “the objects of what may be the most lavish, global and consistent branding exercise in human history.” Islands are “locales of desire,” “platforms of paradise,” “habitual sites of fascination, emotional offloading or religious pilgrimage” (Baldacchino 201). They are the object of a “fine-tuned marketing strategy that seeks to tap a primordial allure for the exotic, the unexplored and, more recently, the green and pristine” (200). In the dystopian world Christie describes, Greenwood Island seems to be an epitome of the latter. Rich tourists, ironically called “Pilgrims,” flock into its miraculously green old-growth forest in search of “something ineffable that’s missing from their lives,” “to glean something rare and sustaining from its trees, to breathe their clean air and feel less hopeless among them” (Christie 7).

 

The island is here the site of mourning, of nostalgia for a lost pre-withering world. It becomes the stage for iteration of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia” (108), an aporia set in motion when “agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (107–08).

 

Archive 4: The Return of the Anti-Conquest

Accordingly, in Christie’s novel, imperial nostalgia depends on an image of the island as a pristine natural space. The island can function as a self-contained space for freedom and possibilities only by suspending both its history of colonial dispossession and environmental violence and its present condition as the locus of surveillance and precarious labour (through the racial capital necessary to maintain the nature offsetting), all against the backdrop of social, economic, and ecological crises.

 

This contradiction recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “anti-conquest.” Although Pratt initially developed this concept in the context of her study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing (see Imperial 8–9, 37–38), she later applied it to the mechanisms of the tourist industry today (“The Anti-Conquest”). The “anti-conquest” refers to the process by which tourists, in this case, are spared the labour, violence, and damage that happens behind their tourist experiences. This practice of concealment generates a structure of precarity, since, as Bruce Braun argues of the history of what he calls “cognitive failures” in the construction of the forest in British Columbia, “[a]t any moment, that which is disavowed (i.e., the territorialities of First Nations) may return to haunt the colonial order, and reveal its constitutive displacements as a type of violence enacted on people and things” (260).

 

Reopening the Island Archive

There are multiple and complex ways in which Christie’s novel seems to both reinscribe white settler logics and make visible the erasures of these logics, introducing disturbances that undo the main plot and/or run parallel to it, interrogating it, unveiling the fraught and highly entangled relationships underneath the simulacrum of the Pilgrims’ experience of the island. I have sketched some areas in which the colonial history of islands in general and the specific setting of the fictional Greenwood Island become instrumental in the process of disentangling and reinterpreting these relations as they are depicted in Christie’s novel. To reopen the island archive is then to rethink the field of Canadian literary studies, making visible its complex fabric and fissures, extending its borders and underscoring the need for further research.

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christine Kim and Canadian Literature for organizing this conversation and for inviting me to participate in it, and Emma, amanda, and Brianne for their assistance in making this forum happen. As a returning visiting scholar at UBC, I am also grateful to the Department of English for its sustained hospitality over the years, and to the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people on whose traditional unceded territory I am conducting my research. This work is part of the larger research grant funded by the Government of Spain: The Premise of Happiness: The Function of Feelings in North American Narratives (PID2020-113190GB-C21).

 

Works Cited

Armas-Díaz, Alejandro, et al. “Beyond the Right to the Island: Exploring Protests Against the Neoliberalization of Nature in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain).” Erkunde, vol. 74, no. 4, 2020, pp. 249–62.

Baldacchino, Godfrey. “Island Tourism.” The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment, edited by Andrew Holden and David Fennell, Routledge, 2013, pp. 200–08.

Braun, Bruce. The Intemperate Forest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast. U of Minnesota P, 2002.

Christie, Michael. Greenwood. McClelland & Stewart, 2020.

Kim, Christine. “Editorial: Methods, Objects, Fields.” Canadian Literature, no. 255, 2023, pp. 7–14.

McCall, Sophie, et al., editors. Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2017.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.

—. “The Anti-Conquest, Travel Writing, and Planetary Consciousness.” Interview with Chris Christou. The End of Tourism Podcast, season 1, episode 11, 5 Apr. 2022, www.theendoftourism.com/episodes/the-anti-conquest-travel-writingand-
planetary-consciousness-mary-louise-pratt.

Riquet, Johannes. The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Oxford UP, 2019.

Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 1989, pp. 107–22.

Sabaté-Bel, Fernando, and Alejandro Armas-Díaz. “Commodification or the Right to the Island: The Struggle against the Construction of a Hotel in La Tejita (Tenerife).” Island Studies Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2022, pp. 214–34.

Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. U of Minnesota P, 2007.

 

Eva Darias-Beautell is a professor at the University of La Laguna, where she teaches contemporary Canadian literatures in English. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, and British Columbia. Her books include Shifting Sands: Literary Theory and Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Mellen, 2000), and Graphies and Grafts: (Con)Texts and (Inter)Texts in the Fictions of Four Canadian Women Writers (Peter Lang, 2001), as well as the edited collections Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012) and The Urban Condition: Literary Trajectories Through Canada’s Postmetropolis (Vernon Press, 2018). She is currently working on a new book about the notions of happiness and unhappiness in Vancouver literature.