The castaway state: On islands and nation-building (Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Raban, England, J. M. Coetzee, Nelson Mandela, South Africa, Romesh Guneskera, Sri Lanka)

The Castaway State proposes that the island in British postcolonial literature encapsulates the idea of the postcolonial nation with all of its uncertainties, disruptions, displacements, and anxieties. Through close readings of writing from and about islands, including novels by Daniel Defoe, JM Coetzee, and Romesh Gunesekera, memoirs by Jonathan Raban and Nelson Mandela, and other cultural artefacts, the dissertation enables an understanding of the island as an emblem of a nation that must be continually and violently reinforced or risk disintegrating. The three islands that situate this project suggest a postcolonial nationalist trend and yet insist on their differences. They are late twentieth-century Britain viewed from its former colonies, a postcolonial version of Robinson Crusoe's island, and Robben Island, South Africa's prison island. All three are as much real as they are literary; they simultaneously occupy places on the globe and in the national imagination.; The notion of an ideal island isolate is almost a given, and the island is typically shown as either infinitely plastic and thus infinitely available for appropriation or, conversely, as perfectly fixed and bounded. Neither vision sufficiently describes how islands work, so as a counterweight, this dissertation salvages the specific, material differences of island spaces. Other theorists have tended to concentrate on figurative islands. By moving beyond the island as trope, The Castaway State emphasizes actual power relations, specific geographies, and material economies. The literature read for this project exhibits the necessary border-crossing that culturally, politically, and economically underwrites the nation but that is also what shows island boundaries to be permeable, flexible, and fragile. In the face of this knowledge, the fiction of islandness that seems to offer a national outline cannot be sustained and must continually be shored up in the national narrative and as a repetitive, violent inscription of borders on the landscape. The texts attended to in this dissertation expose the failure of the island as a reliable site of representation in practice.