ABSTRACT

Island scholarship increasingly aims to understand islands and islanders on their own terms (Baldacchino, 2006; Grydehøj, 2014; McMahon, 2003; Pugh, 2013a; Stratford et al., 2011). This concern with elevating island voices connects with what many writers from islands have been arguing for years, and includes a call for ‘islands not [to be] written about but writing themselves!’ (Walcott, 1998, p. 72) and labours by Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) to foreground ‘a world of islands’ rather than ‘islands of the world’ (DeLoughrey, 2007; Fletcher, 2011b; Savory, 2011). Indeed, reflecting the salience of the argument, Baldacchino (2004, p. 272), defines island studies itself as ‘the interdisciplinary study of islands on their own terms’.