ABSTRACT
This section takes as its subject the notion of haunted/spectral, ruined and utopic/dystopic island places, applying Derrida’s (1993) concept of hauntology (a nostalgia/longing for an unrealized future) and applies it to problematizing the collective imagination, dreaming, and fantasy that islands often engender. I begin with a critical unpacking of the idea of the island paradise as a kind of imagined ultimate detachment from the struggles of everyday life in late capitalism, examining the role of islands as bounded utopias, worlds-within-worlds, and escape hatches from contemporary reality. My micro-essay on the past, present, and future of phantom islands looks at how these cartographic fictions function as powerful myths and containers for ideas of colonialism, the Other, and manifest destiny. The third essay uses the example of Iceland and the Faroe Islands’ huldufolk (hidden people) and the Yapese belief in ghost pathways to discuss the role of myth in creating layered and multi-dimensional worlds in island places, exploring how and why myth functions in particular ways in these contexts by creating what I describe as a “stacked ontology of place”. Lastly, I examine the ways in which islands have become (or are becoming) ruins of late capitalism and globalization. Here, I examine how these places function as both ideological and tactile ruins, as well as how the bounded place becomes a stage for unimpeded decay and dissolution.
