Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces (Rethinking the Island)

(Andrew van der Vlies, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Queen Mary University of London)Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism is an insistently insightful book that crosses disciplines and geographies with impressive ease. In Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism, Helen Kapstein offers a deft and engaging assessment of their role as metaphor, metonym, and material space in a range of postcolonial (and postimperial) literary texts and cultural objects. She is a wonderful reader of material and imaginative islands and an eloquent witness to the costs and consequences of insular thinking. Conceptually challenging and eminently readable, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism transforms our view of all its component terms. (Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, The Gradu

Helen Kapstein is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY.

Through an analysis of a variety of texts ranging from literature to prison correspondence to tourist questionnaires it exposes the ways in which nationalism relies on fictions of insularity and intactness, which the island and island tourism appear to provide. It argues that each text expresses a profound discomfort with national form by undoing the form of the island through a variety of narrative strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres. Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island