Global insularities: insular spaces of tourism and migration

Abstract

Insularity, in its metaphorical sense as a designation of circumscribed spaces, clearly delineated and detached from their surroundings, has been questioned with regard to the actual experience of island spaces (cf. Hay). It reinforces a predominant continental imaginary of the island as separate, isolated, and peripheral. However, when insularity is not understood in an essentializing way as a necessary characteristic of islands, but as the result of social constructions, practices, and discourses (see also Dautel and Schödel), it can be a useful concept for an analysis of processes of spatial segregation. Insular spaces can then be understood as spaces defined by specific characteristics or rules. Physical boundaries distinguish them from their surroundings; often separated by restricted entry and exit, they form 'insides' in a dialectical relation to their outside. As distinct 'other spaces' which are nevertheless connected to their environment, for instance by an inversion or compressed re flection of its characteristics, they can also be described as heterotopias in Foucault's terminology ("Of Other Spaces" 24). Insularity conceived as a social construction can help to frame a critical analysis of current mechanisms of spatial compartmentalization and an increase of exclusionary spaces within capitalist globalization.