Islands, History, and Decolonial Memory

Abstract

How do small island ecologies commemorate their disappeared pasts? What are some of the place-making practices that shape the formation of small island collective memories? Through the analysis of five case studies of small island communities in a comparative framework, this editorial introduction to a special section of Island Studies Journal on ‘Islands, history, decolonial memory’ opens up the mnemonic and psychoanalytic challenges facing contemporary island societies and the invention of their social memories. The islands of Balliceaux, Ro, Saaremaa, St. Simon and Dongzhou present competing instances of how memory operates across cultures of remembrance and forgetting.