This book investigates desert islands in postwar anglophone popular culture, exploring representations in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, cinema, video games, and comedy, drama and reality television. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, desert island texts are analysed in terms of their intersections with repressive and seductive mechanisms of power. Chapters focus on the desert island as: a conflictingly in/coherent space that characterises identity as deferred and structured by choice; a location whose ‘remoteness’ undermines satirical critiques of communal identity formation; a site whose ambivalent relationship with ‘home’ and Otherness destabilises patriarchal ‘Western’ subjectivity; a space bound up with mobility and instantaneity; and an expression of radical individuality and underdetermined identity. The desert island in popular culture is shown to reflect, endorse and critique a profoundly consumerist society that seduces us with promises of coherence, with the threat of repression looming if we do not conform.
Author(s): Barney Samson
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 139
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introducing the Liquid Modern Desert Island
1.1 Island-Ness and Desertedness
1.2 Solid and Liquid Modernities
References
2 (In)Coherent Desert Islands: Desert Island Discs and Bounty Chocolate in Print
2.1 Desert Island Discs
2.2 Bounty Chocolate in Print
References
3 Community on the Desert Island: The New Yorker Cartoons and Gilligan’s Island
3.1 The New Yorker Cartoons
3.2 Gilligan’s Island
References
4 Repression and Seduction: The Blue Lagoon and Bounty Chocolate on Screen
4.1 The Blue Lagoon
4.2 Bounty Chocolate on Screen
References
5 Mobility, Instantaneity and the Desert Island: Cast Away and Lost
5.1 Cast Away
5.2 Lost
References
6 Anxiety and Eroticism on the Desert Island: Dear Esther and Love Island
6.1 Dear Esther
6.2 Love Island
References
Index
