island conversations
podcast series

If we look more at Island Studies in France, how would you define the field within your French setting, and is this distinct from Island Studies in other parts of the world? 

I think that is a quite difficult question because I am not sure that there is a specific French way to address island studies. Just two remarks that come to my mind. I have seen in France, and maybe in other countries, but I don’t know exactly, a persistent taste for island typologies which is, according to me, a dead end as a great number of exceptions can invalidate this kind of approach. The second remark is about a  less transdisciplinary approach than in the Anglo-Saxon sphere. I am a geographer, but thanks to the SICRI network, I published several times with colleagues coming from very different horizons, and you are a perfect example of that, Henry. I didn’t feel the same facilities in my own academic environment.

That’s very interesting, thank you for that. Could you talk a little bit about your personal island connections, and share some memories of researching on islands? Maybe three examples of different settings with some key points. 

I will keep the three examples for the next question. My personal island connections began very early. I grew up in Granville, a coastal city in Normandy, where I could see from the beach the archipelago of Chausey, which is about 7 nautical miles off the coast. So my first island experience was to frequently go there. The navigation there is really fascinating with the presence of countless reefs surrounded by very strong currents due to its location in an area subject to some of the highest tides in the world. When the weather allows it, we can see another more distant island, but as it was a foreign one we didn’t use to go there. This island, surrounded by a kind of mystery, was Jersey, which is the southernmost island of the Channel Islands. I always considered the Channel Islands as a sort of “domestic exoticism”, both close and far and this situation made me feel a confused sense of strangeness that I put aside for a long time.

I started quite late in my academic studies during which the empirical perceptions felt by the child I was thirty years before came back to the surface. My Master’s degree dealt with a characterization of Granville, which is a port, a seaside resort, but also a border town due to the presence of these close foreign islands. And my analysis of the cross border relationships revealed that there were positive and negative consequences likely to influence social, cultural, and economical conditions.

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As a positive, we can think about the tropism toward both island and foreign destinations mixed together in this case. This phenomenon has boosted nautical activities including yachting since Granville was – and still is – in this respect the most desired place on the entire northwestern part of the French coastline. As a negative, we can obviously think about the many disputes concerning both the question of the international delimitation of the sea and the other one, which is closely linked to the latter on the fishing rights in this very narrow marine space. 

When I decided to start a PhD in Geography, I chose to define a spatial pattern that I called, in French, île frontière, and in English “border island”, and I chose three case studies. The first one was quite naturally Jersey because I only touched lightly on the subject during my previous works and my PhD was a good opportunity to pursue the matter further. The second one was Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, a small French archipelago, which is about twenty kilometres off the coast of the Canadian island of Newfoundland. And the third one was Trinidad, the main island of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, which is very close to Venezuela, at the Orinoco river mouth.

[...] Just to look a bit closer at your work, what is the contribution of your field to island studies, and how has this evolved over time?

My first intention was to develop an in-depth reflection on what I expressed as a dialectic between proximity and otherness. There is an indisputable spatial proximity, but overall there are heavy alterities. There is in each case a political border, but also a linguistic border, a cultural border, an economic border, and we can’t forget either a relationship with space which is supposed to be specific to islanders. I had a lot of material about this topic, but another focus of research took greater importance in the global structure of my PhD – that was the importance of the sea. And what was clear is that the combination of border and island has a multiplier effect on territorial issues on, in and under the sea. This applies to the sharing of the sea according to different modalities, depending on the scale and categories of stakeholders mobilized.

The sea is a three-dimensional space with four different levels of human activities that are the surface, which is a two-dimension space where the humans have to move for different reasons: the waters themselves, where they mainly fish; the sea bed which is another horizontal space submitted to various kinds of activities including fishing, the installation of facilities linked to energies, cables, extractions of minerals; and finally the marine sub-soil which is exclusively devoted to the exploitation of hydrocarbon deposits. These spaces are not necessarily legally superimposable and some marine resources as fisheries or hydrocarbon deposits do not always – I could say do not often – fit with the increasing tendency of the countries to annex bigger and bigger parts of the ocean. That is also true for security or environmental issues. Thus, the marine space is complex and ambivalent. The sea surrounds the island; it is also a means of connecting with other territories; it is as well a separation, a ground of opposition with geopolitical, economic, and sometimes symbolic stakes. 

My academic background was done at the Department of Geography of the Caen Normandy University, which is one of the most important centers of French social geography, first in the rural and later in the urban and suburban fields. It is probably why I progressively came to consider the sea as a social space, but an extremely complex one since it is vertical, fluid and continuous.

Combined with the island situation, I later found the concept forged by Phil Hayward of aquapelago, which was especially interesting and I published an article in Shima on the topic. I emphasized in this text the sometimes unexplored complex relation between the island and its surrounding waters in a mix of both vertical and horizontal complexities.

And to illustrate my point, I would like to briefly come back to the three case studies of my PhD. In the case of Jersey, the most interesting is the way the fishing disputes have been resolved in 2000 by the signature of the bay of Granville Treaty which was a way probably never seen at this level of detail of sharing the sea by a cross border fishing management. But I know that you are aware that this Treaty has been thrown out of the bathwater by the Brexit.