Performing Islands

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

performance; islands; cultural heritage; tradition; festivals; commodification

Abstract

The pairing of the terms ‘islands’ and ‘commodities’ immediately raises the idea of islands both as sites of production and as markets -- or as places of cultivation, growing, harvesting, manufacturing, and trading of commodities. A top-of-mind understanding of these terms can thus be pegged on economic terms: islands as producers and consumers, islands as sites for trade and commerce. Not surprisingly, the term ‘performance’ comes up in relation to how commodities fare in the exchange processes, commonly referring to whether or how a particular commodity gets sold or bought, at what bulk or rate, at what price ranges, how fast or slow all these happen, and is it bringing in income for the island. But performance comes up also in terms of its aesthetic sense in the equation islands + commodities because producers of commodities have developed performance practices aimed ultimately at marketing their commodities even if the discourse around such performances is framed in terms that highlight other-than-economic concerns like ‘identity’ or ‘heritage’ or ‘devotion’. The economic thus becomes a condition in which performance arises and is sustained, becomes tradition, in the lives of island communities. Islands perform their commodities and in the process become commodities themselves – and thus the need to display and market themselves, as happens with tourism programs. The paper explores how this happens, adding a third term to the pairing: islands, commodities, and performance. It investigates how performance operates in the dynamics of flow and relations at work in the island trading in and of commodities and how performance used as a critical lens might reveal the social, political, and artistic/aesthetic dimensions operating in the triadic configuration.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jazmin Badong Llana
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/01/11
TI  - Performing Islands
BT  - Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 263
EP  - 267
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_28
ID  - Llana2024
ER  -