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To date, studies of the contribution literature makes to ideas about islands have concentrated on “high” literature. This has left unexamined the largest proportion of literature featuring islands. If one of the goals of island studies is to interrogate prevailing ideas about “islandness,” then the islands that crowd the storyworlds of popular genres merit close attention. This article focuses on popular fiction to advocate “performative geographies” as a key concept for island studies of literature, and indeed other domains of culture. Popular genres are undeniably sources of distraction and entertainment for billions of readers. However, they are also systems of meaning, which have an immeasurable impact on our geographical awareness and imagination. This article uses critical snapshots of Anglophone island-set crime fiction and popular romance fiction to show the meta-geographical potential of popular novels as they both depict and reflect on islands as performative geographies, or spaces that make and unmake individual and social identities.

IN THE EMPIRE OF NATURE John M. MacKenzie suggests there were "three animals in India with which the British had a special hunting relationship, the tiger, the elephant and the pig" (179). Of these, the tiger is the one most closely associated with Britain's imperial relationship with India. By the mid nineteenth century, as Joseph Sramek explains, "tigers . . . had become invested with several potent meanings" (659). Several critics including Sramek and Annu Jalais demonstrate how tigers were closely associated with Indian rulers, and, at the same time, with all that was wild and untamed about the subcontinent. Thus "[o]nly by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians" (Sramek 659). Through close readings of selected tiger images from the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper considers the way tigers were consistently used as visual signifiers of India in a series of stock-in-trade images which depict tiger hunts, white men protecting white women from tigers, and tigers menacing Indians.

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