John Donne's famous pronouncement ‘No man is an island’ has proven to be a key coordinate in the map of modernity, particularly regarding the relationship between geography and identity. Donne's claim, first made in 1623, is poised on the brink of a new cartography of islands and continents taking form in his time and continuing to unfold into ours. As Donne's statement suggests, islands have a particular role in this map as both literal and imaginary locations: they were perceived as ideal colonies for primary production, especially given the difficulty of overland transportation until the nineteenth century, and as ideal prisons, as with Norfolk Island, Van Diemen's Land and Palm Island. Inseparable from these historical events is the powerful charge of the island in the Western imagination. As Yi-Fu Tuan has famously observed: ‘The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human […] But it is in the imagination of the Western world that the island has taken strongest hold’ (1998, 118). Gilles Deleuze's meditation on islands also identifies the lure of the island for the human imagination and its specific hold on the modern Western psyche, which resides in the island's capacity to represent the (illusory) possibility of a perfect harmony between man and space, where ego and geography appear to be perfectly aligned (2004, 10–11).

The ensuing discussion seeks to unravel the compacted set of meanings that attach to the man–island metaphor to show how and why this relationship assumed significance in the modern period and identify some of its implications in both history and representation. The chapter will investigate a range of ways the map of colonial modernity maps the modern man who is its proper and preferred subject. It argues that the island offers a figure of re-creation or rebirth which aligns with modern conceptions of identity formation – and the self-made colonial in particular. Through a study of both literature and history, I will show multiple ways this man-island takes shape according to racialized, gendered and literary formulations.