2021 Issue No. 35 – Anomalous/Autonomous: the constitution and performance of micro-, disputed and/or temporary territories

Along with established national states, the planet has a scatter of anomalous and/or autonomous territories whose existence is performed in various ways. These include officially recognised archaic micro-jurisdictions (such as those operating in the Channel Islands, off the west coast of Normandy, France); self-proclaimed micro–nations in various regions; territories established offshore in efforts to escape national control; rhetorical utopias that have no material existence; and territories created in traditional and new media that intersect with material reality in various ways. These entities are significant for affronting the fixity of nation states and their boundaries through their détournement of various aspects of nationality and statehood.

This issue of Transformations allows scholars from the humanities and social sciences to analyse and reflect on the histories of particular territories and the impulses and justifications that have enabled them, highlighting their idiosyncratic positions and trajectories in a world order that is – paradoxically – ever more internationalised and intractably rooted in cumbersome national entities.

Philip Hayward (Guest editor)

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a British jurisdiction in the Channel Islands comprising several islands and forming a binary with the neighbouring Bailiwick of Jersey. The Bailiwick is an archipelago of administrative similitude and island-based jurisdictional difference. It is a dependency of the British Crown with a sense of independence and with identity and jurisdiction constructed within, between and across several island spheres. This is a setting of anomalous/autonomous territories, with the Bailiwick having a distinct geography of overlapping political jurisdictions that exhibit an administrative dialectics of place with islandness and archipelago-ness at the core of identity making. This article asks: How do the islands within the Bailiwick of Guernsey perform jurisdictional politics as territorial units? As well as discussing the islands’ top-down administrative structures, distinct emblems of politicised island identity in the form of anthems and postage stamps are considered regarding the ways they contribute to island performativity and identity construction within their territorial setting.

Keywords
anthems; emblems; Guernsey; politics; postage stamps

Tavolara is on the northeast coast of Sardinia, at 4.5 km from the small town of Loiri Porto San Paolo and 18.3 km from the city of Olbia (Fig. 1). It is a 6 km long and 1 km wide limestone massif that in its highest point reaches 565 m. Most of its perimeter is a rocky cliff face and the main landfall is a small beach facing the Sardinian’s coast, named Spalmatore di Terra (Fig 2). A smaller docking area lies on the opposite side, at Cala Levante, through which a lighthouse and the NATO radio facilities can be reached. (Floris 9: 338). Tavolara was known by the Etruscans, Greeks and Romans, who used it as a water and food filling station, and during mid-9th century it appears to have been a railing point for North African corsairs (Della Marmora 360-362). During the 18th century shepherds from Sardinia and Corsica used the island as pasturage, and between late 19th century and the 1960s fishers from the Pontine Islands stayed on it for a few months a year. Today Tavolara is part of the touristic network of North Sardinia, as we will discuss later.

Keywords
Kingdom of Tavolara, Republic of Malu Entu, Micronation, Sardinia, Italy.

This article examines the serial transformation and resignification of a small islet off the coast of Madeira over the last 250 years. The first phase saw the Ilhéu do Diego modified into a fort (Forte de São José), linked to the mainland, and the second saw the fort incorporated into the seawall that forms the southern edge of the port of Funchal. The history of the fort area subsequently provided the pretext for its assertion as an independent micronation performed in various ways in the period 2007-2017 by a Madeiran resident, Renato Barros, who had become disenchanted with the local government over a disputed development application. The article identifies that history and residual place identities enabled the fort site to be imagined as the Principado do Ilhéu da Pontinha by Barros, in the face of counter-imaginations and interventions by local authorities. and that Barros constructed an entitativity for his claimed principality through the development of symbols, rhetoric and performances.

Keywords
Ilhéu do Diego, Forte de São José, Principado do Ilhéu da Pontinha, Madeira, micronation, islandness, peninsularity

This article examines the story of the Kingdom of L’Anse-Saint-Jean where a popular referendum resulted in the first and only North American municipal monarchy. Many questioned whether this was a publicity stunt; for Denys Tremblay, aka King Denys I, it represented much more than that. Moreover, as a living performance piece it challenged people’s perspectives on nationalism, sovereignty, and democracy. King Denys I applied his own personal touch to the project which sought to attract people to the region as well as show what could be done within the limits of the status quo. Though the monarchy was short-lived, it achieved what decades of separatist politics could not in Québec: the establishment of a sovereign sub-unit of a democracy without contravening its constitution.

Keywords
micronations, sovereignty, nationalism, L’Anse-Saint-Jean, Québec

In February 2019, Ocean Builders, a private company, anchored a six-square-meter inhabitable octagonal structure in the Andaman Sea, twelve nautical miles off the coast of Phuket in Thailand, within the country’s exclusive economic zone. Over the next three months, it was periodically occupied by a couple, Chad Elwartowski, an American citizen, and Supranee Thepdet, a Thai citizen. Both are supporters of the seasteading movement to colonize international waters with autonomous modular platforms to experiment with competitive governance and challenge the status quo of the nation-state. In April 2019, the Thai government found that the structure and the couple’s plan to develop an independent seasteading community threatened Thailand’s sovereignty, and the Thai navy seized and dismantled the seastead. Elwartowski and Thepdet later described their stay on the platform as a moment during which they were “truly free.” I argue that the seastead functioned as a space of freedom only to the extent that its occupants performed freedom and their identities as sovereign individuals, a performance that was convincing enough to attract new supporters and investors, and for the Thai state to take action and engage in its own performance of sovereignty. I further argue that Ocean Builders’ performance was designed to create freedom-as-a-product that could be marketed and sold in the form of a seastead. As a case study, Ocean Builders’ venture illustrates the complex relationship between performance, materiality, space, discourse, power, and identity, and how these elements interact in the constitution and performance of micro-territories and of contested oceanic claims to sovereign territory.

Keywords
seasteading, performance / performativity, freedom, ocean, sovereignty

In 1973, John Lennon was fighting deportation from the US by a Nixon administration that deplored his anti-government activities, when he and his wife Yoko Ono came up with the concept of Nutopia, an imaginary state with no borders or laws, to publicise his plight. So was Nutopia the last breath of the hippie dream, a final attempt to “get back to the garden” as Joni Mitchell put it, or rich cosmopolitans’ presumption that they should be free to move wherever they pleased? In this essay I will briefly review strains of utopian thought in the 1960s counterculture, examples of micronations from that period and Lennon, Ono and the Beatles’ own history of associations with micronations, islands and alternative communities, in life and art, to argue that for Lennon at any rate, they filled a deep seated need to belong, without necessarily recognizing corresponding obligations to his compatriots.

Keywords
John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Nutopia, micronations, counterculture, cosmopolitanism, nationalism

Most micronations located in South Korea have only a virtual existence and little, if any, public recognition. The exception is Nami Island, which branded itself as the Naminara Republic in 2006, and is a popular and financially successful tourist resort. This article considers aspects of place-branding applied to Nami Island and draws comparisons with the eponymous setting of the acclaimed television series Hotel Del Luna (2018). The physical island and the virtual hotel share many components of a micronation schema, although the hotel is not a self-declared micronation. Both are embedded within, but culturally separate from, the surrounding state. Each has evolved an origin myth and a sustaining mythic narrative developed from contemporary Korean media-lore: Nami Island markets itself as a fairy tale space and exploits images from the popular TV drama Winter Sonata, which lures many of its visitors, while Hotel Del Luna draws upon and adds to media-lore about ghosts and the supernatural. Commercial enterprises which playfully assert their cultural separation from South Korea, these micronations self-consciously model a utopianism markedly absent in the country which surrounds them.

Keywords
micronation schema, media-lore, origin myth, ghost-lore, fictive reality, Winter Sonata

This short article reviews the history of micronations in Japan. The Japanese experience with micronations is dominated by a micronation boom that took place in the 1980s after two events: 1) a call by a prefectural governor for more localized, innovative development and 2) the publication of a popular book, Kirikirijin (Inoue 1981), that portrayed a small, rural area in northern Honshu declaring itself independent from the rest of Japan. Most of Japan’s micronations existed during this 1980s and early ‘90s period, with approximately 150 micronations in existence in 1988. Japan possibly held most of the world’s micronations during the 1980s, when the phenomenon was still not that widespread around the world. Unlike many of the more famous micronations around the world, such as Sealand and Hutt River Principality, most of Japan’s micronations were not borne out of sovereignty experiments or landowner disputes with government but were rather created in order to drum up domestic tourism spending at rural businesses. The micronation experiment largely came to an end at the turn of the century, within a few years of the burst of Japan’s economic bubble. Several micronations, including some micronation federations, still exist however.

Keywords
micronation, Japan, tourism, chihō no jidai