‘The Furthest Hebrides’: critical reach from contested shores

Scotland’s islands are paradoxically peripheral yet conceptually central to an understanding of the layered complexity of issues relating to land and identity in contemporary 21st century Scotland. Through a specific focus on Scotland’s western isles, this paper traces the authoring of the layered constructions and reconstructions of space and place that has produced a dense and variegated palimpsest; the process of the ‘making’ of the Hebrides. It examines visual and documentary representations to draw out some of the issues of ‘belonging’ and ownership, appropriation and dissemination, in the context of the national-identitarian functions of culture, that are embedded in the complimentary and contradictory ‘ways of seeing’ the contested terrain of island cultural landscape(s).
Through a grounded multi-disciplinary approach to the issues raised and the exemplars elaborated on, the paper opens up several overlapping and inter-related issues of concentric and conflicting identities, delineation of the field of cultural discourse, the inscription of meaning and value and the production of cultural landscapes, and the deeper processes of complicity, self colonialism and subalternity.
The paper concludes by advocating that a detailed study of how these processes of ‘making’ are mediated at local (island), national (Scottish) and supra-national (UK) level opens up new channels for further research in the intricate waters of the cultural dynamics of authorship, ownership, ‘belonging’ and power in the politics of land and identity.