Insular Iconicity and Utopian Immunity: Inoculating the Self in Tamsin Calidas’ I Am an Island (2020)

This paper contends that Tamsin Calidas' I Am an Island (2020) is characterised by an ideological investment in the absolute immunity of self. The narrative mobilises an allegory of inoculation through wild swimming which activates both the biomedical and political semantics of immunity in order to summon a self that is fully immunised against others. This summoning is legible in the dehistoricisation of the island and the imagined geographies of insular self-containment which the text produces, and maps onto the protagonist. These semiotic emphases aim to deny the island's material interconnections, but also end up reaffirming them, revealing the utopian nature of the text's ideological investment. In exploring this paradox, I show how an immunitary lens allows us to reconceptualise a blue humanities approach to island imaginaries and the immunising power of water.