London, Madrid and Redonda, a Caribbean Kingdom in Exile

Micronations are inherently postcolonial – in Achille Mbembe’s sense of the post-colony –as a “thing that is, but only insofar as it is nothing”, a thing that erupts out of the “closure of the map”, rebelling against geographical imperialism. All post-colonies, as Mbembe describes them, belong to a “subjective economy”,which is produced through a process of intense imagination. Nonetheless, the Kingdom of Redonda,the subject of this article, is unique. The territory it claims is an uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea locally known as “the Rock” – the island of Redonda. Officially, the island belongs to Antigua and Barbuda, which means that the micronational Kingdom of Redonda is forced to operate in exile, currently in Spain but previously in England. In this article, I survey the literary and social landscape of a Caribbean micronation through the reign of four successive kings in London and Madrid: King Felipe(better known as M.P. Shiel), who vies with Claude McKay for the title of the first West Indian author, and who was the author of more than twenty-five novels, including possibly the mostly future-history series in science fiction; King Juan I (the British neo-Georgian poet and anthologist, John Gawsworth); King Juan II (British author and publisher, founder of Centaur Press, Jon Wynne-Tyson); and King Xavier (the Spanish novelist and founder of the publishing house, Reino de Redonda, Javier Marías).