Postcolonial Spaces

Postcolonial Spaces http://avaxho.me/blogs/ChrisRedfield 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd i 7/19/2011 3:57:06 PM Also by SARA UPSTONE: SPATIAL POLITICS IN THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL BRITISH ASIAN FICTION: Twenty-First Century Voices Also by ANDREW TEVERSON: SALMAN RUSHDIE: Contemporary World Writers 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd ii 7/19/2011 3:57:06 PM Postcolonial Spaces The politics of place in contemporary culture Edited by Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone With a Foreword by Edward Soja 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd iii 7/19/2011 3:57:06 PM Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone 2011 Foreword © Edward Soja 2011 All contributions © individual contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–25225–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Postcolonial spaces : the politics of place in contemporary culture / edited by Andrew Teverson, Sara Upstone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–25225–7 (hardback) 1. Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Space in literature. 3. Geography in literature. 4. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Postcolonialism—Commonwealth countries. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Teverson, Andrew. II. Upstone, Sara. PR9080.5.P72 2011 828'.9140803582—dc23 2011021383 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd iv 7/19/2011 3:57:07 PM For Dominic and Tristan, for whom space means play (AT), and for a wonderful mother, Christine Dailey (SU). 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd v 7/19/2011 3:57:07 PM This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Notes on Contributors xiv Acknowledgements xvii Introduction 1 Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone 1 English somewheres: Caryl Phillips and the English North 14 John McLeod 2 A few words about the role of the Cartographers: Mapping and postcolonial resistance in Peter Carey’s ‘Do You Love Me?’ 28 Nicholas Dunlop 3 ‘How does your garden grow?’ or Jamaica Kincaid’s spatial praxis in My Garden (Book): and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya 40 Wendy Knepper 4 Gender and space in postcolonial fiction: South Asian novelists re-imagining women’s spatial boundaries 57 Elizabeth Jackson 5 From hijab to sweatshops: Segregated bodies and contested space in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane 67 Monica Germanà 6 Overlapping space and the negotiation of cultural identity: Children’s literature from the South Asian diaspora 83 Shehrazade Emmambokus 7 Owning the city: Screening postcolonial Bombay in Milan Luthria’s Taxi 9 2 11: Nau Do Gyarah 97 Caroline Herbert 8 Postcolonial purgatory: The space of migrancy in Dirty Pretty Things 112 James Graham vii 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd vii 7/19/2011 3:57:07 PM viii Contents 9 Third space, abstract space and coloniality: National and subaltern cartography in Ecuador 129 Sarah A. Radcliffe 10 Security, territory, and colonial populations: Town and empire in Foucault’s 1978 lecture course 146 Stephen Legg 11 The geography of theory: Knowledge, politics and the postcolonial present 164 Tariq Jazeel Bibliography 185 Index 203 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd viii 7/19/2011 3:57:07 PM Foreword Edward Soja As Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone observe in their excellent editorial introduction to this collection of essays, postcolonial studies have always been spatial to some degree. This has meant that there has been a long-standing and mutually rewarding relationship between post colonial studies and the field of human geography. These ties have become even closer given the resurgence of interest in space and spatial theory that has spread across almost every humanities and social science discipline in recent years. At the same time, however, this so-called ‘spatial turn’ has raised new issues and challenges to postcolonial scholarship. In some ways, the early advantage postcolonial spatial studies have had is no longer as strong as it once was, as many other fields of study become increasingly spatialized. Postcolonial Spaces draws on its well-established special relationship with critical human geography but aims also to move in new directions and build more effective and synergistic bridges between the two distinctive worlds of postcolonial scholarship, one rooted in literary criticism, the other in geography. The essays contained here are a kind of barometer indicating what has been happening in each of these postcolonial worlds, one seeking to become more spatial while the other, ostensibly more spatial to begin with, looks toward creating closer ties with literary texts and critical methods. Whether productive bridges and/or hybridities have been cre- ated in these chapters I will leave to the reader to decide. Instead, I will try briefly to give some additional perspective and background to this search for closer ties between the two worlds of postcolonial spatial studies. Clearly at the inspirational source not just of postcolonial studies more generally but of specifically spatial versions of postcolonial criticism is the work of Edward Said. None of us, Said writes setting the spatial scene, is completely free from the struggle over geography, a struggle that is not just about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, images and imaginings, about competition for land and territory and the search for fundamental and egalitarian rights to inhabit space. Struggles over real and imagined geographies are not just the leitmotif of Eurocentric orientalism and at the core of Said’s explorations of culture and imperi- alism, they are central to nearly all postcolonial writings and provide a provocative focal point for the chapters contained here. ix 9780230252257_01_prexviii.indd ix 7/19/2011 3:57:07 PM x Foreword Postcolonial Spaces, however, is more than an extension or rebirth of Said’s ideas. It is an effort to break open new ground and build upon the unprecedented diffusion of critical spatial perspectives throughout the human sciences. In nearly every chapter, for example, there is refer- ence to a ‘third space’ of creative hybridity and innovative new ideas. Many of the literary scholars reaching out to geography draw on my concept of Thirdspace (Soja, 1996), while, somewhat counterintuitively, the three chapters written by geographers tend to refer more directly to the related but less spatially assertive conceptualization of Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), referring more to notions such as the ‘third cinema’ and the Third World. In both concepts, the lasting interpretive power of binary logic and Big Dichotomies, such as colonizer–colonized, East and West, North and South, capitalism and socialism, is rejected in the search for alternative spaces, for other ways of thinking and writing about the postcolonial condition and its unending struggles over geography. Despite these conceptually unified theorizations, however, postcolonial studies in general and postcolonial spatial studies in particular have continued to be split into two different discursive worlds. One world thrives on spatial metaphors like mapping, location, cartography, and landscape, works primarily with fictional literatures, and excels at liter- ate textual analysis; the other often tends to sublimate its overtly spatial emphasis, eschews metaphorical flair, and strives for solid materialist exposition of real politics and oppression. These postcolonial worlds and their cultures of representation overlap but remain remarkably dis- crete and distinctive, especially in their paradigmatic core areas. Both worlds are represented here in Postcolonial Spaces although there is a concerted and creative effort to stimulate bridging and perhaps even hybridizing dialogues between them. The existence and persistence of these two different discursive and interpretive worlds first became apparent to me, a geographer who tries to straddle both worlds, in a seminar I gave at the invitation of doctoral students in the English Department at UCLA. A few of their instructors had ‘discovered’ space but the students, as is often the case, were far ahead of their mentors in exploring the implications of the spatial turn for literature and criticism. They asked me to do a reading course with them. We met and I poured out my ideas about space and spatiality, while they eagerly and knowledgeably responded, introducing me not just to how the spatial turn was being perceived in English literature studies but to writings that they thought perceptively represented my ideas.

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