Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities
Matthew Graves, Aix-Marseille Université
Elizabeth Rechniewski, University of Sydney
The ambition of this issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
is to reach across the methodological boundaries of history, politics, literature and
geography to apply their complementary perspectives to the study of identity and its
relation to space and place, an aim that involves attempting to identify the many
different ways the notoriously slippery concepts of identity and geography may intersect.
In the course of the twentieth century the centrifugal forces of decolonization and
globalization eroded frontiers and seemed to threaten the dissolution of national and
cultural identity in supranational spaces of uncertain form (European enlargement),
while the centrifugal forces of resurgent regionalism raised fears of the break-up of the
sovereign body of the nation. The nation-states attempted to fill the identity void by
devising new forms of territorial politics (devolution, shared sovereignty) based on a
reconfiguration of the foundational spaces and places or the reinvention of collective
myths; at the same time, movements of resistance formed around an essentialist rereading
of national space (resurgent nationalisms), while others attempted to find an
alternative sense of collective belonging outside of the national framework (region,
community, network). In an age of hyper-communication, the postmodern diasporas
have become a source of ‘long-distance nationalism’ (Schiller & Fouron 2001).
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Such geographical identities and ‘the struggle over geography’ (Saïd 1993: 6)1 that they
imply provide the setting for a new imaginative geography: for instance, the recurrent
theme of Englishness in post-devolution literature, or the revival of the travel writing
genre which marked the end of decolonization. If we accept that the nation is an
‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991), then the new spaces of identity suggest new
forms and formulations of the imaginary, a geo-narrative map yet to be drawn. In the
last thirty years, the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory has reached beyond the boundaries of
geography and its subdisciplines to encourage a focus on:
the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the life world of
being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of
human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and
reformation of geographical landscapes: social being actively emplaced in space and time in
an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization. (Soja 1989: 10–11)
Moreover, the disciplinary partitions have been eroded from within as much as from
without, since the ‘cultural turn’ in geography has encouraged the recognition that the
description of space can rarely escape social, political and even ideological
implications. Just as space and place have become central to social theory, so has
mapping emerged as a trope of spatial thinking and analysis. From Stuart Hall’s ‘maps
of meaning’ (2003: 29) to Salman Rushdie’s ‘world mapped by stories,’2 the map-aslogo
traces itineraries through a fragmentary world of uncertain meaning.
For this issue we have selected articles that cast a fresh perspective on two areas where
identity and geography intersect: the construction of identity through the imaginative
recreation of place in literature: Mapping Literary Spaces; and the study of the shifting
relationships of centre and periphery, exclusion and inclusion in urban settings and
geopolitical confrontations: Social and Political Peripheries.3
Mapping literary spaces
The etymology of the term ‘plot’ goes back to Old English when one of the meanings of
‘plot’ or ‘plat’ was a plan or map of land. That this term should have migrated to
describe the narrative structure of fiction reveals the parallels that can be drawn between
1 The more fully elaborated text is: ‘Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is
completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is
not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’
(Saïd 1993: 6).
2 The expression refers to Rushdie’s multimedia archive which was purchased by Emory University and
subsequently exhibited there in 2010.
3 We thank Miriam Thompson for her invaluable editorial work on this issue.
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PORTAL, vol. 12, no. 1, January 2015. 3
fictional creation and map-making; as Peter Turchi (2004: 13) writes: ‘in every piece we
write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it
even as we discover it.’ Turchi pursues these parallels along two lines of argument: not
only does the writer create a fictional geography and setting for their story, but the very
processes of writing resemble those of the cartographer since they involve choice of
perspective, forms of symbolic representation, the selection of features to foreground,
the depiction of relationships, and the drawing of boundaries. And through these
processes, both writer and cartographer must conjure up the illusion of creating a
simulacrum of reality, establishing a relationship with the real world that convinces the
reader/user not of its absolute fidelity but of its validity, its usefulness and its relevance.
The metaphor that depicts the novel as charting new territory and the writer as explorer
is one of the tropes of literature. Another is the metaphor that represents life as a
‘journey.’ Indeed it constitutes one of the central tropes of Western literature and myth:
the journey of exploration, of initiation, of trial and redemption, where the main
character embarks on a voyage of discovery that is also one of self-discovery and selftransformation.
In his article in this issue Charles Moseley uncovers the moral and
symbolic force of the geographical narrative in one of the earliest examples, that of
Mandeville’s Travels, an account of the part-fabled journey of the Western narrator to
the East. His travels across ‘macrospace’ cannot be plotted onto any modern map but
the trajectory of his journey reflects the theological and historical ordering of space of
the Medieval worldview, where geography is a physical representation of the sacred.
Even in the secular variants of this trope, that include the picaresque novel and the
bildungsroman, Geography is not simply the framework of travel, the background
against which the action is played out, but an actor in the drama, confronting the hero
with a series of physical trials and obstacles. As the journey unfolds, the hero moves not
only through a physical landscape but also through the changing social landscapes that
each stage brings. His mature self is built up through these successive encounters as the
experiential and symbolic journey progresses.
It is a voyage of self-discovery but also a voyage of discovery about the world for the
hero and the reader, that is to say, a vehicle for critiquing existing ideas, for undoing
the prejudices of the group to which one belongs. Thus Mandeville’s Travels contains
within it, Moseley argues, a critical meditation and commentary on Western ideas and
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practices through the encounters with the many Others that the journey affords.
Similarly, in her article for this issue, Isabelle Avila shows that Marlow, the narrator of
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is forced by the end of his journey up river to reassess the
true nature of savagery and civilization, and to question the self-assured depiction of
European domination on the maps of colonized Africa. As these examples suggest,
while the self may be built up through journeying through space and time, it may also
be disrupted, challenged indeed destroyed.
In her paper to the ‘Geographies of Displacement’ conference in Montpellier in June
2014, Isabelle Avila drew attention to the role of maps as lieux de mémoire that
organize not only space but time as well. As the blank heart of African cartography was
gradually filled over the nineteenth century, the successive versions of the map of the
continent, preserved in memory, became testimony to the exploits of the British and the
advance of ‘civilization.’ The maps, displayed in schoolrooms, furnished the ‘mobilier
mental des Britanniques’ over several generations, providing ‘un lieu de mémoire
géographique du progrès de l’exploit humain.’4 Her case study is a potent reminder that
the development of Western cartography is closely associated with the Age of
Discovery and its expansion with the imperialist project. As Toal (1996: 4) writes: ‘The
function of cartography was to transform seized space into legible, ordered imperial
territory.’ In the employ of the European colonial powers, the cartographers of empire
carved up the ‘blanks’ and ‘empty quarters’ of the globe into easily assimilated
geometrical figures, frequently along lines of longitude and latitude rather than the
ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural contours of their indigenous populations, even in
defiance of geographical realities. In this context, the map of empire became an
instrument of ‘Geography Militant,’ serving a dominant epistemology in a polarized
world of civilized Western Self and primitive Indigenous Other.
In her article for this issue Avila argues further, however, that the apparent simplicity
of the story told by the maps, of the passage from the unknown to the known, from
invisibility to transparency, was challenged by literary writers of the late nineteenth
century, and notably by Joseph Conrad. Through his portrayal of the shadows that close
in on Marlow’s voyage into the heart of dark