Nesologies: island form and postcolonial geopoetics

Abstract

The terrain of what this essay calls geopoetics is limned by the encounter between two epistemologically independent but insistently cross-pollinating strands of enquiry. The first concerns the textuality of geography, and focuses on the semiotic, rhetorical and ideological energies that inform the domain of geographical knowledge and representation. The second addresses the reverse problematic of the geography of textuality, and takes stock of the representational and narrative uses of spatial form, or delves into the geographies underlying the distribution, consumption or reception of imaginative texts.11. Awareness of the textuality of geography is largely the result of the impact of Marxist or Marxism-related geography, including Henri Lefebvre's La production de l'espace (1974), David Harvey's The Limits to Capital (1982), and Neil Smith's Uneven Development (1991)

equally influential has been the semiological attention to techniques of cartographical representation in Frank Lestringant's L'Atelier du cosmographe ou L'Image du monde à la Renaissance (1991), Christian Jacob's L'empire des cartes (1992), and Tom Conley's The Self-Made Map (1996). Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973), Louis Marin's Utopiques: jeux d'espaces (1973), Philippe Hamon's Expositions: Littérature et architecture au XIXe siècle (1989), and Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel (1999), on the other hand, have been seminal in sketching out important vectors of a geography of textuality.View all notes The focus of geopoetics therefore encompasses both the diachronic and the synchronic, historicity and spatiality: as a hermeneutic practice, it represents both an effort to account for those aspects of spatial ‘knowledge’ that are dynamically made and remade in the process of social and cultural change, and an attempt to ground representation on the set of localizing and particularizing constraints that act upon it.22. The interplay between geography and history looms large in the essays included in the special issue on ‘Geopoetics’ in Critical Inquiry 26(2), 2000. Joan Brandt uses the term in Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Postructuralist French Poetry and Theory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Brandt's acceptation of the term is rather looser, but shares the focus on ‘interrelatedness’—in her use, ‘of the poetic, the theoretical, and the sociopolitical’ (p viii).View all notes In this hybrid economy of what Diana Loxley, evoking Edward Said, calls ‘world as text and text as world’, it is the very division between geographical and textual topoi that is exposed as epistemologically volatile and unsafe.33. Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands, London: Macmillan, 1990, p 96.View all notes And it is precisely by highlighting the problematic state of this distinction that geopoetics can help us challenge the frequently inert and undialectical divisions of subject and object, of representation and referent, on which traditional understandings of geography—and in some cases, poetics—have rested.