Oceans, islands, closets and smells: decolonization through spatial metaphors

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kimberley Peters, Philip Steinberg, and Elaine Stratford (eds), Territory Beyond Terra, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018.

2 Paul Carter, Decolonsing Governance: Archipelagic Thinking, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019, p 1.

3 Carter, Decolonsing Governance, pp 18, 21. See also E Stratford, G Baldacchino, E McMahon, C Farbotko and A Harwood, ‘Envisioning the Archipelago’, Island Studies Journal, 6(2), 2011, pp 113–130.

4 J Pugh, ‘Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago’, Island Studies Journal, 8(1), 2013, pp 9–24, cited in Carter, Decolonising Governance, p 21.

5 Carter, Decolonising Governance, p 109. Elsewhere he phrases these three characteristics as ‘edgelessness, innumerability, and the absence of islands’, p 32.

6 K Peters and P Steinberg, ‘The Ocean in Excess: Towards a More-Than-Wet Wet Ontology’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 9(3), 2019, pp 293–307; P Steinberg, B Kristoffersen and K L Shake, ‘Edges and Flows: Exploring Legal Materialities and Biophysical Politics of Sea Ice’, in Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R Johnson (eds), Blue Legalities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. See also P Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, London: Faber and Faber, 1987; P Carter, ‘Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed), Mappings, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

7 Carter, Decolonising Governance, p 101.

8 Carter, Decolonising Governance, pp 38–39.

9 G Pratt, ‘Spatial Metaphors and Speaking Positions’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 10(3), 1992, pp 241–244; C Katz and N Smith, ‘Grounding Metaphor’, in Michael Keith and Stephen Pile (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity, London: Routledge, 1993; G Rose, ‘As if the Mirror Has Bled: Masculine Dwelling, Masculine Theory, and Feminist Masquerade’, in Nancy Duncan (ed), BodySpace, London: Routledge, 1996.

10 Wolfgang Natter and John Paul Jones III, ‘Signposts Towards a Poststructuralist Geography’, in John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, and Theodore R Schatzki (eds), Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space, New York: Guilford, 1993, p 198.

11 M Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe, London: Routledge, 2000.

12 Carter, Decolonising Governance, p 32.

13 Of course the archipelago and closet differ as spatial metaphors in that while many islanders live on archipelagos very few (if any) gay men live in actual, geographically defined closets. The shared power of the two metaphors, however, as well as the parallels in the critiques articulated by Brown and Carter, further suggest that the power of the spatial metaphor lies as much in the force of space as a concept deployed through/in metaphor as in the actual material content of the specific, referenced space.

14 Carter, Decolonising Governance, p 101.

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Philip Steinberg

Philip Steinberg is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University, where he directs IBRU: Durham University's Centre for Borders Research and the Durham Arctic Research Centre for Training and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (Durham ARCTIC). He is the author or editor of six books, including The Social Construction of the Ocean (2001) and, most recently, Territory Beyond Terra (2018).