Introduction: Postcolonial spaces across forms

In her influential study of spatiality, human geographer Doreen Massey (2005) writes that “one of the effects of modernity was the establishment of a particular power/knowledge relation which was mirrored in a geography that was also a geography of power (the colonial powers/the colonised spaces) – a power-geometry of intersecting trajectories” (64). In this comment, Massey brings out the notion that space – its control and its administration – functions not as an auxiliary to colonial conquest, but as a central component (possibly the component) enacted itself through such conquest. Given this observation, it is perhaps unsurprising that the question of imperialism’s geographies, both “imagined”, in Edward W. Said’s terms, and material, have long remained a central concern of postcolonial studies and colonial discourse analysis more broadly. Of particular interest for this special focus of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing is the way in which literature and cultural expression more broadly have formed a key means through which imagined geographies have been constituted, intersecting with and interrelated to the political-economic processes of colonialism and their aftermaths. As John Noyes (2006) writes, literature acts as “one of the many specific praxes which constitute imperialism” (emphasis in original), critical for the way in which it “serv[ed] to organize and coordinate a number of other imperialist functions on a different level” (7), including the structuration of the physical and geographical experience of imperial conquest and domination. If, as Sara Upstone (2009) claims, “the right to space must be seen as key to the very real, often violent, material effects of colonisation” (4), then literature, following Noyes, might be seen as one of the levels on which space was and is produced. Thus, the “long-standing and mutually rewarding relationship between postcolonial studies and the field of human geography” becomes something more than a gesture towards interdisciplinarity in the name of humanistic study, transforming into a site of urgency through the means by which the two disciplines, working together, illuminate “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” (Soja 2011, ix; italics in original).

If a critical consensus has emerged around the puissance of space as a constitutive facet of colonial rule and its legacies, the precise nature and condition of that space as articulated within postcolonial studies is less clear. In his landmark study, The Production of Space, French theorist Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) warns of what he calls the twinned myths of transparency and opacity which plague the study of space. On the one hand entirely metaphorical, little more than a synonym for subjectivity, and, on the other, entirely unknowable, “out there” in the “real world”, never to be accessed, these two visions of space occlude its existence as a lived totality, a complex matrix containing within it a multitude of scales and registers, forever in flux. More recently, Soja (2011) complains that

postcolonial studies in general and postcolonial spatial studies in particular have continued to be split in two different discursive worlds. One world thrives on spatial metaphors like mapping, location, cartography, and landscape, works primarily with fictional literatures, and excels at literate 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. (x)

When applied to the study of literary spatiality, these divisions and dualities result in a condition in which the text remains a passive repository of alternately abstract and materialist visions of space which do not account for its full, lived complexity as a site of constitution. It is precisely this dynamic and often contradictory model of space that the articles comprising this special focus seek to foreground, with a specific study of the role of cultural artefacts the role of cultural artefacts in the production of space. Rather than view the cultural text in passive terms, these articles foreground the specifically productive role of space and spatiality in literature and art, foregrounding their potency as sites of constitution and contestation. Spanning India, South Africa, the Caribbean and Singapore, these five articles take a broad geographical view of the multitudinous nature of space across registers and eras, demonstrating a common spirit in the vision that identity, subjectivity and spatiality cannot be seen as discrete and disinterested entities, but rather as co-constitutive parts of a dynamic and total system.

I have elsewhere written on the urgent need to reconstitute the ways in which we, as literary and cultural critics, think about and talk about space, moving from a mere focus on content to an exploration of the articulations and correspondences which motivate the production of space (Krishnan 2017). In other words, space is not merely what the text says, but what the text does. The articles in this section exemplify the type of scholarship that seeks to place this ethos into critical practice, looking not simply to instrumentalize the text or reduce it to a set of quantifiable inputs, but rather to excavate the full range of meaning which the text engenders as a site of creative agency in its own right. Against the postcritical notion that context serves as a mere black box through which meaning is mechanistically uncovered, these articles demonstrate the ways in which contextual knowledge enlivens the text, opening it to its full complexity as a site of completing and often conflictual “spatial ecologies” (Quayson 2014, 4), whose movements, interactions and struggles define the productive and generative force of postcolonial geographies and identities writ large. With articles ranging in their focus across literary fiction, poetry, film and graffiti art, moreover, this section illustrates the breadth of possibilities which emerge when a postcolonial spatial reading is applied to a wide corpus of texts, dismantling boundaries of genre and form to look beyond the merely illustrative, representative or passive.

This section opens with an article which positions film as an essential medium through which to reconsider spatial precepts and analyses. Florian Stadtler, in his reading of Indian cinema, locates in the city of Bombay/Mumbai an important articulation of modernity from the mid-20th century to the present day. Focusing on the specific example of postmillenial popular Indian cinema, Stadtler explores the contours of violence and nostalgia which mediate the filmic portrayal of city-space. Locating violence as the primary determining agent of the everyday in the city, Stadler’s contribution aptly illustrates the importance of commercial forms and popular media in the illumination of city-spaces submerged beneath the authenticated narratives promoted by government and official agents, suggesting that the formal properties of mass-market cinema engender a range of spatial correspondences which function beyond the confines of the page. Like Stadtler’s article, Emma Bird’s contribution places its attention on Bombay/Mumbai, focusing on poetry as the site of spatial articulations. Poetry, as a form, has been largely untheorized in postcolonial readings of space, and this article marks a welcome redress of this critical neglect. Bird explores the way poets have re-imagined the city through a process of poetic negotiation which unmasks its space not as cartographically bounded and absolute but as an open-ended process based on the experience of being human therein. Reading poems by Subramaniam, Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Amit Chaudhuri, Namdeo Dhasal, Hemant Divate, Arun Kolatkar, Imtiaz Dharker and Nissim Ezekiel, Bird connects a dizzying array of poetic expression to the forging of an alternative mode of spatial understanding and conceptualization. As in Stadtler’s analysis, this is a spatiality built upon the lived aesthetic of daily life in the metropolis, and which moves beyond the scripted narratives of the city as a binaristic site of possibilities and corruption and violence. An important contribution both for its reframing of our understanding of social space and poetry’s role therein, the article marks a welcome movement in the spatial turn in postcolonial literary studies.

If the question of genre serves as an underlying counterpoint in Stadtler’s and Bird’s articles, genre again emerges in Janie Beriault’s reading of two texts which defy easy characterization, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. For Beriault, these texts might offer a productive engagement with extant theorizations of spatiality under global modernity, re-centring its peripheries in their incisive commentaries on commercial tourism. Reading the spatial practices which inhere within each text, moreover, the article suggests an alternative to the hegemonic narratives purported by the tourism industry, which seek to isolate the Caribbean as a geography existing outside the social and historical processes of global modernity. By focusing on the underlying articulations of poverty and oppression which enable such a story to be told, these two texts, Beriault argues, offer a means through which to recuperate local agency and disrupt abstract modes of knowledge production about the global peripheries.

The next article examines the ways in which prose writing registers the dynamism of spatial formations. Samuel Perks’s study of Singaporean historical fiction attempts to complicate dominant narratives of Singapore as a success story of neo-liberal development and progress. Centred on close readings of two recent novels from the city-state, Perks contends that historical fiction might offer another perspective on Singapore’s so-called successful progression, through its Garden City programme launched in the 1960s, from fishing village to global metropolis. For Perks, historical fiction undercuts the inscription of neo-liberal-developmentalist triumphalism into “Garden City” space, in discursive and material terms, by restaging Singaporean economic development from a “bottom-up” perspective. Central to the analyses in this article are the ways in which these two works of historical fiction dramatize resettlement and landscape development as a means of resisting the neo-liberal erasure of vernacular and collective experiences of despoliation. Viewing Singapore as a paradigmatic – though by no means unique – exemplar of the neo-liberal logic of the contemporary world-system, Perks illuminates the role of literary writing in excavating hidden histories, experiences and, most tellingly, formations of geography. The final contribution to this special issue moves away from what we might traditionally consider to be literature in order to explore the intersection between the constitution of space and politics in the global south through the study of graffiti art. Centring its analysis on a handful of graffiti collectives based in Cape Town, Nomusa Makhuba’s contribution, “Changing the City After Our Heart’s Desire: Creative Protest in Cape Town”, explores the dynamics of legibility at play in the constitution of the post-apartheid city-space. Reading graffiti on the streets and within the confines of the art gallery, the article argues that the function of graffiti is to forge an ongoing process of creative protest which moves across sites and locations through a form of layering and erasure. By so doing, the article suggests, these collectives foreground the inherent violence of gentrification in city improvement planning, pointing towards the maintenance of an ever-generative form of alienation driven by the entrenchment of economically inflected forms of apartheid-style spatial segregations.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) argues that “when codes worked up from literary texts are applied to spaces – to urban spaces, say – we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level” (7). Yet the articles here demonstrate the extent to which this is only a partial observation. Certainly, each of the contributions illustrates the importance of excavating these forms of description and representation. At the same time, however, whether it be in the urban filmscapes of Bombay/Mumbai, the once-cloistered gallery spaces in Cape Town or the beaches of Antigua, the articles demonstrate the importance of the text – literary, visual, cultural – in imaginatively re-inscribing space. With a collective vision which unmasks the ways in which space, as lived through the text, exceeds the boundaries of colonialist modes of cartographic ordering, these articles uncover its supposedly monolithic properties, disturbing its modes of meaning-making and mapping, and giving view to the multitudes, often conflictual, often discrepant, who, moving through a continual process of becoming, lie within.

Notes on contributor

Madhu Krishnan is a senior lecturer in 20th-/21st-century postcolonial writing in the Department of English, University of Bristol. She is the author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identification (2014) and the forthcoming Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

The initial spark for this focus came out of research which I conducted through the support of the British Academy/Leverhulme Foundation Small Research Grant. I would like to thank all the contributors who have made this focus come together, and am exceptionally grateful to the editors of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for their tireless and meticulous efforts in bringing these articles together into their final form published here.