Introduction: Postcolonial spaces across forms

Abstract

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

Traumatic Portrayal of Nativity and Post-Colonial Cultural Hegemony in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart

“…Soja (2011) in "Foreword" to Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture refers to two realities: one that gives more importance to setting in terms of location and landscape in post-colonial works and considers them ideal for literary and textual analysis; second, that discusses real purpose of "politics and oppression." (2011: x) ( quoted in Krishnan, 2018 Writing). In literary contexts, colonialism deals both with the texts "produced by writers from countries with a history of colonialism" as well as with the texts "produced during colonialism" (McLeod, 2011).…”

“…However, in a hegemonic situation, nativism is also seen contrasted with modernity. Massey (2005) in relation to colonial power equates modernity with the establishment of power dynamics in a particular geographical area calling it a "power-geometry of intersecting trajectories" (2005) (quoted in Krishnan (2018). The natives gear up a resistance and do not allow the white man"s modernity to efface their nativity.…”