Editorial: Richard Phillips and Scott McCracken
Fredric
Jameson has called for a rethinking of ‘cultural politics in terms ofspace
and the struggle for space’.1
This issue of
new formations looks at wherethe spatial imagination is taking cultural
criticism. Five of the articles (byClive Barnett, Richard Cavell, Jess Edwards,
Gerry Kearns, and AndrewThacker) were originally given as papers at a conference
session, ‘TextualSpaces, Spatial Texts’, at the Royal Geographical Society
in London in 2004.That three other articles drawing their impetus from the
same disciplinaryintersection were submitted to the journal during the editorial
processsuggests that the session reflected broader debates in cultural studies.
Thesecurrently operate around: textual space (a term deployed by StephenMuecke);
mapping strategies and territorial disputes (Graham Huggan);maps of meaning
(Peter Jackson, after Raymond Williams); cognitivemapping (Frederic Jameson);
geographies of writing (Nedra Reynolds);writing space (Jay Bolter); geographies
of reading (James Secord); conceptualspace (Paul Werth); and spaces of print
and cartography (Robert Mayhew).2
The first of these three articles, Peter Brooker’s ‘Terrorism and CounterTerrorism and Counternarratives; Don DeLillo and the New YorkImaginary’, asks how New York has been re-imagined since 11 September2001. Looking at narratives as different as DeLillo’s work from Mao II toCosmopolis and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers,Brooker asks how New York’s urban imaginary as a ‘lived perceptual andinterpretive framework, operating in a dialectical relation with the physicalfabric and institutionalised systems of the urban or metropolitan complex’has changed in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Ian Buchanan’s article ‘Practical Deleuzism and Postmodern Space’ takesthe discussion from redefinitions of a city we think we know to the lack ofdefinition of what Marc Augé calls ‘non-places - malls, airports, freeways,office parks, and so forth, which prioritise cost and function over look andfeel’. In his discussion of postmodern space, Buchanan moves through threeseparate, but related stages: cinematic anticipations; the mall as realisation;and the application of the concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ to itstransformations. Understanding postmodern space in relation to land valueand ground rent suggests, he argues, an application of Deleuzian theorythat is in keeping with the practical philosophy Deleuze demanded.
In the third article in this section, Jody Berland examines the significanceof a spatial imaginary to Canadian national identity. In ‘After the Fact: SpatialNarratives in the Canadian Imaginary’she argues that in Canada ‘theemphasis on land and space has both expedited and resisted forces ofcolonial power’. Berland’s central metaphor for the forging of a nationalimaginary is the train-radio that broadcast as it crossed the continent, makinga Canadian space through the air waves. But Canada’s ambivalent positionas both part of North America and politically and cultural distinct from itspowerful neighbour means that its national space is far from secure. Herespatial politics is an ongoing battle for definition and redefinition.
The articles that emerged from ‘Textual Spaces/Spatial Texts’ are framedby Andrew Thacker’s call for ‘a critical literary geography’ and MilesOgborn’s ‘Afterword’. Thacker, working in an English Department, tracesthe influence of geographical ideas as they have seeped into literary studies.He proposes ‘a critical literary geography’, stressing its difference to the‘effortless mapping of represented landscapes in literary texts’. Such a literarygeography would, he suggests, ‘raise more complex questions about spaceand power, and how space and geography affect literary forms and styles’.Ogborn, who responded as discussant to the conference papers on the day,here gives a considered response from the perspective of cultural geographyon the distinctions and differences highlighted by the dialogues the articlesestablish.
The other four essays in this section, also demonstrate the transgressionof disciplinary boundaries such dialogues involve. Gerry Kearns, who worksin a Department of Geography, offers a nuanced analysis of the spatialpolitics of James Joyce’s fiction. Jess Edwards, from an English Department,engages with early modern mathematics to respond with an account of the‘dirtiness’ of early modern maps, which were used ‘not just to representspace but also to negotiate the identity, the legitimacy and the agency ofindividuals, groups and ventures’. Clive Barnett, another culturalgeographer, in ‘Disseminating Africa: Burdens of representation and theAfrican Writers Series’ offers a new perspective on Heinemann’s AfricanWriters Series as not primarily ‘ideological’, but instead engaged in thegeneration of new public forms of space. While in the final article in thesection, Richard Cavell asks in ‘Geographical Immediations: Locating TheEnglish Patient’, what impact the increasing hegemony of electronic mediationhas had on the relationship between space and text. Writing from within anEnglish department, Cavell argues that ‘"text" remains useful for ourunderstanding of a fundamentally mediatised space only to the extent thatit can be understood as having superseded the regime of writing, as inBarthes’ suggestion that texts are networks’.
Such dialogues are not, of course, without disagreement. Cross-disciplinarymisunderstandings are the inevitable consequences ofdifferences in perspective, language and values: of different critical literacies.As editors we have had vigorous debates about the issue, debates colouredby our different disciplinary perspectives which changed in character andemphasis according to the spaces in which they were situated at the time.The conference, for example, took place on geographical terrain, while theeditorial process was conducted in the context of a journal which includes,culture, theory and politics, but not geography in its title.
Despite the tensions this threw up, we accept that such debates reflectthe difficulties and realities of interdisciplinary exchange. Situated inevitablyamidst the realities of disciplinary power and influence, in the end, ourdialogues were both critical and productive, resulting, we feel, in a betterissue than if they had not taken place. Nonetheless, the dialogues go on. AsOgborn concludes, there are still significant differences. Speakingproductively across boundaries is something that has to be worked at.
1. Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso, 1991
2. Graham Huggan, Territorial Disputes, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996; see also: PeterJackson, Maps of Meaning, London, Routledge, 1989; S. Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality andCultural Studies, Kensington, New South Wales University Press, 1992; Nedra Reynolds, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press,2004; Paul Werth, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, London, Longman, 1999; JayDavid Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print,New Jersey, Lawrence Earlbaum, 2001; James Secord, Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Receptionand Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago, University ofChicago Press, 2000; Robert Mayhew, ‘British Geography’s Republic of Letters:Mapping and Imagined Community, c. 1600-1800’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 65, 2 (2004).
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