Literature’s Sensuous Geographies

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor: ROBERT T. TALLY JR., Texas State University Series description: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. His work explores the relations among narrative, representation, and social space in American and world literature, criticism, and theory. Tally has been recognized as a leading figure in the emerging fields of geocriticism, spatiality studies, and the spatial humanities. Tally’s books include Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism; Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique; Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System; Spatiality; Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography; and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer. The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, Tally is the editor of Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies; Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights; and Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative. Titles to date: Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature By Emily Johansen Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. Spatial Engagement with Poetry By Heather H. Yeung Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place By Sten Pultz Moslund Literature’s Sensuous Geographies Postcolonial Matters of Place Sten Pultz Moslund LITERATURE ’ S SENSUOUS GEOGRAPHIES Copyright © Sten Pultz Moslund, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-47967-9 Permission to use the opening quote from Judith Butler’s “Giving an Account of Oneself” has been granted by Diacritics, The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-50251-6 ISBN 978-1-137-45322-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137453228 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moslund, Sten Pultz. Literature’s sensuous geographies : postcolonial matters of place / Sten Pultz Moslund. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Geography and literature. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Geocriticism. 4. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Senses and sensation in literature. I. Title. PN56.G48M67 2015 809′ .9332—dc23 2014036017 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: March 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Martha we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity and not fully recoverable to ourselves. Judith Butler (“Giving an Account of Oneself”) C o n t e n ts Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I Theories 1 The Tenor of Place, Language, and Body in Postcolonial Studies 17 2 Sensuous Empires and Silent Calls of the Earth 31 3 Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of the Sensible 45 4 How to Read Place in Literature with the Body: Language as Poiesis-Aisthesis 59 Part II Analyses 5 Mind, Eye, Body, and Place in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) 81 6 Silent Geographies in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) 97 7 Nation and Embodied Experiences of the Place World in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) 115 8 Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937): Colonial Aesthetic and Decolonial Aisthesis 135 9 The Settler’s Language and Emplacement in Patrick White’s Voss (1957) 153 viii Contents 10 Place, Language, and Body in the Caribbean Experience and the Example of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (1972) 179 11 Place and Sensuous Geographies in Migration Literature 203 12 Spatial Transgressions and Migrant Aesthetics in David Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993) 219 Coda 241 Notes 247 Bibliography 253 Index 265 S e r i e s E d i t o r ’s P r e f a c e The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and x S e r i e s E d i t o r ’s P r e f a c e other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but also of the experience of place and displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. Robert T. Tally Jr. A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s I wish to express my thankfulness to the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation) for its financial support of the research phase that led to the writing of this book. I am grateful to Susan Bassnett, David Dabydeen, Edward Casey, Peter Hulme, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for supporting me at a very early stage of the project in the tough competition for funding. I also especially wish to express my gratitude to Edward Casey and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for being such generous hosts during my research visits at Stony Brook University and Stanford, respectively, and for being such fantastic critical readers of some of the chapters of the book. The book is indebted, too, to the intellectual stimulation of Gumbrecht and Robert Harrison at Stanford and their marvelous philosophical reading group (their thoughts on Heidegger, Nietzsche, nihilism, materiality, and Being, in particular). In fact, I owe much more to Gumbrecht’s and Harrison’s daring and open ways of thinking and speaking about relations between literature, language, and reality than the references in the book may suggest. Gumbrecht’s The Production of Presence (2004) has been particularly inspiring in thinking through the relations between art, language, the senses, and the presencing of place. Thank you, Sepp! The same goes for the way I contrast the meaning of the work and the hermeneutics of interpretation with the bodily and affective intensities in the work. I also want to thank my colleague, Søren Frank (this is becoming a habit!), for being such a great colleague and wonderful friend, for chairing the Place Research Program with me at the University of Southern Denmark. The Place Research Program spun up so many questions and perspectives that have also (in one way or another) made their way into these pages. Finally, my deepest gratitude, as always, goes to Marie for her love, her care, and for her unfailing support and encouragement, and to Martha—pure presence of life itself!—for coming into this world. Without the two of you, all of this work wouldn’t be worthwhile.