By Sara Upstone
In her cutting edge research of spatial destinations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational and comparative process that demanding situations the tendency to have interaction with authors in isolation or with regards to different writers from a unmarried geographical environment. Suggesting that keeping apart authors by way of geography reinforces the primacy of the state, Upstone as an alternative illuminates the ability of spatial locales similar to the adventure, urban, domestic, and physique to permit own or communal statements of resistance opposed to colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies. whereas targeting the foremost texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salmon Rushdie when it comes to specific spatial destinations, Upstone bargains quite a lot of examples from different postcolonial authors, together with Michael Ondaatje, Keri Hulme, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. the result's a powerful case for what Upstone phrases the 'postcolonial spatial imagination', self reliant of geography even though continuously absolutely contextualised. Written in available and unhurried prose, Upstone's learn is marked by means of its recognize for the ways that the writers themselves withstand not just geographical barriers yet educational categorisation.
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Additional info for Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel
Sample text
Using the fiction of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Wilson Harris as case studies, it is clear that, regardless of the specifics of geographical location, postcolonial fiction can be seen to problematise the use of national space as the signifier of political engagement. The relationship between the contemporary postcolonial novelist and the nation must be set within the context of an anticolonial history that has seen ideas of independent nationhood as integral to liberation. The concept that liberation from colonial power has most notably been enacted on a national scale, rather than through local politics, has ensured the prominence of the nation in postcolonial discourses.
What exists is on one level a body, on another level an international community, but on no level a nation. However relevant the political analysis, to ignore this perspective in Harris’s work is to underestimate the originality of his vision. And whilst Johnson’s comments may be pertinent, they exist within a field that is more reluctant to take on Harris’s own message in readings of his fiction. Robert Carr, for example, provides a detailed and fascinating reading of The Guyana Quartet (1960–63).
The Politics of Post-Space 21 they highlight the very crucial sense in which order is always an imposition, and how chaos reflects the state of space everywhere, rather than a reading which would facilitate the exoticisation of colonised spaces. Writing in English, and what are to different degrees magical narratives, their texts provide particularly powerful engagement with the elements of counter-realism and language that I have identified as central to postcolonial subversion. Finally, writing novels that move from colonial occupation to postcolonial independence, they capture precisely the sense of post-space as relevant to both colony and postcolony – to the legacy of colonial power and its very real continued operation – that is central to my concerns.