Guest Editorial [PDF]
Kayleigh Sacco, Geraldine Sammut, Maria Theuma: University of Malta
Behind the Backs of Borders: Diaspora Microspace in Imtiaz Dharker’s Poetry [PDF]
Bailey Betik: University of Edinburgh
A self-described ‘“Scottish Muslim Calvinist’”, poet Imtiaz Dharker uses her collections to vividly depict everyday life ‘between borders’. Dharker’s cultural identity, one indubitably rooted in hybridity, displays itself in the shattering of binaries between Other and indigene throughout her body of work. However, factoring in the changing sociopolitical climate and attitudes toward Muslim women in the Western world, heightened in the aftermath of 9/11, and comparing her collections I Speak For the Devil and The Terrorist at My Table, one can see Dharker’s imagery of hybridity drastically shift. To better unpack the notion of existing in a perpetual life between borders, I propose a notion of “diaspora microspace” that combines Avtar Brah’s definition of a ‘diaspora space’ with Homi Bhabha’s ‘inter’ of the Third Space. Diaspora microspaces then act as frames of examination for the manifestations of diaspora narrative in everyday spaces of identity—where collapsed borders echo through quotidian spaces like dinner tables, doorways, and the home. Pre-9/11, these diaspora microspaces in the former collection begin as thresholds of optimistic negotiation, understanding, and translation, but in the latter, post-9/11, more often end in mistranslation, power struggle, and misrepresentation. Drawing upon Brah and Bhabha’s aforementioned theories alongside Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, I will chart how Dharker blurs Other-indigene and public-private binaries with this imagery, as well as how her agency over her disaporic cultural identity waxes and wanes.
The “Gypsies” as Displaced Others in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Stories [PDF]
Alan Goodson: University of Edinburgh
The Romany people feature prominently in nineteenth-century British literature as a prototypical displaced “other” symbolic of moral, social, and racial standards antithetical to the national ideal. We read examples of this trope in Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Bronte’s Jayne Eyre, Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ and Stoker’s Dracula among many other works. Doyle’s treatment of “Gypsies” in his Sherlock Holmes stories such as ‘The Speckled Band’, ‘Silver Blaze’, ‘The Priory School’ and ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles’ opens a subversive space resisting a stereotypical representation which may be expected from an author whose cultural conservatism is well documented, and whose Holmes stories are often seen as reinforcing sentiment sympathetic to the Imperial and British national ideal. Many of Doyle’s Holmes stories feature either foreigners or English characters returning from abroad culturally subverted, who threaten to disrupt the harmonious space of British society. The country becomes a safer place when these “types” are categorised according to Holmes’ methodology in relation to the ideal hierarchy, which has the white Anglo-Saxon male at its summit. The “Gypsies” maintain anonymity as a quasi-autonomous, mobile and discrete culture within British national boundaries yet in these stories they are never responsible for crime, while suspicion is often the cause of their displacement as they are forced to avoid local disturbance. The narrative, therefore, seeks to inform the reader that the Roma do not threaten domestic space in spite of their non-conformist behaviour.
Elsewhere, yet Nowhere: John Burnside’s Autofictions and Strategies of (Dis)Placement [PDF]
Ricarda Menn: Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
In reading John Burnside’s three autofictions, A Lie About My Father (2006), Waking Up In Toytown (2009), and I Put A Spell On You (2014), this article aims at discussing how spaces and personal remembering, as well as potential displacements, are interlinked endeavours in recollective narratives. As a key argument, the notion of spacing yet displacing the self through writing and re-writing furthers the autofictional endeavour of self-narrative as a non-linear, fragmented enterprise. This paper therefore sheds light on the interconnections of autobiography and autofiction, space and memory, as well as seriality and writing.
Exile and Chosenness in the Old English Exodus [PDF]
Joseph St John: University of Malta
The narrative poem Exodus came down to us in a single copy, preserved in the manuscript known as Junius 11, which is dated to the 10th century. The poem, like the other poetic compositions preserved in the same manuscript, is a biblical adaptation. However, the Anglo-Saxon poem does not simply relate the relevant episodes in Old English, as it employs nautical and military imagery that is alien to the original. The structure of the poem, as well as its peculiar imagery, effectively entails interpretation of Scripture, as the message of the biblical book is contextualised, both with reference to other biblical episodes as well as through Anglo-Saxon poetic imagery and narrative technique. The biblical ‘Book of Exodus’, a narrative of exile and journey, embodies the concepts of displacement and placement. Moreover, the crossing of the Red Sea—which dominates the poem’s main narrative—constitutes the space between the two, a movement from one state of affairs to the other. The concepts of displacement and placement within the poem, even though influenced by the original, take several forms, some arising out of biblical exegesis and others out of the history of the Anglo-Saxons themselves.
Heterotopic (Dis)placement in Elias Khoury’s Awlad al-Ghetto: Ismi Adam: Writing as Reclamation of Place [PDF]
Farah Aridi: Goldsmiths, University of London
This article focuses on the heterotopic spaces “of” and “in” the titular book, explored through the analysis of the everyday socio-spatial practices of Adam, the main character. Not only is he the narrator of his own story, but he also foregrounds the importance of narrating his own story himself. His act of narration of his experience in an Israeli camp in occupied Palestine and as a refugee in New York is a reclamation of his identity and voice. In order to do so, Adam announces full “ownership” of his book, by performing its spatiality: he breaks its structure, interrupts its flow by using intervening brackets, selects its content, and follows no linearity in the succession of events or the division of chapters. This paper invokes Michel Foucault’s study of heterotopic spaces as a starting point. To concretise the investigation of the camp space and its effect, including its internalisation, on its inhabitants, I rely on Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the said space as a state of exception. A spatial analysis of both the physical and the social dimension of the spaces present in the novel accentuates the camp’s transgressive potential. Finally, Henri Lefebvre’s triadic process of the production of space and Margaret Kohn’s study of heterotopia as sites of resistance are explored in context of the book Adam is writing.
The Space of Dissent in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It [PDF]
Amira Aloui: Carthage University
The Humanist episteme cherished individualism and mapped a world picture that places every object in its space and displaces any attempt of dissent. Shakespeare, then, produces As You Like It to invest in a new project that is not only a translation of its culture, but, above all, acts as an agent that maps and reshapes the episteme that has produced it. The characters, instead of ascending to the level of angels, choose to descend in space and time to the forest in an era marked by an opposition between the city and the country, or court and forest. The playwright thus becomes a mapmaker and the text a cartography of an alternative world. The physical displacement of characters to the alternative world of the forest spells out the playwright’s examination of the possibility of an anarchic “state” that negates all forms of corruption and policing; family, gender, class and even poetic orthodoxies. This hypothesis suggests the failure of the embryonic capitalist state, or a shared anxiety towards it. The interlude in the greenwood contrasts the immobility of time to a spatial mobility. Greenwood, thus, marks the longing for an alternative and a rejection of an authoritarian world, that of the city and the court. In this essay, I will study the revolutionary dimension of the text through an examination of poetic, political, and theatrical (dis)spatiality.
The War on Terroir: Biology as (unstable) Space in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy [PDF]
Aran Ward Sell: University of Edinburgh
Islands that turn out to be sea monsters, worlds encircled by serpents, poetic personification of skies and landscapes: metaphors of natural space as a living creature are nothing new. But the work of contemporary ‘weird fiction’ writer Jeff VanderMeer creates a radical new politics of biogeography for an Anthropocene audience: the encoding of our spatial environment as not just a single creature, but a living ecosystem dependent on a non-reducible complex interaction of micro-organisms, organic intelligences and climatic conditions. Focusing on VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, this article considers the implications of ‘Area X’, which is simultaneously a geographical space, a hostile intelligence, and an invasive “terroir”. This terroir, a term taken from wine-making to mean the sum of all interacting environmental elements (organic and otherwise), attempts to reintegrate the trilogy’s human characters into these interactions—to remodel them into a non-discrete, functioning element of an ecosystem—through parasitic infestation, decomposition and hyper-accelerated evolution. I consider the acknowledged influence on VanderMeer’s work of Rachel Carson, Jean Baudrillard and the anarchist Invisible Committee, to elucidate how the inherent instability of Area X’s biogeographical spaces provides a decentred perspective on climate change and human interventions in the natural world, displacing anthropocentric cultural readings of the Anthropocene even as it illustrates the profound danger that human intelligence poses to the co-dependent ecosystems which sustain it.
Again, Plato’s Garden, Again: a response [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina: Lancaster University
Weaving A Descriptive Tapestry of War, a Language Composed of Two Fragile and Precious Threads: A Review of the Works of Zeina Abirached [PDF]
Laure Keyrouz: University of Nova Gorica
