Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities

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Such geographical identities and 'the struggle over geography' (Saïd 1993: 6) 1 that they imply provide the setting for a new imaginative geography: for instance, the recurrent theme of Englishness in post-devolution literature, or the revival of the travel writing genre which marked the end of decolonization. If we accept that the nation is an 'imagined community' (Anderson 1991), then the new spaces of identity suggest new forms and formulations of the imaginary, a geo-narrative map yet to be drawn. In the last thirty years, the 'spatial turn' in social theory has reached beyond the boundaries of geography and its subdisciplines to encourage a focus on: the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the life world of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes: social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization. (Soja 1989: 10-11) Moreover, the disciplinary partitions have been eroded from within as much as from without, since the 'cultural turn' in geography has encouraged the recognition that the description of space can rarely escape social, political and even ideological implications. Just as space and place have become central to social theory, so has mapping emerged as a trope of spatial thinking and analysis. From Stuart Hall's 'maps of meaning ' (2003: 29) to Salman Rushdie's 'world mapped by stories,' 2 the map-aslogo traces itineraries through a fragmentary world of uncertain meaning.
For this issue we have selected articles that cast a fresh perspective on two areas where identity and geography intersect: the construction of identity through the imaginative recreation of place in literature: Mapping Literary Spaces; and the study of the shifting relationships of centre and periphery, exclusion and inclusion in urban settings and geopolitical confrontations: Social and Political Peripheries. 3

Mapping literary spaces
The etymology of the term 'plot' goes back to Old English when one of the meanings of 'plot' or 'plat' was a plan or map of land. That this term should have migrated to describe the narrative structure of fiction reveals the parallels that can be drawn between 1 The more fully elaborated text is: 'Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings' (Saïd 1993: 6). 2 The expression refers to Rushdie's multimedia archive which was purchased by Emory University and subsequently exhibited there in 2010. 3 We thank Miriam Thompson for her invaluable editorial work on this issue. PORTAL, vol. 12, no. 1, January 2015. 3 fictional creation and map-making; as Peter Turchi (2004: 13) writes: 'in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.' Turchi pursues these parallels along two lines of argument: not only does the writer create a fictional geography and setting for their story, but the very processes of writing resemble those of the cartographer since they involve choice of perspective, forms of symbolic representation, the selection of features to foreground, the depiction of relationships, and the drawing of boundaries. And through these processes, both writer and cartographer must conjure up the illusion of creating a simulacrum of reality, establishing a relationship with the real world that convinces the reader/user not of its absolute fidelity but of its validity, its usefulness and its relevance.
The metaphor that depicts the novel as charting new territory and the writer as explorer Even in the secular variants of this trope, that include the picaresque novel and the bildungsroman, Geography is not simply the framework of travel, the background against which the action is played out, but an actor in the drama, confronting the hero with a series of physical trials and obstacles. As the journey unfolds, the hero moves not only through a physical landscape but also through the changing social landscapes that each stage brings. His mature self is built up through these successive encounters as the experiential and symbolic journey progresses.
It is a voyage of self-discovery but also a voyage of discovery about the world for the hero and the reader, that is to say, a vehicle for critiquing existing ideas, for undoing the prejudices of the group to which one belongs.  (Lefebvre 1991: 383) where populations can reappropriate their cultural identities and social or political autonomy.
In the struggle over geography, counter space is typically carved out on the periphery of political societies, or at the local and regional sub-scales. In her contribution to this issue, Daniela Rogobete looks at how postcolonial literature maps out such space, diachronically as much as synchronically, creating alternative narratives of identity. In particular, she examines the claims and counter-claims made for the Indian English Novel: in achieving global recognition for Indian literature and culture while resisting the cultural compression of globalization, but also in projecting Indian identities on Western models to the detriment of regional literatures and languages. Rogobete suggests that the tensions inherent in the paradigm of the 'global novel' may be resolved with the contemporary emergence of a 'glocal' Indian literature which assimilates English and regional languages in a hybrid and eclectic genre that preserves the authenticity and diversity of cultural identities.

Social and political peripheries
The relationship of core and periphery and its related pairs, inclusion and exclusion, centre and margin, can be conceptualized in many different ways and shown to operate in many settings, affecting individuals, communities, or whole populations, as the articles in this section illustrate.
Social and political exclusion are so often symbolized through, realized in and reinforced by, spatial segregation. This is poignantly illustrated in Esme Cleall's article, Silencing deafness, which describes the increased institutionalization of people with Others have argued that while it is true that identity in the modern world is increasingly loosened from all territorial ties, new landscapes of belonging are created: Arjun Appadurai, describing the creation through technological ties of networks uniting world-wide diaspora, writes of the 'ethnospaces' that unite people scattered across continents: As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethnic in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality … The landscapes of group identity-the ethnoscapes-around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious or culturally homogeneous. (1996: 48) We need perhaps, moreover, to question the often implicit assumption of the 'dislocation thesis,' that there existed an unproblematic link between place and identity that characterized past generations, an idea that is sometimes reproduced even in academic theories that contrast the complex and shifting identities of the present with some golden past of identity rooted in place, and imply or extol the necessity for a return to 'supposedly unalienated direct sensory interaction with nature' (Appadurai 1996: 48). David Harvey (2009: 187) argues that such theories 'cannot avoid descending into a pervasive elitism,' as they contrast the empty and soulless lives of the majority with the 'authenticity' of those who live 'simple lives close to the land.' Countering the perceived rootlessness of modern life, is the resistance of city dwellers to the juggernaut of change: for example, as Carolyn Stott's article shows, the residents who took up the defence of 'old' Belleville, continue to display a strong sense of community centred round preservation and celebration of the 'uniqueness' of this quartier of Paris. Their campaign illustrates how ideas about a locality can determine the destruction or preservation of its physical features: the historical representations of Belleville that Stott identifies draw to the area a certain type of resident, artists, writers and multiculturels, who value its unique heritage and are inspired to try to preserve and recreate (or create?) the qualities it possesses in reputation.
Stott reveals too the power of imaginary boundaries: the quartier known as 'Belleville' overflows and transgresses its current administrative boundaries: it is a palimpsest of layer upon layer of historical associations and literary representations that overlap but never quite coincide. Not only does the area defy any attempt to impose on it clear boundaries but internally it is criss-crossed by divisions and contrasts defined by the needs, priorities and practices of the various communities who live there: high and low Belleville; the old streets with their small workers' cottages transformed into studios and the grand towers of the HLM; the sudden transformations from one street to another as the ethnic mix of each sector shifts. Today's inhabitants impose on it their own meanings through their social and work activities: the artists who see the area as redolent with an atmosphere propitious to their creativity and lifestyle; the transplantés who relate to it in utilitarian terms mainly as a cheaper place to live; immigrants who, benefitting from the quartier's reputation for tolerance of diversity, seek to reproduce the familiarity of home in the streets and markets creating 'microterritoires,' 'dans lequel les communautés diasporiques cherchent un ancrage territorial' (Bruneau 2006: 328 Colonial populations too, remote from the metropolitan centre, may be condemned by the tyranny of distance never to see the home country to which they nevertheless feel they belong. Such was the fate of the Australian colonists in the nineteenth century who Caledonia. Yet for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Australia feared its much smaller and weaker neighbour as a threat to her very existence, as a steppingstone for French and later Japanese aggression. Gerard Toal (1996: 1) has written that geography is not a noun but a verb: it does not describe what space is but studies what we do with space, imaginatively and politically.
The articles in this issue illustrate the exercise of the literary and political imagination and the role of materiality and memory in the creation of geographic representation.
They show too a new awareness of the centrality of space in the constitution of identities, and the need for a new geocritical reading of its discourse, as the interrelations of place and community are played out on the many scales of social and political life, from the local to the global.