Social & Cultural Geography | 2019
Topoi/graphein: mapping the middle in spatial thought
Abstract
Christian Abrahamsson’s Topoi/Graphein is the first book to be published in the University of Nebraska Press’s ‘Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth’ series, edited by Paul Kingsbury and Arun Saldanha, which is intended to provide ‘a forum for cutting-edge research that embraces theoretical creativity, methodological experimentation, and ethico-political urgency’. This book certainly lives up to that ambition. By foregrounding and problematizing the space ‘in-between’, the slash of the book’s title and the plus sign of the series’ title make perfect bedfellows, and the weird-sounding phrase ‘topoi graphein’ is undoubtedly a thought-provoking re-writing of the alltoo-familiar and taken-for-granted word ‘geography’, whose criticality has arguably become dulled through endless repetition. Merely inserting a slash or a plus sign into the word geography would probably have been an insufficiently jolting or shocking gesture. I wager that ‘geo/graphy’ or ‘geo +graphy’would be easily recuperated by the customary forms of ‘earth writing’, and I suspect that few would-be readers would have stumbled upon let alone been tripped up by such a title. Switching ‘topoi’ for ‘geo-’, and ‘graphein’ for ‘-graphy’, is arguably amuchmore disconcerting and bewildering gesture, defamiliarizing and estranging the work of geography in at least three dimensions at once: in the world, in the writing and in the in-between. Moreover, the strangeness of the title is accompanied by an evocative yet enigmatic subtitle, ‘mapping the middle in spatial thought’, and the book’s cover sports an arresting yet incongruous photograph of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon at the Trinity test site in NewMexico on 16 July 1945. The puzzling combination of ‘topoi/graphein’, ‘mapping the middle’ and an eerie mushroom cloud promises a work that is theoretically creative, methodologically experimental and ethico-politically urgent, and from which there is likely to be ‘much to ponder and much to learn’, as Gunnar Olsson says in his inspiring foreword (p. xv). Topoi/Graphein begins and ends in the middle, amid the horror of Abu Ghraib and amidst the abysmal remains of horror vacui, respectively, and aspires to remain in the middle for the duration of the text, cleaving to the slash between topoi and graphein, all the while attempting ‘to map the paradoxical limit of the in-between’ (p. xxiv). The middle, or the in-between, is paradoxical because it is the space or place of relationality and relativity that draws together and holds apart, where not only identity and difference but also truth, knowledge, certainty and sense are rigged to break down. Building on the extraordinary oeuvre of Gunnar Olsson, from Birds in Egg (1975) to Abysmal (2007), Abrahamsson’s theoretical creativity involves taking the alltoo-familiar geographical trilogy of points/locations, lines/limits and planes/surfaces, and reworks them from the middle – from the inside out and the outside in –, thereby delimiting, deranging and deconstructing each in the process.