Sten Pultz Moslund

The Presencing of Place in Literature

One of the most remarkable developments within cultural and literary studies within the last fifty years has been the liberation of notions like movement, migration, multiplicity, difference, and displacement from a subordinate status as mere exceptions to an archaic thinking of individual and cultural life as matters of identity and sedentary settlement. However, the drawback of the successful reassertion of these notions is that matters of physical places and human experiences of emplacement have been generally overlooked or too hastily devalued as less significant. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is not off the mark when he identifies the dominance of a Cartesian worldview in the humanities, the body and the physicality of the world being eliminated by the cerebral tenet of cogito ergo sum. The study of globalization in particular has become the story of increased detachment from space and physical existence: we are developing a “largely ‘digital’ relationship to the material world” where “specific physical places” and “the position of [our] bodies” have become entirely irrelevant for “information transfer” and “the activities of [our] minds.”1 Or as Nigel Thrift puts it, nearness has been replaced by distribution as “a guiding metaphor and ambition.” 2 These tendencies are also evident in the triumphant language of transcultural mobility within the later development of postcolonial studies, where place, to the extent that it is noticed at all, is something the migrant hero merely passes through, if it is not reduced to the stasis of an oppressive monoglossia of origin and rootedness.

Literature's sensuous geographies : postcolonial matters of place

Introduction PART I 1. The Tenor of Place, Language and Body in Postcolonial Studies 2. Sensuous Empires and Silent Calls of the Earth 3. Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of the Sensible 4. How to Read Place in Literature with the Body: Language as Poiesis-Aisthesis PART II 5. Mind, Eye, Body and Place in J. M. Coetzees Dusklands (1974) 6. Silent Geographies in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902) 7. Nation and Embodied Experiences of the Place World in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958) 8. Karen Blixens Out of Africa (1937): A Colonial Aesthetic and Decolonial Aisthesis 9. The Settlers Language and Emplacement in Patrick Whites Voss (1957) 10. Place, Language, Body in the Caribbean Experience and the Example of Harold Sonny Ladoos No Pain Like This Body (1972) 11. Place and Sensuous Geographies in Migration Literature 12. Spatial Transgressions and Migrant Aesthetics in David Dabydeens Disappearance (1993) Coda