Mapping Imaginary Spaces in Salman Rushdie's Fiction
Mapping Imaginary Spaces in Salman Rushdie 's Fiction
Daniela Rogobete
Today everything that derives from history and from historical time must undergo a test. Neither cultures ' nor the consciousness ' of peoples, groups, or even individuals can escape the loss of identity that is now added to all other besetting terrors nothing and no one can avoid trial by space. (Lefebvre in Burgin, 1996: 23)
Space and its recontextualisation, its metaphoric representations and political remappings have always preoccupied the theorists of postcolonialism who tried to find new ways of reading its physical and metaphorical coordinates. A relativisation of both space and time was long ago operated so that territories were reshaped, boundaries retraced in an attempt to reconfigure reality according to new dimensions. Relocation of centre and periphery, margins and interstitial spaces were redefined within what has been called the politics of location requiring a new vocabulary belonging to spatial language. It places identity, no longer envisaged in tight relation to a definite place, race gender or culture in the " The difference between modernism and postmodernism in terms of displacement is most of the time defined as lying in the opposite conception of space seen as unitary in modernism versus the hybrid cosmopolitan space favoured by postmodernism. Whereas modernism was said to have been interested in an absolute, coherent space, postmodern culture seems to be increasingly interested in spatial logic. Frederic Jameson introduced the idea of devising cognitive maps serving on the one hand to offer space a different perspective and on the other, to provide metaphors for the metaphysical coordinates of space, so far slightly ignored, and for class struggle and social organisation, relying upon Laclan 's affirmation that any representation of space is political. "That is exactly he affirms what the cognitive map is called upon to do in
Daniela Rogobete
Today everything that derives from history and from historical time must undergo a test. Neither cultures ' nor the consciousness ' of peoples, groups, or even individuals can escape the loss of identity that is now added to all other besetting terrors nothing and no one can avoid trial by space. (Lefebvre in Burgin, 1996: 23)
Space and its recontextualisation, its metaphoric representations and political remappings have always preoccupied the theorists of postcolonialism who tried to find new ways of reading its physical and metaphorical coordinates. A relativisation of both space and time was long ago operated so that territories were reshaped, boundaries retraced in an attempt to reconfigure reality according to new dimensions. Relocation of centre and periphery, margins and interstitial spaces were redefined within what has been called the politics of location requiring a new vocabulary belonging to spatial language. It places identity, no longer envisaged in tight relation to a definite place, race gender or culture in the " The difference between modernism and postmodernism in terms of displacement is most of the time defined as lying in the opposite conception of space seen as unitary in modernism versus the hybrid cosmopolitan space favoured by postmodernism. Whereas modernism was said to have been interested in an absolute, coherent space, postmodern culture seems to be increasingly interested in spatial logic. Frederic Jameson introduced the idea of devising cognitive maps serving on the one hand to offer space a different perspective and on the other, to provide metaphors for the metaphysical coordinates of space, so far slightly ignored, and for class struggle and social organisation, relying upon Laclan 's affirmation that any representation of space is political. "That is exactly he affirms what the cognitive map is called upon to do in
References: Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, Tiffin Burgin, Victor. 1996. In-different Spaces: Places and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham and London: Duke University Press Smith Neil, Cindi Katz Lavie, Smadar, Ted Swedenburg (Eds.). 1996. Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity, Duke University Press Leach, Neil Quayson, Ato. 2000. Postcolonialism – Theory, Practice or Process?, Cambridge: Polity Press & Blackwell Publishers Inc. Rushdie, S. 1991. Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta Books – 1983 Thrift, Nigel, Sarah Whatmore. 2004. Cultural Geography: Critical Concepts in Social Sciences, (in Practicing Culture, vol. II), Routledge Young, Robert J.C