Introduction: Spaces of Immigration "Prevention": Interdiction and the Nonplace

Interdict: noun 1 an authoritative prohibition. 2 Catholicism: a sentence debarring a person, or esp. a place from ecclesiastical functions and privileges. verb 1 prohibit (an action). 2 forbid the use of. 3 restrain a person from. 4 a Military: impede (an enemy force) esp. by bombing lines of communication or supply b intercept (a prohibited commodity); prevent its movement.

—Canadian Oxford Dictionary

New Coordinates

Dealing with the concept of "space" has become a veritable prerequisite for critical assessments of representation. "Mapping," the corollary of such considerations, engages space in a way that presupposes the viability of a dialogue between what are, in effect, multiple spatial relations and cartography through the setting of coordinates, trajectories, and frontiers. As the breadth of critical inquiry in the humanities continues to expand, the use of geographical metaphors and techniques to analyze not only the imagined spaces of artistic production and theoretical discourse, but also the real, physical spaces of the built environment and the shifting coordinates of "the national," grows concomitantly. That there may exist new coordinates relating to these discourses insinuates the possible rearrangement of constellations or the taking of new bearings based on unused or overlooked beacons that actuate both the past (the already-mapped) and the future (willed trajectories that may or may not be realized; the possibility of drifting). Interdisciplinarity has shown that new coordinates are not necessarily off the map but of the map, in that one need not seek out undiscovered country, per se, in order to offer a novel response to the continuing spatialization of disciplines, theory, and lived experience.

This spatialization process inflects whatever it comes into contact with. As Mike Crang and N. J. Thrift observe, space is the "everywhere of modern thought" [1]. And while it may be true that, as Graham Livesey suggests, space has become "fragmented between disciplines, each of which has its own language that particularizes and problematizes [it]" [11], spaces of juncture—such as Diacritics—exist that permit integration and reformulation. The essays in this double issue engage with this spatial "everywhere" as their authors articulate their respective interpretations of the evolving nature of space and a broadly understood notion of mapping in ways that both break new ground and revitalize previous paths of critical inquiry. By delving into geographic, temporal, literary, and experiential manifestations of space and navigation—both literal and metaphorical—"New Coordinates" works on multiple planes and axes, tackling at once how space inflects questions of urban design and experience (Boyer, Veel), architecture (Leach), the space of the nation (Balibar, Resina), the limits of knowledge (Lima), the site and truth (Badiou, Pinet), the space of writing (Conley), and the striking conceptual importance of the notion of the nonplace to contemporary French thought (Bosteels).

One particularly fecund offshoot of spatial theory has been the exploration of spaces in which meaning once founded in modernism and modernist aesthetics has been rearticulated vis-à-vis the experience of the post/super/hypermodern subject—a subject that, in spite of globalization, still maintains a connection to the state, no matter how contentious or tenuous that link may be. Out of this tension, competition with theories that engage the construction (or continued existence) of a referential sense of "place" has arisen in the form of investigations of both how "localities" are structured and maintained and the appearance of nonreferential spaces: "nonplaces." Inherent in an important aspect of this movement is the reconsideration of the built environment and the way in which edifices and constructed zones are imbued with or impart meaning (an idea that is central to Neil Leach's "9/11" essay in this volume). In the overlap between the experiences of these divergent built environments, there is particularly fertile ground for a discussion of the way in which one particularly popular theory of the nonplace, state control of frontiers, and migration combine to elucidate the continuing importance of an exploration of space, variable forms of mapping, and what may be called the "trajectory" of the nation-state. In a general sense these tensions are discernible in the way that states exercise or attempt to exercise...