Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction

Introduction

Introduction But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. —Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation This book engages questions of space and spatial imagination in Caribbean fiction. Through the lens of contemporary spatial theory, I offer a comparative and interdisciplinary view of Caribbean postcolonial discourse. This discourse, in its inherently spatial orientation , contributes to and even anticipates the growing interest in space and place as critical categories fundamental for our understanding of social and political identity. Many Caribbean writers emphasize not only the cultural and linguistic legacy of colonialism but also its impact on space and spatial hierarchy. This question of spatial hierarchy has an even broader relevance: How are ordinary people, whom the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre designates as “users” of space, excluded from active and autonomous participation in shaping their daily spatial reality, and, more important, how do they challenge this exclusion through practices of spatial imagination? My aim is to examine space as a political fact and as a metaphor whose imaginary potential continually challenges its material limitations. Literary responses to colonial hierarchy in the Caribbean conceptualize the spatial identity of the region as a necessary battleground for individual and collective autonomy in the face of external domination. Space and housing, in particular, become the most salient means to enact various strategies of resistance to colonial and neocolonial spatial discrimination based on wealth and private property. My readings of Caribbean literary texts foreground the impact of socioeconomic deprivation on (post)colonial self-understanding. This socioeconomic deprivation is not only socially produced but derives its structure and modes of operation from an established practice of capitalist exploitation so cogently exposed by Lefebvre, whose theories of space guide my intervention. In The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre warned that obsessive references to “space” might degrade this valuable concept into a figure of 2 Introduction speech: “We are forever hearing about the space of this and/or the space of that: about literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream, psychoanalytic topologies, and so on and so forth” (3). This indiscriminate invocation of space is, in Lefebvre’s view, a sure sign that space is paradoxically absent from most epistemological studies. The growing interest in spatial analysis, not only in geography, urban studies, and architecture, which traditionally deal with space, but also in philosophy , sociology, globalization studies, environmental criticism, and literary studies, signals a profound concern with space and place as such and also, often indirectly, with the role of spatiality within broader questions of culture, identity, and distribution of wealth. Beyond serving merely to invigorate tired discourses in search of new directions, spatial analysis reveals us clinging to the notions of space and place in fear of losing them. Already in his 1967 lecture “Different Spaces” (“Des espaces autres”), Foucault suggested that “today’s anxiety concerns space in a fundamental way” (177). Deprived, through the complex processes of globalization, of the imagined simplicity of physical location, we seem to discover ways of reinserting space into discourses that are not explicitly concerned with spatiality. Consequently, “the language of social and cultural investigation is increasingly suffused with spatial concepts” (Smith and Katz, 66). Space thus becomes a metaphor, offering an inner geography of discovery and appropriation. The fact that we are increasingly “mapping” everything may well signal the disorientation of our age, but it is also the sign of a craving for the sensuous world, which we seek to reclaim.1 At the same time, the proliferation of spatial metaphors suggests an act of substitution: if space is indeed absent from most epistemological studies and is always somehow beyond our reach (we are most often its compliant users but rarely or never its active planners), the abundance of spatial metaphors substitutes for active engagement with the social production of space. Increasingly out of place (or “destitute,” as I aim to argue in this book) in an overadministered and closely surveilled global world, we substitute for real space by finding and shaping it imaginatively. Adopting Lefebvre’s perspective on space, I argue that beyond the moment of our inherent place-bound existence, we also occupy space in excess of our ontology, producing a kind of spatiality that shapes our understanding of the world. Our spatial existence is thus given and passively experienced and also continually produced and reproduced, allowing space to be actively transformed through our everyday engagement with it. This vital spatial dynamic, which emerges in and from a [18.222.119.148] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 09...