The Presencing of Place in Literature

Abstract

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irrelevant for “information transfer” and “the activities of [our] minds.”¹ Or as Nigel Thrift puts it, nearness has been replaced by distribution as “a guiding metaphor and ambition.”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.