Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about making it onto the map. It studies some of the ways in which emergent geographical spaces come to be recognized as full-fledged, autonomous places with their own identities and internal dynamics. More specifically, it focuses on the role that literature and the other imaginative arts play in that process, emphasizing the ability of fictional representations to shape our attitudes about the actual environments through which we move. Within this field of inquiry, I deploy my analyses around a concept that has taken on particular importance in the current, transitional (postmodern, postcolonial, globalizing) moment of world history—that of the entre-deux, or in-between. The term entre-deux designates the many different kinds of sites that fall between the established categories that shape our expectations of what a place should be and that often tend, therefore, to be misunderstood, maligned, or simply ignored. Such places, because they deviate from established norms, are all too often thought of in terms of what they lack or what is wrong with them—as defective variants of more-established, better-understood places. However, as recent reappraisals of interstitial geographical entities like American suburbia and third-world squatter cities have emphasized, such places, despite their very real problems and inadequacies, may also prove to be unexpectedly resourceful loci of innovation and development—provided that we know how to look.

But let a suburb stand a generation or so and, in literature as in life, it is perceived as a Real Place.

—Gillian Tindall, Countries of the Mind

Ours, too, a transitional species,

chimerical, passing,

what is later, always, called monstrous—

no longer one thing, not yet another.

—Jane Hirshfield, “These Also Once Under Moonlight”