Introduction

Abstract

In his groundbreaking study, Thirdspace (1996), Edward Soja argues that the concept of space has often been overlooked in analyses of human experience. Locating this disregard in the privileging of history in philosophy from the Enlightenment onwards, he laments the fact that ‘putting phenomena in a temporal sequence’ has somehow come to be seen as ‘more significant and critically revealing than putting them beside or next to each other in a spatial configuration’ (1996, p. 168). Only recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, has this hierarchy been slowly and gradually challenged. What has emerged is a spatial renaissance that has recognized the importance of place and location. In the field of postcolonial studies, however, space has always been central. From its very beginnings, those involved in developing knowledge of colonial and postcolonial discourses have identified space in all its forms as integral to the postcolonial experience. Often cited as the seminal postcolonial critic, Edward Said’s work is intimately spatial, as illustrated by two passages of his writing in particular: ‘Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental’, in Orientalism ([1978] 1995, pp. 49–72), and the later devotion of the first 15 pages of Culture and Imperialism (1993) to the relationship between empire and geography.