Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces

Front matter

MOHIT CHANDNA

SPATIAL BOUNDARIES ABOUNDING

Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film

Section 1. Understanding Verne: Laying the Groundwork Verne and the World Verne’s Geography

Geography on Verne

Reading Verne’s Geographies

Rounding up the World

Capital Repetitions: Monghir

Section 2. Opium Silence and Nineteenth-Century French Literature 78 Colonizing Hong Kong 81 Illegal Opium and Colonial Wealth 89 Opium Cities 94 Opium Race 98 Chapter 3

Dislocating the Indian Nation: Ananda Devi's Homelands 107 Global Pathways 109 Alonga Local Road 111 Dislocating Location 115 Grounding Identity 118 Patriarchal Homelands 121 Tango with India 126 Delhi’s Underbelly 133 Antipodal Itineraries 136 Desert Safari 140 Producing Dissent 145 Rediscovering India 152 Chapter 4

Martinique: Space, Language, Gender 155 Section 1. Contextualizing Texaco 157 Texaco and its Significations 157 A Spatial Metaphor 158 Literary Margins: City and Language 159 Marie-Sophie as Texaco 163 Chamoiseau and Feminism 164 Reinventing the City 167 Section 2. Martinique’s Literary Identity and French Borders 69 Martinique: Colonial History, Postcolonial Literature 69 French Borders, Martinican Text 74 Section 3. Text, Texaco and Landscape 177 Texaco: Space and Language 177

Rewriting l’En-ville 185

Table of Contents 9

Section 4. France, Martinique and Marie-Sophie’s Body 188 Marie-Sophie and Texaco 188 Marie-Sophie’s body and Martinique 197 Chapter 5

Out of Place: French Family at (Algerian) War 205 Immaterial Differences 206 Locating Caché 207 White Lies 211 Hidden Agenda 213 Colonial Family; National Lies 216 Colonial Past; Cinematic Present 221 Escaping Images 228 Deadly Images 232 Epilogue: Interjecting Passages 239 Notes 253

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

Translations of quotations from literary works and films: English translations appear in square brackets and follow the original quotations within the main text.

Translations of critical writings: English translations appear in the main text whereas the original French quotations only appear in the notes. Occasionally, when necessary for the argument some of the translations follow the original in the main text.

Unless otherwise stated all English translations of French quotations are mine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film is the result of many years of hard work and is a book that has become possible only because of the help of several friends, colleagues and institutions. I would like to start by thanking Nelly Furman. She has been a constant source of support and friendship, both when I was a graduate student and later when I started my career as a colleague in the profession. I shall forever remain indebted to Nelly. My thanks also go to Kathleen Long, for her professional guidance, to Mary Pat Brady for her help with my theoretical arguments, and to Debra Castillo for her friendship. Thank you David Bodenhamer for helping me find a home for this book.

Without the supportive and professional environment at the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, and the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), this work could not have taken its current shape. Friends and colleagues from the Department of French and Francophone Studies at EFLU have contributed immensely to creating an environment conducive for research. Discussions with students and research scholars have helped me further refine my intellectual and theoretical positions. Rebecca Vedavathy B. very graciously agreed to read this manuscript. I owe Rebecca an unrepayable debt of gratitude for her remarks and suggestions.

Thank you very much Jayanti di, Javeed sahab, Manjari Katju, Aniket Alam, Sara Aparajita and Rewa Anahita. Hyderabad is home because of you. My deepest thanks to my family. Nabina and Spruha have generously tolerated the vagaries of this journey. Sarika and Rajiv, I cannot ever thank you enough. My parents are the reason I am where I am. I am grateful for their love and support.

A Shastri Mobility Programme (SMP) Grant by Shastri Indo Canadian Institute (SICI) enabled me to consult research material and interact with colleagues in Canada. I would like to thank Centre d'études et de recherche sur l'Inde, l'Asie du Sud et sa diaspora (CERIAS), and the Département d'études littéraires, both located at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), for their support.

The generous grant by the Paul Druwé Fund and the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access has made it possible for this book to be available in the open access format. My sincerest thanks to KU Leuven. I would also like to thank the acquisitions editor at Leuven University Press, Mirjam Truwant, who has always been very generous with guidance and help. Irina du Quenoy’s editing skills have helped this manuscript take its current shape.

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Several parts of this manuscript have been presented at conferences and published in English and French in edited volumes and journals. They are as follows: “Caché, Colonial Psychosis and the Algerian War” Interventions (2021); “Reading Devi’s Poetry” in Ananda Dévi, When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me. Translated by Kazim Ali. Harper Collins. 2021; “Paris, Rue Descartes et la poésie de Czesław Miłosz; Caraivéti, Démarche de Sagesse. Jan-June 2019; “Produire le non-lieu: l’Inde à la dérive chez Ananda Dévi; Caraivéti, Démarche de Sagesse: Numéro Spécial Sur Récit de Voyage. July-December 2017; “Femme et dislocation nationale chez Ananda Devi,” Interculturel Francophonies. Lecce: Alliance Frangaise de Lecce, no. 28 (2015); “Time Is Money: Spaces of Colonial Desire and Jules Verne” Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914. 3.2 (2013); “Colonialisme sans frontières: L'Espace colonial dans la littérature de jeunesse; Littérature de Jeunesse: Réel et Imaginaire. Ed. Nalini Thampi. Pondicherry: Dept. of French, School of Humanities, Pondicherry University (2013); “Around the World in Eighty (One) Days” in Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas, eds. Debra Castillo & Kavita Panjabi. Kolkata: Worldview Press, 2011; “Re-reading Postcolonial Women Authors,” International Journal of Francophone Studies. 18.4 (2015); “Writing Colonial Spaces” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. 1.2 (2013); Rev. of Rewriting the Return to Africa. by Anne M. Francois, International Journal of Francophone Studies. 15.2 (2012).

Prologue

One needs to rearticulate the colonial project of unending spatial expansion, with its fetish for acquiring and apportioning space, along the theoretical coordinates of the borders it engenders. Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-millennium French and Francophone literature and film, to analyze subject formations resulting from interaction with these colonial reconfigurations. This book examines key colonial and postcolonial moments to theorize: a) the role of ever-changing space and spatial grammar within the colonial project; b) the ongoing resistance to colonizing spatial practices as the omnipresent enforcers of citizenship; and c) literature and film as the sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture their dominance.

This book provides ways of rereading the colonial story and its aftermath by juxtaposing spatial demarcations of colonialism alongside the plethora of connotations that production of space brings forth, evoking both the discourse on the enunciation of space as well as how space produces the colonial subject. This mutual intertwinement of space, discourse and the subject allows us to see spatial divides - whether they be geographical, literary or conceptual — both as agents of the colonial-capitalist narrative and as bearers of the counter and ante-narratives of postcolonial differences. As it examines spatial practices within colonial paradigms across the world, Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces brings together the historical and material conditions of the colonizing mission alongside those of fictional characters in order to lay bare the spatial workings of colonialism.

Central to this thesis is the territorial fetish of the colonial project that defined the world as an extension of European frontiers. I argue that the conventional colonial narrative disregards the collusion of colonially generated spatial paradigms in reducing all markers of plurality to a conquerable unit of spatial territory. Therefore, as it contends with imaginary histories of colonialism this book resituates postcolonial discourses alongside spatial analyses of literature and film. Located within these prevailing postcolonial discourses are spatial formulations that these discourses of nationalism and self-articulation either remain unaware of or underplay in favor of modernity-inspired enunciations of identity. I argue that uncovering these formulations dissolves the “authentic” enunciations of identities that these anti-colonial and ante-colonial discourses got mired in, in their haste to counter the colonizing discourses of modernity.

In particular, this book focuses on the colonized body. It is the site on which spatial reconfigurations are mapped and the site that subverts colonial topography. Displacement of peoples by whimsical borders, management of individual bodies for maximizing production, advancement of a paternalistic nationalism by sacrificing the reproductive body, erasure of the racialized body, are all different ways of exploiting the colonized body that are analyzed in this book. I foreground also how this body, whether in the form of an immigrant, raped domestic worker, or even as a dead body, subverts the workings of colonial spatial paradigms.

Space is an active component in the formation of colonial identity and nowhere is it more evident than in the proactive engagement and transformation carried out by everyday spatial practices of the colonial subject. Whether in overt headlong resistance against the powers that be, or in the act of survival of a domestic worker in unauthorized slums, creative works record such material interactions and uncover a discursive site that focuses on everyday spatial practices. These works understand divisions such as colony, metropolis, urban, rural, center and peripheries not as permanent designators of spatial hierarchy but instead as the result of material conditions of colonialism.

Each chapter of Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces situates the negotiations of the colonial subject within the deeply ingrained spatial logic of colonialism. While the first chapter scaffolds the theoretical reasoning, the chapters that follow understand different moments of colonial spatiality by anchoring representative arguments alongside the works of one particular author. The second chapter discusses nineteenth-century literary perceptions of Asia, in particular that of India, as it follows Jules Verne’s famous character Phileas Fogg around the world. The third chapter looks at the colonially generated geography of India in

Prologue

Ananda Devis literature. Devi narrates alternatives to the India of modernity presented by Verne. In the fourth chapter, Patrick Chamoiseau’s work allows us to engage with the relationship with the French borders that Caribbean writers unceasingly recall. The fifth chapter brings us back to Paris, or rather to its suburbs, where the famous film Caché foregrounds how France’s large immigrant population is suffering the consequences of a colonial spatial logic.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: CHARTING COURSE

On Wednesday, 2 October 1872, predictably “suivant sa quotidienne habitude” [in keeping with his daily habit’] (12; 10), Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of the famous nineteenth-century French novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), left at half-past eleven for the Reform Club. He reached his destination with calculated precision, taking 575 steps with his right foot and 576 with his left (18-19; 15).' Before delving into the Morning Chronicle, the distinguished English gentleman had already read the Times and the Standard, the latter keeping him busy from 3:45 p.m. until dinnertime. As he settled down for a hand of whist with his fellow club members, the discussion turned around to the contents of an article in the Morning Chronicle that were to alter, in many ways, the entire life of this mathematically exact, machinelike man? leading a life regulated to the very last detail.

Provoked into a heated debate about the possibility of circumnavigating the Earth in eighty days, Phileas Fogg decides to disprove his fellow club members of their erroneous understanding of the expanse of the world and challenges them to a 20,000-pound bet. He sets out to prove that “la terre a diminué” [‘Earth has shrunk’] (23; 18). With his resourceful and loyal servant Passepartout (hired exactly at 11:29 a.m., a minute before leaving for his club the very same morning) in tow, Phileas Fogg embarks on a journey that would take him around the world and back to London in a matter of eighty days. Or, as Fogg takes the pains to point out, in 1920 hours or 115,200 minutes (25; 20).

Following his departure on 2 October (at 8:45 p.m. to be precise), it is only by relying on his qualities of “sang-froid et d’exactitude” [‘composure and precision] (301; 202) that Fogg is able to overcome the many dramatic tests that adverse circumstances throw his way along the geographically dispersed itinerary. Navigating his path, mostly through British colonies, he tides over often-encountered adversity by dipping into his generous purse to hire and at times even buy his transportation.’ Fogg returns, as one might expect of him: just on time — with the clock at the Reform Club striking exactly 8:45 p.m. on 21 December 1872 (299; 200). Given that most of his time on the journey is spent traveling in various modes of transportation, in many ways the victory was not only Fogg’s but also that of the mechanization that made the journey possible.

One of the salient features of the journey of this phlegmatic hero is that he is rarely given to observing, being focused solely with chronometric rigidity on his objective. Appreciating the local scenery in the journey is a task left either to Passepartout or to the narrator in the novel’s background. While traveling by ship, for example, Fogg could not be worried to explore the wonders of the Red Sea.* However, the reader does notice that, from Suez to Bombay to Calcutta to Hong Kong, the novel is in many ways an excuse for putting on display the vast British colonial empire. No wonder that at times the journey takes the adventurers into locales that are nothing but exact replicas of British counties. At other times, the level of savagery or civilization of the stopovers is a function of their relationship to the colonizer. Oblivious to the scenery, uninterested in people, what then had the eccentric gentleman gained on his quest? Nothing, the novel tells us, except a “charmante femme” [‘lovely wife’] (301; 202), Aouda, a woman from British India whom Fogg and his servant had saved from being forcefully consigned to the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. For Phileas Fogg, who spent 19,000 pounds of the 20,000-pounds? bet on the journey itself, the material gains might have been insignificant, but for this book this net gain of zero, which proves that the Earth has shrunk, has accrued a whole wealth of discourse about a globe aligned along new geopolitical axes.

Simply put, the contention at the heart of this journey is: Time is money. What is at stake in the bet is not Fogg’s financial future. It is rather a discourse on the planet Earth. Set in a period where accrual of capital was increasingly becoming a function of clock time, could there be a better metaphor for the commodification of global geography than a 20,000-pound bet that negotiates global space in a fixed period of eighty days? This swift passage over space in fixed time, led by a character who is the very embodiment of a clock, critically reduces the status of the globe by reproducing it within the constraints imposed by a mechanism responding to a 20,000-pound investment.

Among the first works to take the nineteenth-century reader around a globe configured in cartographic terms, Phileas Fogg’s circumnavigation of the world rescales global geography along a matrix of colonial capitalism. There is a dramatic resemblance between this journey and the production process that dominated much of the late nineteenth century. What one witnesses here is global spatiality being prepared to fulfill the demands of an abstracted time: colonial structures produce a universally homogenized global network of infrastructure necessary to encash the commodity of time. Spatial structures and geographies in the novel gain their relevance by the degree to which they are rooted in a market economy organized to accommodate the needs of a fast-paced system of transportation — a spatial abstraction that only reinforces the temporal abstraction of clock time.

Fogg’s quest for a shrunken Earth might seem a failed mission if one takes the statement at its literal value, but this was the very guiding principle for steam-based transport that was, in many ways, diminishing Earth. For Verne’s novel, the early nineteenth-century topos of “[a]nnihilation of time and space,’ still seems operational and indeed even shows how “[m]otion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality” (10).° Engrossed as he is in himself, Fogg’s indifference is in fact the validation of the very paradigm that reformulates this Earth. Instead of appreciating the local landscape, he single-mindedly focuses on the speed of his journey.

Structured by a Western European industry that invades local landscape and practice, Verne’s novel is replete with borders and spatial markers that deploy a blinkered colonial vision to empty the world of its peoples and cultures, reproducing it into an assemblage of rationalized spaces. As active tools in the propagation of a capital-infused colonial spatiality, these abstracted spaces operate as empowered agents that transmit through self-replication the commercial essence that made them, revealing in the process an entirely different globe.

This spatial encounter, in turn, critically reduces all markers of human subjectivity to coordinates familiar to the self-proclaimed racially superior colonizer. Verne repeatedly presents Aouda as a Europeanized native woman. Fogg, the benevolent colonial adventurer taking Aouda back to London after rescuing her from the clutches of the native barbarians, serves as a transparently racial metaphor for the kind of racial clustering that such rationalized spaces insist on.

Anchoring Space

Assessing colonial spaces, questioning the parameters they impose, and bringing forth their constant presence, both in the subjugation by the colonizer and as a point of resistance by the colonized, has occupied much ofliterature written on colonialism. Yet, within the context of Francophone literature and film, despite the overwhelming presence of everyday negotiations with the kind of abstracted spaces that the example above demonstrates, most discussions of the definitions of space have centered on what constitutes the expanse of national geography.

Even Léopold Sédar Senghor version of Négritude, for example, situates his movement geographical origins in Africa and thus advances the same old colonizing model of defining identity through the paradigm of the nation. In his haste to set up normalizing identities, Senghor is among those early writers who advanced simplistic definitions of history as well as geography that work on the basis of exclusion. Senghor’s is a twofold move that involves establishing the African as essentially different and then setting one’s self up according to “la francité” the universal indicator of “clarity, order, harmony of ideas” (459).7

Instead of seeing how nationalism itself (with physical geographical boundaries as one of its essential prerequisites) is a spatial product of the European quest for newer territories, the debate about Francophone literature has invariably been about setting up competing geographical nationalisms that remind us of the colonial paradigm,* as Senghor’s conception of Négritude does. At the same time, Francophone literature has concerned itself with finding alternatives to this very idea of a fixed nationalism. Anne Francois, for example, in her work on Francophone women authors, Rewriting the Return to Africa and the Caribbean,’ displays how the women authors under study negotiate their identity and presence between Africa and the Caribbean. Simultaneously these authors respond to the clear misogynist leanings of those like Senghor who founded their identity in a mythically created Africa.

A work like Joseph Diémé’s De la plantation coloniale aux banlieues: La Négritude dans le discours postcolonial francophone," through its very title (I translate roughly: From the Colonial Plantation to the Banlieues: Négritude in Postcolonial Francophone Discourse), signals the juxtaposition of two different spatial entities — the slave plantation of early French colonialism and the twenty-first century banlieues. The title itself underscores the need to reckon with the role spatial divisions play in creative production. When Diémé shows how contemporary creative production — music, film, literature — in the spatial margins of the French banlieues is linked to the practices of the plantation, he is creating the grounds for exploring the causal links between these spatial divisions and the creative production that they engender. Indeed, as scholars like Diémé and Frangois, through what I have elsewhere called “co-incidental spatial analyses; !! are making capital contributions toward a better understanding of Francophone literatures, they are also bringing forth spatial anxieties that need further examination.

Beyond identitarian debates located around the physical spaces of nations, even conceptual understandings of colonial interactions resort to spatial metaphors, only further underscoring the need to understand the spatial paradigm that undergirds the world. Edouard Glissant’s usage of his signature term relation from his seminal work Poétique de la relation (Poetics of Relation) speaks of the globe as an interconnected space. Without the awareness of the plethora of theoretical discourses that elucidate the spatial nature of colonialism, Glissant’s “étendue” [‘expanse’] offers a move to overcome the debilitating definitiveness that a colonizing modernity had imposed upon the world. “Etendue” encapsulates the interconnections that bind the globe together as it also allows articulating various histories that populate it: “L’étendue n'est pas d'espace, elle est aussi

”12 ['Expanse [extending] is not merely space; it is also its son propre temps rêvé. own dreamed time: ]”° The dictionary definition of the word “étendue” presents it as a property of bodies placed in a larger space and occupying a part of it. “Étendues” are unique perspectives that define physical space in such a way that each “étendue” understands the world and its own placement within it differently. At the same time, these various divergent “étendues” overlap as they delineate each other from their respective points of view.

Apart from the territorial conquests, colonization presented another spatial monopolization — by fashioning a world focalized through and revolving around the European perspective — thereby scripting a unipolar discourse that spreads outwards as an extension of the European frontier. Jacques Coursil’ explains how Glissant already spatializes the colonizer-colonized relationship when he explains colonization as a function of “étendue” [‘expanse’], according to which the “[o]ccident ne peut se concevoir sans la maîtrise de l'étendue” [‘the West cannot think of itself without mastering the expanse’] (95), and as such, describes the world from its own rigid perspective.

There have been attempts at understanding the functioning of space in Francophone literature, as is evidenced by the collection of essays titled Geo/graphies: Mapping the Imagination in French and Francophone Literature and Film. This is an exploratory collection of essays resulting from a conference, which attempts to display “the number of approaches possible” while analyzing “representation of place in a variety of texts” (ix) in both French and Francophone literature. Given its genre, this volume is unable to engage in a sustained manner either with the issues of importance in Francophone literature, or with theoretical concerns for the discipline of geography, and more importantly with the interaction between these bodies of knowledge.

One notable exception is Eric Prieto’s Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place.” In this monograph, Prieto brings together literary and theoretical conceptualizations of place “in a way that highlights points of resonance between them” (10). Divided into three sections, the monograph looks at “the phenomenological experience of place”; “place-bound identities”; and “place in the larger geopolitical context of postcolonial studies” (10). The third section, comprising the fifth and the sixth chapters, is particularly relevant for my work. This third section discusses “postcolonial place identities” in the context of Martinique and Guadeloupe and is directly related to this book’s discussion of Martinican literary tradition. Prieto first charts out the evolution of postcolonial theory in relation to the nation, the neighborhood and the niche in the fifth chapter. In the sixth chapter, Prieto reads these three in the works of Aimé Césaire; Patrick Chamoiseau and Maryse Condé; and Glissant.

Underlying Prieto’s larger work is the idea that humans have a “long history of environmental co-evolution between us and our environment,” which has “played a long and active role in determining the kinds of cognitive abilities we have and don’t have” (63). It is within such an understanding that Prieto discovers how Glissant’s work underlines the “importance of relationality” (Postmodern 180) and displays an interplay between what is immediately accessible and the distant. More precisely, it helps understand the “mechanisms through which our (often indirect) experiences of the wider world impinge on our understanding of the local environment” (Postmodern 180).

Prieto has faced criticism for his humanist approach toward literary geography, which critics recognize as being on the wane.” Still, the juxtapositions that Prieto brings forth between postcolonial theory on the one hand and Caribbean literature on the other display the underlying spatial urges within postcolonial Francophone traditions and are particularly useful for understanding the various spatial forms identitarian assertions have taken, both within postcolonial theory and Francophone literary tradition.

In privileging the biological metaphor of niche (Postmodern 184-6), Prieto is not claiming to present an overarching theoretical model to explain the totality of multiple spatialities that have emerged from the postcolonial Francophone canons engagement with capitalism, colonialism and decolonization. In another article, Prieto has made the call for recognizing and respecting various levels of analysis and exploring the “explanatory potential” of all discursive positions (“Phenomenology” 67). Prieto recognizes other potential ways of looking at literary geography. While discussing Jameson, Prieto categorically states that his intention is not to “deny the importance of political economy.” Nor is it to “argue for the foundational authority” of other forms of analyses, like the placebased analyses Prieto himself privileges (“Phenomenology” 66). Prieto has set different theoretical objectives for his monograph and he is aware that the “biological, evolutionary model” (Postmodern 186) he presents does not directly engage with colonial and financial equations of centers and margins whose effects are visible in the material unevenness that persists across the globe. Prieto ends the third section of his 2013 monograph with a suggestion to use the metaphor of niche, borrowed from evolutionary biology, to approach and understand “the homogenizing pressures of commodity capitalism” (186).

For Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces colonial exploitation and the accompanying uneven global economic development are central to the analyses of literary spatiality. The need for examining the effects of “commodity capitalism” that Prieto gestures toward in his analyses of Martinican literature, along with the need to register the effects of colonialism, provide the basis for this book, as it extends its enquiry to geographical areas other than those discussed by Prieto. Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces also approaches literary geographies differently. This book, as I discuss below, privileges Marc Brosseau’s idea of literary texts being geographers in their own rights. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that Prieto’s is one of the rare works to engage very self-consciously with space in Francophone literature. Largely, Francophone literary analyses’ engagements with space mirror what Edward Soja reminds us about Michel Foucault: although “understanding of spatiality was at the center of all his writings,’ Foucault “never developed his conceptualizations of space in great self-conscious detail” (146-9). This gap of undeveloped spatiality in Francophone liteature and film is where Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film hopes to situate itself.

The interactions of spaces and powers that Foucault recognizes but does not enumerate have been articulated in greater detail by others like Doreen Massey, whose engagement with spatiality extends over decades and several book-length arguments. Massey addresses more rigorously what Glissant’s work intuitively refers to: colonialism as a product of the European desire to master the étendue.

Étendue is to be understood here both as the physical expanse of the world and as the knowledge that defines this global expanse. Massey writes:

Once understood as more than the history of Europe’s own adventures, it is possible to appreciate how the previous way of telling the story (with Europe at its centre) was powered by the way in which the process was experienced within Europe; told from the point of view of Europe as the protagonist. Spatialising that story enables an understanding of its positionality, its geographical embeddedness; an understanding of the spatiality of the production of knowledge itself. (63)”

Massey’s comment about the importance of geography in knowledge creation contrasts a world defined by unidirectional linear time — of “History” — against one that exists in a multiplicity of spaces, highlighting the focus on space in recent years. Massey’s prismatic view defies the earlier urge to flatten differences and accepts a multidimensional subjectivity. This is a move away from the imagination of space as a continuous surface that the colonizer, as the only active agent, crosses to find the to-be-colonised simply “there.” This would be space not as smooth surface but as the sphere of coexistence of a multiplicity of trajectories.

(For Space 63)

With its attention to a multiplicity of influences on spatiality, its demand for taking into consideration numerous histories, Glissant’s coincidental engagement with space needs to be further enriched within a larger framework. Massey’s assertion reveals how geography plays a vital role in defining the knowledge that shapes the colonized subject as someone who is “simply ‘there” This assertion also provides reason to reassess within a spatialized understanding why Glissant in his colonial countermove to this colonial “continuous surface” is so insistent on a “coexistence of a multiplicity.” Seeing that the same reductive paradigm dictates Verne’s spatial reconfiguration and the creation of artificial lines dividing the colonies from the metropolis, both having profound meanings for human lives, one would have to assert that “if time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction. In that sense space is the social dimension” (For Space 61). Massey constructs a matrix wherein spaces exist in interrelation with each other: “Such a way, Massey says, “of conceptualizing the spatial, moreover, inherently implies the existence in the lived world of a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces:

cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism” (3).”

In fact, Michel Foucault offers a rather uncomplicated lament that scaffolds the central argument of this book. One needs to interpret space as anything but “the dead, the fixed, the inert.”*? “A whole history” Foucault writes, “remains to be written of spaces — which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms to be plural) from the great strategies of the geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations” (49). We are all part of a global community populated with omnipresent spatial power structures (both meanings intended) that make available the application of “great strategies” as well as afford “little tactics.” Foucault's comment reminds us that space remains an all-pervasive influence in our lives and it participates in “economic and political installations” as these installations shape space. Glissant and Verne highlight the urgency with which one needs to reassess these spaces alongside a growing list of scholars engaged in deciphering their workings.