Abstract
This article is an attempt at an interplay between Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, Marion Shoard’s edgeland and an imagined geography and history of a particular location and the people who have lived there. The town of Paldiski – the Baltic Port – bordering the Gulf of Finland, may be a remarkable Glissantian vantage point, and simultaneously an edgeland from which to draw attention to the creation and persistence of the ‘imaginaire’ that Glissant argued binds people as much as economic transactions. The port is both closed (as a military base or due to customs regulations) and open as a harbour. Thus, it frames all kinds of flows of peoples, materials and policies, yet it is on the edge literally and figuratively. In Paldiski, the imaginary seems independent of the physical environment, the past and future, and the people highlighted by the lifepaths of two historic figures.
Highlights
This contribution is an Édouard Glissant-inspired investigation into a history and geography of a town – Paldiski on the Pakri Peninsula, the south coast of the Gulf of Finland, on the Baltic Sea – that never got to be the hub that it was envisioned to be, despite a multitude of efforts to create a superior military port, or at least a flourishing commercial centre in a location persistently argued to be ideal for such enterprise
This is not to say that there are no physical traces of a settlement in this particular spot but its assumed potential has been contained within a strictly defined outline and described persistently in similar terms despite numerous tumultuous changes in the physical environment and political system
Has Paldiski emerged because its geography and history encourage us to think in certain ways, or have they rather prohibited our thinking in other ways?
Summary
This article is an attempt at an interplay between Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, Marion Shoard’s edgeland and an imagined geography and history of a particular location and the people who have lived there. The town of Paldiski – the Baltic Port – bordering the Gulf of Finland, may be a remarkable Glissantian vantage point, and simultaneously an edgeland from which to draw attention to the creation and persistence of the ‘imaginaire’ that Glissant argued binds people as much as economic transactions. The port is both closed (as a military base or due to customs regulations) and open as a harbour.
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