Terror, Spatiality, and the Future in Maria Irene Fornes’s Terra Incognita

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between terror and spatiality in Maria Irene Fornes’s Terra Incognita (1991), a play rooted firmly, as its title suggests, in the production of spatiality. Fornes turns conventional spatial conceptions upside down by synchronising history with the present. Spatiality corresponds to both the social and political practices of terror and the alternative spaces opened up in the play to resist such terror, providing the grounds, both literally and metaphorically, from which to examine the inscribed modes of terror in the play. The essay’s main line of argument is informed by the concept of heterotopia proposed by Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces (1967). Heterotopias are real spaces (as opposed to imaginary spaces) that exist in stark contradiction to other real spaces, thereby problematising their existence. By constructing such a heterotopic space where the specificity of space and time, territorial borders, and religious, racial, ethnical, and national sovereignty lose their prescriptive significance, Terra Incognita opens to debate the human maladies that risk the future.