The Geography of ‘Otherness’: Spaces of Conflict in Smaro Kamboureli’s in the Second Person

Rocco De Leo

doi:10.3390/h8010017

Abstract

In today’s “liquid” society, boundaries and limits are shifting or disorienting: belonging to no place, not knowing where ‘home’ is, underlines the sense of uncertainty and in-betweenness experienced by people. This contribution suggests five spatial issues Greek-born Canadian author Smaro Kamboureli has to negotiate with in her ‘poetic diary’ in the second person, where she investigates the duality of the self, displaying the double “I” of the writer’s split subjectivity on a concrete (Greece) as well as abstract (language) place of living. Kamboureli’s account of a duel with and a paradoxical courting of what was and is now for her “the place of language” is related to the awareness of inhabiting a “third” zone of expectations: the difference of origin, of country, of point of view. In conclusion, the different levels of spatial negotiations Kamboureli has had to come to terms with have made her a completely different person. Her life on the border, epitomized in turn by airports, boats, Greece, and the Greek islands, is indeed an endless research of, as well as a conflict with, the ‘Other’, which opens up questions about the relativity of the space/place dichotomy.

Highlights

Spatial analysis is no longer confined to disciplines that deal directly with the physical dimensions of social existence, such as geography, architecture, and urban planning
Space has infiltrated most of the social sciences and the humanities: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and legal studies
In offering a spatialized conceptualization of worldly phenomena where space is not another merely area to be analyzed, but a central part of the approach itself, Michel Foucault has written that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space

Summary

Introduction

Spatial analysis is no longer confined to disciplines that deal directly with the physical dimensions of social existence, such as geography, architecture, and urban planning. Space has infiltrated most of the social sciences and the humanities: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and legal studies. Salerno) and in Canada (with Guernica Editions, Toronto) in 2019 Investigating her small book means to acknowledge how space/place dichotomy affects identity construction, and what. Kamboureli, an important figure in the Canadian literary realm and professor of English at the University of Toronto, has experienced in these terms. A central figure in contemporary Canadian criticism and literature, Kamboureli previously taught English and was the Director of the TransCanada. Her publications include On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian. In 2016, Kamboureli was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the senior national, bilingual council of distinguished Canadian men and women from all branches of learning who have made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities, and the sciences

Negotiating Non-Places

The Canadian Spatiality

The Poetic Artifice

Possibilities of Place in Space