The Tenor of Place, Language, and Body in Postcolonial Studies

Abstract

Questions of place, language, and body have always been central to postcolonial studies. To start with the former, places, spaces, landscapes, geographies, and territories play a fundamental role as colonial and postcolonial literatures emerge out of a historical contestation of land—a contestation of land that, in fact, has its origin in the fifteenth century with the concurrent development of modernity in Europe and Europe’s expansion into the rest of the world. The setting is never just a backdrop to the story in colonial and postcolonial literature. It is of decisive importance and one of the underlying reasons why the story was written in the first place. Hence “discoveries” and conquests of space, mappings of land, the naming and renaming of spaces, settlement, dispossession and displacement, migrations and diasporic spaces, borderlands and zones of contact, territorializations and de-territorializations: these are all of crucial concern to the postcolonial scholar. And hence, Said’s observation that “the imagination of anti-imperialism” is distinguished by “the primacy of the geographical in it” (Said, 1993, 271).