Matthew Hart's Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction opens with a signature deconstructive move. Setting out the operating concept of the book, Hart reminds us that the “global” is only “global” by simultaneously remaining national, albeit in a curious way: “The putatively global culture of the twenty-first century occupies a political geography that is only located outside borders, states, and nations by being simultaneously within them” (4). This inside-outside “political geography” is what Hart terms the “extraterritorial”: spaces—airports, maritime space, free trade zones, refugee camps, the little sovereign bubble of the diplomat—that are both external to the conventional borders of the nation state but no less integral to statecraft for it. Such spaces, far from being superfluous or a troubling excess, nor the exception that proves the rule, are in fact foundational to state formation in the twenty-first century: “These spaces have one thing in common: within them, the puncturing and gradation of territorial sovereignty doesn't erase state power but extends it throughout putatively ‘global’ space” (8). If Hart's theoretical move is familiar—revealing what appears externalized to a given system to actually be integral to it—the insight produced is not. Hart reminds us, with a timeliness surely only intensified by a global pandemic, that the power of the state to draw borders, far from waning along with all the other signatures of high modernity, paradoxically intensifies under globalization.There is, in other words, no outside of territory. There is only the extraterritorial, which is still inevitably defined in relation to territory itself. Hart chides academics in the humanities for an obsession with domains (geographical and otherwise) that supposedly provide a complete break from normative spatial or social dynamics: “There is . . . a profound difference between extraterritoriality and non- or aterritoriality. If artists and scholars were to remember this the social and political claims they make for their work might be smaller and less optimistic, but they would be more persuasive” (23). In a footnote that complements this chiding, Hart argues the superiority of his own concept against Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's of deterritorialization. To Hart, the latter thinkers are too rigid in their portrayal of the state as “a coercive and immobilizing force opposed to dynamic nomadism” (245n68). For Hart, by contrast, the state is, and has historically been, as flexible and malleable an entity as any. But insofar as Deleuze and Guattari's claim was that the flows released by capital exceed the capacity of any organization to fully contain them, the extraterritorial's increasing importance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (and thus contemporary fiction, to which I will turn in a moment) doesn't necessarily contradict their point. As capital becomes genuinely global, the state has not withered but changed its form accordingly.For example, Hart spends a great deal of his time with the concept of the “zone” as theorized by Keller Easterling. The “zone” marks precisely the place where state and capital meet in a fully coordinated way: such free-trade zones, the “smart city” of Songdo in South Korea, for example, embody the state's infinite flexibility when it comes to the circulation of commodities. The “camp,” on the other hand, would be the extraterritorial space that stands as both opposite and prerequisite to the zone, for it reveals the state's ever-increasing capacity to produce extraterritorial enclaves to confine people without confining capital. Thus Hart declares the extraterritorial to be a simultaneously open and closed form. But “open” is not a straightforward synonym for “good” here, and neither is “closed” simply “bad.” In Hart's analysis, the extraterritorial is not, ultimately, any more a fully dystopian space than it is a utopian one: “To some writers and artists . . . extraterritoriality can designate openness or freedom; to others . . . it signifies imprisonment or subjugation” (10).The political indeterminacy of the extraterritorial (is it better or worse than regular territory?) makes it ample fodder for literature's tolerance of ambiguity. Indeed, the novelty of Hart's concept ultimately comes not from its usefulness in political theory or geography, even though surely those disciplines will have to contend with Extraterritorial's argument. Rather, it is the subtitle of Hart's book in which the complexity and generative nature of the idea of the “extraterritorial” is fully revealed: “a political geography of contemporary fiction.” Any critic armed with a concept that will have any longevity needs to show that it can make its usefulness felt across a wide array of cultural samples. Thankfully, Hart's book reads like a study in which the operating concept has been generated from cultural objects themselves, rather than imposed on them retrospectively. This would explain the eclectic mix of genres on which Hart draws: the detective story, the historical novel, dystopian science fiction, the memoir, and so on. What unites this disparate archive is the shared foregrounding of the literary problem of setting: “a crucial but somewhat undertheorized aspect of prose fiction” (24). And yet setting alone is not the straightforward key to making a contemporary novel “extraterritorial” in orientation. Some of the novels surveyed do of course take place in spaces immediately recognizable as extraterritorial: J. G. Ballard's and Kazuo Ishiguro's novels set in the Shanghai International Settlement are a major focus, as is China Miéville's The City and the City, with its science fictional double-space. But many do not. The strength of Hart's analysis is his capacity to show how the extraterritorial, once encoded in the novel's formal “mobility and contingency” (29), appears in unexpected literary guises: “point of view, diction, secondary world construction, and more” (234).As a case in point, of all the contemporary fiction Hart analyzes, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is the least obviously “extraterritorial” in its setting. And yet the analysis of the novel is probably the most interesting of all of Hart's many excellent readings. Precisely because it is the least obvious candidate for inclusion in the book, Wolf Hall becomes the most illustrative of the explanatory potential of Hart's central concept. Hart notes that the classic historical novel built an ideology around the nation state by setting its drama at the conflicted borders of the nation, thereby resolving, through the imaginary resolution of such conflicts, any territorial tensions or ambiguities brought about by the formation of such states. Wolf Hall, however, makes apparent the extraterritoriality at the heart of the Westphalian system, thereby inverting this classic formula. Mantel's novel rewrites the foundational myth of modern British statehood as tethered to a discrete territory by overcoming the insoluble problem of praemunire, by articulating this period's resonance with the extraterritorial spread of the British state in the twenty-first century.Tellingly, Hart sees parallels between Miéville's The City and the City, with its overlapping regimes of governance in a fictional urban setting, and the England of Mantel's novel: both dramatize settings in which “international borders, far from existing at the edges of the country, have become distributed throughout public and private space” (159). (One wonders what Hart would make of the fact that both these novels were adapted into successful BBC dramas.) In the case of Wolf Hall, Hart speculates on the parallels readers may draw between, for example, the key plot point of Henry VIII's wooing of Anne Boleyn taking place in a Calais that functions as a kind of English enclave or home away from home, and the refugee encampment that was situated there until recently, which was “on French soil but, in an echo of the old walled enclave, was also patrolled by British police officers” (159). If such a literal parallel seems a little too speculative to be entirely convincing, then no matter, because the real insight in Hart's reading of Wolf Hall comes in his identification of Mantel's characterization of Thomas Cromwell as a key vehicle for understanding the extraterritoriality inherent to modern statehood. For Hart, Cromwell embodies, in his “extraterritorial personhood” (155), the proto-bureaucratic structures of the Tudor state. This is evident both in content—Mantel's indulgence of the historical narrative that Cromwell was the key point of transition between “late medieval government” (152) and the modern British state—and form. The latter becomes apparent in Mantel's narrative style, a “close third-person perspective” (154) in which everything is perceived through Cromwell's point of view, but with the persistent use of the pronoun “he” rather than “Cromwell” or “Thomas.” Hart sees this as a mechanism for depersonalizing Cromwell's character, thereby providing a sense of “omnipresent omnicompetence” (154) that centralizes bureaucracy in Cromwell, grounding this newly expansive territorial power of the modern state in a single character's perspective. And crucially, despite the “unquestionable Englishness of the plot,” Cromwell is a character whose personal history gains him a foothold in power structures that extend well beyond England into Italy and France: “He can be the agent of territorial sovereignty because he is an extraterritorial person” (181). Through such an extended analysis of narrative point of view, Hart thereby manages to prove one of the overarching points of his argument: that “territorial sovereignty depends on relations of interdependence with foreign states . . . underwritten by legal notions of formal equality epitomized in the contractual exchange of commodities” (157).Wolf Hall is just one example of how Hart's selection of novels traces the development of extraterritoriality as a defining feature of modern governance from the sixteenth century to the present by seeking out contemporary novels that take key historical episodes as their subject matter. It seems that the most important dynamic in these extraterritorial fictions is their unearthing of a vision of the state as having been “always already” extraterritorial. Thus our own present, although “trending” (9) ever more inexorably extraterritorial, appears, through the lens of these novels' presentation of history, less a break with the past and thus the revelation of some new world order than the logical endpoint of the Westphalian imaginary mediated through global capitalism and imperialism.From Mantel's novel, Hart moves seamlessly to a discussion of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, which provides the hinge for the final chapter on Ballard's and Ishiguro's treatments of interwar Shanghai in Empire of the Sun and When We Were Orphans, respectively. Ghosh's epic trilogy concerns the entanglement of British colonialism in India, the Atlantic slave trade, and the first Opium War (1839–42). These novels, for Hart, encourage connections between a foundational moment in the development of an uneven and combined world system in which matters of territory, trade, and conflict came to the fore, and our own moment of discourse concerning supposed tensions between Western superpowers and burgeoning Asian economies. But again, like Wolf Hall, this is not a straightforward matter of a direct analogy in Ghosh's work, and Hart is keen to stress that the novels are not treatises on international relations but rather reimaginings of the past that show a moment in which British imperial dominance expressed itself in the form of extraterritorial sovereignty. In Ghosh's fictionalized version of the “Fanqui town” (foreigners town) in Canton in River of Smoke, a hubbub of myriad nationalities trade and intermingle. But this space is not a utopian “melting pot” in Ghosh's novel. Rather, it is a delicately poised set of borders and national identities: “The presence of South Asian merchants in the foreign enclave at Canton at once makes Indian subjects part of the same world as British, American, and Chinese persons and makes them newly aware of themselves as a national group” (168). In other words, Ghosh's novel suggests that national belonging is and was crafted in the context of global capitalism's expansion rather than simply existing in tension with it. Indeed, if we follow Hart in perceiving the Ibis trilogy as a kind of parable of globalization, then we can begin to understand a little better the contemporary reality of ever more intensifying global economic interconnection coinciding with the proliferation of borders and the rise, rather than the waning, of assertions of national insularity.In Hart's closing chapter on Ishiguro and Ballard, this interplay between historical subject matter and contemporary political geography is more fully theorized using a concept analogous to the extraterritorial: the extratemporal. Where one is found in a novel, the other necessarily follows. This is because extraterritoriality itself is profoundly extratemporal in its effects. To prove his point, Hart excavates the little-known political theory of Shih Shun Liu, a Chinese nationalist who in the 1920s determined the extraterritorial activities of the British state in China to be a betrayal of the promise of modern progress contained in the very premise of the Westphalian system: that is, its formal commitment to the rights to self-determination of all nations. The extraterritorial enclave of the International Settlement, formed in the wake of the Opium Wars, frustrated China's political and economic development to further the trading interests of the British Empire. For Shih Shun Liu, then, the extraterritorial was an anti-modern spatial formation in spirit and practice.Hart builds on these insights to draw parallels between what he defines as the “semi-colonial” space of interwar Shanghai with the neocolonial practices that characterize uneven development in the postcolonial period: both can be adequately explained as “a situation whereby foreign capital becomes hegemonic within a country that it does not dominate in political or military terms” (195). Much like the Warwick Research Collective's theory of world literature as ultimately an expression of the uneven and combined development of the world-system of global capital, Hart is concerned with how these novels register the “the copresence of what might otherwise have been seen as historically antithetical modes of production” (195). Accordingly, both novels analyzed in this chapter involve characters whose lives in Britain are haunted by past experiences, personal and familial, in the International Settlement during the 1930s and '40s: personal history and the history of the political economic present thus converge in their respective narratives. As the past leaks into the present, memories of an extraterritorial space produce the uncanny effect of the extratemporal. If Hart makes a single contribution to literary studies with this argument, it is to reassert the function of historical fiction to estrange us from the past at the same time that it estranges us from our present. Extraterritorial is not explicitly a book about historical fiction, but its most engaging readings all further our understanding of this genre.The strength of the extraterritorial concept is that once you see it, you can begin to see it everywhere, and suddenly every novel is extraterritorial in one way or another. But ultimately this is what Hart guards against in his concluding remarks. With admirable methodological restraint, he insists that the political geography of the present is only “trending” extraterritorial, and in turn, contemporary fiction as a whole is not exhausted by this heuristic. Indeed, in his conclusion Hart notes that all along he has deliberately pitched his argument “at the level of subgenres” (234) rather than to contemporary literature as a unified whole. Insofar as the extraterritorial is defined as a seemingly niche or extraneous collection of spaces that are in fact more central to contemporary political geography than we might expect, finding it housed in genres that are not generally considered prestigious or integral to the novel, as such, makes sense. Hart thereby confirms once again, as other critics (e.g., Theodore Martin) have noted, the importance of genre, and the play of genres, as a uniquely generative mode within contemporary fiction. It seems likely, then, that despite this final warning against assuming the extraterritorial to have limitless explanatory potential, future, less cautious critics will surely test its limits with abandon.