This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on 'Space and Spatiality in Theory' which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emergence of new ways of theorizing space and spatiality, the relationship between writing, action and spacing, and the emergence of distinctive spatialized ontologies (e.g. 'movement-space') which appear to reflect epistemological and technological shifts in how our worlds are thought, produced and inhabited. The panellists stress the importance of recognizing the partial nature of Anglophone theoretical approaches, and they argue for more situated and modest theories. They also reflect upon the importance of a wide range of disciplinary knowledges and practices to their thinking on the spatialities of the world, from philosophy and the natural sciences to art and poetry.

Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.

What is the space of words and language? The following work of seven poems reveals how language—jumping between Spanish and English—can both take up space on a page and create spaces in the imagination. Sounds, rhythms, shapes, and poetic device shape the following pages in a way that causes the reader to look to the spaces beyond the words themselves.

Planning and Environment D: Space and Society, 30 , pp.226-242, 2012

2010

PREFACE The notion of space is as old as the history of human thought. Spatial categories used to predominantly connote immensity, unfathomableness, indeterminateness, or unlimitedness. However, with the passage of time, our perception of space has been substantially modified. Inhabitable space has proved to be insufficient and to have flexible borders, and even outer space, once beyond human reach, has turned out to be conquerable. The space of knowledge has been expanded considerably, although it has also remained impenetrable at points. As is commonly noted, now space seems to be " shrinking " proportionally to the increase in speed and the spread of technology. Consequently, any explorations into the notion of space inevitably reveal oppositions, paradoxes, ambiguities and unresolved questions related to our various perceptions of space. If we follow the meanders of thought on the nature of space as an ontological-epistemological concept, we will encounter the ancient ...

2008

B. Richardson (ed.): Spatiality and Symbolic Expression. London: Palgrave, 2015

This chapter shows how philosophical approaches to space attempt to articulate a difference between homogenous scientific space and the spatiality of human existence. From Kant and Hegel through to Agamben and Balibar the question at issue is what it means to be spatially constituted as being which lives in space in an irreducible temporal manner. Space, so understood, is not something external to the self, but rather that in which human beings are immersed as corporeal beings. Places are shown to be historical spaces embodying memories and gesturing possible meaning. However, space as historical place can be exclusionary and increasingly human beings experience place as exiles. Taking a view over the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, it is shown that to be in place is to risk displacement, to dwell is to be amidst ruination, to move is to be moved, to be spatial is also to be subject to spatiality.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020

The spatial dialectic is an important familiar phrase in critical writing, but it nonetheless needs continued elaboration and more working out as a concept. This essay proposes some fundamentals for thinking a dialectic that is unrelentingly spatial and unapologetically material. It first seeks to spatialize temporal logics like contradiction through the Hegelian concept of “material contradiction,” which is outside of time, language, and consciousness. It then tries to ponder the built environment as composed of overlapping material contradictions, multiple sites of praxes—past, present, and future—whence a spatial dialectic issues.

In the Victorian era the English novel unsettles conventions of representation. It does so by favoring stories about unsettled, displaced characters, and by disturbing its readers with uncomfortable depictions of imperialism abroad. The interlinked levelsformal, figurative, interpretivethrough which we can approach the novel's engagement with colonial spaces provide myriad ways of surveying Victorian narratives of empire.

In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool. Similarly, literature turns out to be an ideal field for geography. This book examines the cross-fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and methodologies. In the past two decades, several methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography, literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal, 2007, and Tally, 2011) have their specificities, but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping at the core of analysis. Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell, 2001, and Garrard, 2004), geopoetics (White, 1994), geography of literature (Moretti, 2000), studies of the inserted map (Ljunberg ,2012, and Pristnall and Cooper, 2011) and narrative cartography have likewise drawn attention to space. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, following an international conference in Lyon bringing together literary academics, geographers, cartographers and architects in order to discuss literature and geography as two practices of space, shows that literature, along with geography, is perfectly valid to account for space. Suggestions are offered here from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and discourses since texts, including literary ones, have become increasingly present in the analysis of geographers.