1Drawn from a three-day conference held at Université Grenoble-Alpes in 2017, the volume testifies to the wide thematic scope and the international dimension of this event. In no less than eighteen chapters delving into literature, visual arts, cinema and history, the book proposes to explore the entanglement of four key concepts that have long been central to postcolonial studies: space, place, hybridity and the nation. Throughout the volume, the latter two notions are regularly re-situated under the aegis of Homi Bhabha’s and Benedict Anderson’s defining interventions. Yet the reader can also find updated approaches which re-situate such interventions in more contemporary debates.

2The introduction by Christine Vandamme addresses the criticism often directed towards Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and articulates it with Anderson’s assessment of the nation, pointing to the paradoxes but also arguing for the persisting relevance of both (xii). Together with Bhabha’s “Third Space,” Vandamme advocates for a “space of projection and negotiation” (xiv, emphasis in the original) to open up within nation-states, especially under the influence of contemporary phenomena such as mass migration. This is where Bhabha’s theories converge with the notions of space and place announced in the title. In the approach proposed here, place and space are situated on a spectrum ranging from concrete experience to abstraction, where place is a “place of inscription” whereas space, following Bhabha’s idea of the Third Space, is associated with enunciation – “symbols,” “figures and features,” which can manifest national identity (xiv).

3The chapters are grouped in four main parts. The first part, “National Identity and Aesthetics: Iconic Places and Emblems,” functions as a well-balanced collection of metonymic studies, where hybridity is scrutinized through national symbols: the American wilderness (Blin), the eucalyptus or gumtree in Australia (Le Guellec-Minec), the harp in Ireland (Brancaz-McCartan), and the imagery of the Scottish Highlands (Amblard). The second part is titled “National Identity as a Hybrid ‘Third Space’ of Negotiation.” Such negotiation takes the form of “contestation” in contemporary Australian art (Snepvangers and Giovanangeli), “hyphenation” in an analysis of Empire-infused identities in Canada and Australia during World War I (Jannette), or “emancipation” in forms of cultural production such as Bollywood films or the British Asian memoir (Sengupta and Purkayastha, Rosman). The third part about “Self-Definition and National Allegiance” is dedicated to literary fiction, with thought-provoking examples from Canada (Bolay, Sassi, van Herk) and South Asia (Zaidi). These chapters look at national identity by returning to the roots of settler violence (Bolay), métis identities (Sassi) or the ideologies underpinning the inception of Pakistan (Zaidi). The fourth and final part of the volume articulates national identity with “a Revision of the Very Idea of Place.” The reader can find discussions of problematic national identities which are in turn Palestinian (Hodaithy), New Zealander (Lorre-Johnston), Irish (González), Canadian (Dodeman) and Pakistani (Chakraborty), in the fields of cinema, fiction, poetry and photography. A particularly harmonious sequence of chapters unfolds with Samia Hodaithy’s and Abin Chakraborty’s respective analyses, which describe the physical and metaphorical partition lines of Palestine and Pakistan by following the lines of poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Moniza Alvi. A final chapter with a historical approach by Amar Acheraïou enlarges the perspective on hybridity by retracing its cultural origins beyond Bhabha’s concept.

4Although some chapters understandably lean towards one or two rather than all four elements of the conceptual equation under which they are assembled, they still provide varied, original critical insight in themselves. Some chapters indeed propose renewed readings of the nation, interrogating frames such as the transnational, which, in the field of film studies, allows for transposability and self-reinvention (González), or the post-national, a term used to read but also question Canadian writer Yann Martel’s spatial poetics (Dodeman).

5Scholars of place and space will be drawn towards Canadian writer and academic Aritha van Herk’s chapter “The Ferocious Persistence of Place,” aptly located at the centre of the volume. In light of place, hybridity for van Herk is understood as a “a fragile syncretism,” the author refusing to abide by “the too-easy social grammar of identity” (146). Instead, she offers a poetic testimony on hybridity within the sense of place, in particular when the discovery of places causes strong, conflicting emotions – the Stendhal effect is re-defined as an “epiphany of hybridity” (150).

6While most contributions refer at some stage or another to Bhabha’s concepts, the depth of engagement with their connotations and limitations varies. Kim Snepvangers and Angela Giovanangeli’s chapter presents a particularly enlightening problematization of hybridity. Starting with the contested figure of Cook in Australia, they acknowledge the persisting discomfort of postcolonial nation-states towards settler history and resort to DiAngelo’s concept of “White Fragility” (2011) to examine unresolved trauma and problematic affiliations. They warn about considering hybridity as a conceptual solution to struggles which are still ongoing (76–77), and quote uses of the term “hybridisation” – emphasizing the process – rather than “hybridity,” which can evoke a fallacious resolution. Analysing the work of New Zealand photographer Peter Black, Christine Lorre-Johnston also insists on perceiving hybridity as a process rather than “something that has reached its end point” (282); Amar Acheraïou similarly defines it as “more a continuous journey than a reached destination” (332). These readings interestingly argue for observing the mêlée, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, rather than seeking the mélange (Nancy 2000, 147). They display how the problematic encounters that still inform postcolonial nations tend to resist theoretical resolution, thus echoing Bhabha when he claimed that hybridity is “not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures” (Bhabha 2004, 162).

7Overall, the collection forms a timely reassessment of the concepts of nation and hybridity, almost thirty years after the publication of The Location of Culture. At a time when the nation-state is being drastically redefined by unchecked nationalisms, and as a global health crisis has re-situated questions of contact at the centre of sociabilities, there is good reason to keep asking on what terms national borders are defined, and how border-crossing takes place.

8However, Amar Acheraïou explains in the last chapter of the book that the hopeful promise of hybridity as a “third space of emancipation” (327) challenging hierarchies needs to be re-evaluated in light of persisting realities such as racism. As other contributions also suggest, this entails questioning whether the concept can still prove helpful to analyse experience and representation, as well as situating its “ideological and empirical intents” (332). Hybridity could either fall short of meaning because of its “ubiquitous” use (Gikandi 2001, 644), or become a “burden” for the postcolonial subject, in Acheraïou’s words (315). This is why postcolonial theory treads a fine line in its relation to such concepts, always running the risk of approaching culture through the “paranoid classification” Bhabha precisely warned about (Bhabha 2004, 162). Keeping transnational, transdisciplinary discussion alive might be one way of mitigating the risks.