• 1 This article is part of a larger project called Geopoetics: Space and Place in Contemporary Literar (...)

1The overabundance of so-called “turns” in the humanities today may lead rapidly to a kind of inflation or, as some suggest, to treading water, or to simply ending up back where we started. With those most recent shifts – the cultural turn, the iconographic turn, the performance turn – we are dealing not so much with temporary successors as we are with simultaneity and mutual influences. Of these, the most problematic in the Polish context appears to be the spatial/topographical turn. In fact, neither of those two variants has been firmly established or even attempted widely yet in Polish terminology, and the status of the turn itself could be called into question. Magdalena Marszałek, for example, finds the notion of a topographical turn debatable:

• 3 It took until 2008 for there to be an anthology of texts from different disciplines (anthropology, (...)
• 4 The Anthropology of Space and Place. Locating Culture, ed. Setha M. Low, Denise Lawrence-Zúniga (Ma (...)

If we understand the spatial/topographical turn as a paradigm shift, then indeed doubts may be warranted. Labeling a trend in scholarship a “turn” does carry with it, however, the suggestion of something else, namely, a dynamic of action, a state in progress, a turning point, a reorientation. And I believe this is the case, as well, with the spatial turn: there is more dislocation than stabilization in it for now.³ It is worth pointing out at the outset that this “turn” has its institutional anchoring in British and American “place studies;” it has its trade journals here (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment; Gender, Place and Culture, etc.), and its associations (Institut International de Géopoétique, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, etc.). A signal of the paradigmatization of the spatial turn is also the proliferation of sub-disciplines from humanist geography and cultural geography to anthropology of place and space, geocriticism, and geopoetics.⁴

• 5 The foundational text is Sigrid Weigel’s article “Zum ‘topographical turn:’ kartographie, topograph (...)

3The question I want to focus on is also this problem of nomenclature and the question of whether this reorientation ought to be called a “spatial turn” or rather a “topographical turn.” As similar as their meanings are, they are different in terms of territorial custom. They also cover distinct geographical territories, since “spatial turn” is employed mostly in Anglophone regions, which obviously lends it an additional power, while “topographical turn” is more common in Germanlanguage contexts.⁵

• 6 This term is taken from Joseph Hillis Miller, Topograhies (Berkely: Stanford University Press, Stan (...)

4Yet particular territorial usages are less important than the pragmatics of general use in the contemporary context. “Topographical turn” has a decidedly greater and more attractive semantic potential, particularly for literary studies. Etymologically, topography as topos graphos – the description of space – has a more solid basis in the field of literary studies, not only with respect to a rich and long rhetorical tradition. In the contemporary conceptual landscape topography harmonizes with the conviction of literary and cultural shaping of space. It resonates perfectly, as well, with other related concepts – heterotopias and topotropography,⁶ toponym and topology, atopia, utopia and dystopia, the atopic subject and atopiation.

• 7 Bernard Sharrat, “Writing Britains,” in British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Ident (...)
• 8 I wrote more about this in the book Modernizowanie miasta. Zarys problematyki urbanistycznej w nowo (...)

6The trajectories determined by the topographical turn lead to a range of areas of writing and literary research. Of the examples of direction that interest can take, regionalism is especially important, and in particular, the so-called new regionalism. Thematic spatiology as a traditional field (spatial topics in the home, yard, hills, deserts, etc.) is reinterpreted and now read most often from the perspective of gender, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, or in conjunction with the construction of national identity. That latter deserves its own note – as it creates an extensive section of ideological literary landscapes (this is most actively pursued in British “place studies”) and directing attention toward modern dislocations of space and identity.⁷ This direction of study results from the conviction that literature creates and transmits national landscapes and ideological places; Poland is an excellent example of this, having created in the nineteenth century a national spatial repertoire of topoi founded in the opposition between city and country.⁸

• 9 Ewa Łukaszyk, Terytorium a świat. Wyobrażeniowe konfiguracje przestrzeni w literaturze portugalskie (...)

7The fact that spatial categories might be attractive analytical instruments in researching the relationships between national identity and literature – even on a scale as large as centuries-old Portuguese literature – is confirmed by Ewa Łukaszyk’s book Terytorium a świat. Wyobrażeniowe konfiguracje przestrzeni w literaturze portugalskiej od schyłku średniowiecza do współczesności [Territory and World: Imagining the Configurations of Space in Portuguese Literature from the Late Middle Ages to Modernity].⁹ Łukaszyk’s book traces the developmental dynamics of Portuguese conceptualizations of space, evolving from the notion of national territory as a space that had to be ceaselessly expanded by the power of the religious myth (legitimizing imperial conquest) through the collapse of that vision and ultimately twentieth-century nomadism. National mythic geography is interpreted as an instrument serving to confirm the sense of identity in connection with a given territory. Łukaszyk’s proposed conceptual toolbox (territory, border, itinerary, nomadism, diaspora, “mythic geography”) can be treated as its own modern repertoire of topoi, loci communis that form a commons of writing, literary history, ethnic studies, and national mythology.

• 10 See for example Robert Packard, Refractions: Writers and Places (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990), 3
• 11 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

8The issue of the relationship between place and literature is complex and linked to many other realms in a variety of different ways. It may have to do with the relationships of writers to concrete places, such as familial places or those visited on trips. The connections between these places and literature can be described, as Robert Packard describes them, in terms of “refraction” – a term borrowed from optics – if one assumes that literature is a prism that transforms authentic loci into literary places.¹⁰ That relationship can also be understood, however, from the perspective of a geography of literary milieux, where concrete places become a creative space enabling literary or artistic activity. An impressive example of this approach is Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank – a fascinating tale of how Left Bank Paris became the birthplace of an alternate version of modernism in the early part of the twentieth century.¹¹

• 12 See one of the most recent anthologies dedicated to this topic: Literature and Place 1800- 2000, ed (...)

9In the most general terms, it is now commonly accepted that literature and geographical place are not mutually exclusive but are rather complementary, engaged in ceaseless negotiations with one another.¹²

• 13 Kevin Robins, “Endnote: To London: The City beyond the Nation,” in British Cultural Studies, ed. Da (...)

10Meanwhile, research on the city in literature is still actively being developed, powered now by new ideas from postcolonial studies and the new literary geography. There are innumerable examples, but the most representative of the current literary phase of urban studies seem to be texts dealing with the specifics of today’s cultural situation in former colonial metropolises, and in particular, London. Postcolonial London is an especially acute problem in much critically acclaimed literature (Naipaul, Rushdie, Smith, Kureishi, Malkami), which tends to show with photographic clarity the contemporary stratifications and ethnic, national, religious, gender-based, and cultural shifts there¹³ – which is why it is worth dedicating a little more space to this phenomenon now. When examined from the perspective of new spatial reconfigurations, the question of the old dichotomous and hierarchical relations between metropolis and colonies come to the fore, this being the foundation for colonial and postcolonial discourse and contributing to the next evaluative oppositions based on domination and subordination (center-periphery, East-West and in the urban structure of cities: order-chaos). Unmediated contact between inhabitants of the metropolis and the colonies in the colonial era led either to the proclamation and confirmation of “strong,” “pure,” and essential identities (e.g. Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark), or – as in V.S. Naipaul (The Mimic Men) – to the imitation of the imperial cultural pattern.

• 14 See Cities on the Margin, on the Margin of Cities: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary I (...)

11The fall of the empire is succeeded on the one hand by the decentralization of the metropolis by the influx of immigrants from the periphery, undermining the system from within and transforming the old hierarchies while also creating a qualitatively new “third space” of cultural hybridization (in Homi Bhabha’s understanding). The process of dismantling that opposition, however, is accompanied by the appearance of the next one: the reproduced metropolis-colonies relationship now exists within the metropolis itself, in the guise of the opposition between center and the suburbs that, in Europe, condemn their residents to marginalization¹⁴ (examples include Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth). As a consequence of these processes, the space of the city, the former metropolis, becomes a territory of struggle, conflict, and violence against an ethno-religious backdrop (e.g. Kureishi’s Black Album and Londonistan by Gautam Malkami), and the old cultural and ethnic difference between metropolis and colony – which once served as the origins of domination – now becomes an object of consumption and multicultural fashion, itself sometimes interpreted as neocolonialism. From the point of view of literary scholarship, the fact that the spatial relations and their reconfiguration launch a new analytical lexicon in research on colonial and postcolonial literature (culture), including categories of ethnicity, race, class, geography, the problems of globalization, transculturation, hybridization, and the politics of representation is also important.

• 15 This is, of course, one of many definitions of ecocriticism, featured in Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introd (...)

12Ecocriticism leads in yet another direction, and although its connection with the topographical turn may be debatable, they do both share the category of place. The most concise definition of ecocriticsm is that it prioritizes research on the relationship between literature and the environment, nature and culture.¹⁵ The repertoire of questions asked by ecocriticism goes something like this:

• 17 See Jerzy Durczak, “1960-1980: nowy regionalizm,” in Historia literatury amerykańskiej XX wieku, vo (...)

15These trajectories may sometimes appear to simply be returns to old, familiar places. However, the modern cultural context lends them new meaning. So it is, for example, with the case of regionalism, whose revision and re-envisioning we owe to postmodern culture. Regional literature was treated as a secondary phe-nomenon until the 1970s and 1980s, and it was only its rising popularity from the 1960s on in the United States that new ways of interpreting and evaluating it came into being. The relationship with postmodernism is, in this case, also quite complicated – new regionalism appeared in literature alongside postmodernism, and both they shared a critique of elitist modernism, especially its universalist usurping. As much as literary postmodernism was geared toward formal experimentation, however, and uninterested in geography and topography, so new regionalism did opt for realist techniques, placing location at the fore in a very clear way. This is also why it tended to be treated by the critics as a reaction to postmodern confusion or a way of escaping the chaos of postmodern culture.¹⁷

• 18 Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random House, 2006).
• 19 Roberto Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Universi (...)

16Now, however, new regionalism is most indebted to minority discourses, and especially to theories of postcoloniality. Local and regional narratives are treated as a kind of emancipatory strategy and a critical response to the Great National Stories on the one hand while, on the other, as a reaction to globalizing atopias and non-places. New regionalism also enters into a curious relationship with the surregional, that is, with what is now the global. Salman Rushdie provides an apt and succinct summary of this in a novel that is both regional and cosmopolitan, about both Kashmir and Los Angeles: every place, he argues, is part of all other places.¹⁸ Finally, new regionalism is not merely a variety of literature about concrete places, or located in such places; it is also “an attempt to find a new place from which to study literature.”¹⁹

• 22 See Krzysztof H. Wojciechowski, “Koncepcje przestrzeni geografii humanistycznej,” in Przestrzeń w n (...)

20The door was initially opened by humanist geography, which was developed in the 1970s as a form of resistance to the quantitative methodology that then dominated the field. Humanist geographers, then, treated polemically the idea of space as formulated by the hard sciences and subsequently adapted for a geography with pseudo-scientific ambitions, opposing to it approaches especially interested in its anthropological and cultural dimension.²² Space, along with the subject experiencing it, thus became a commons where geography and other areas of study – such as sociology (to invoke but Florian Znaniecki’s “humanities coefficient”) and anthropology – intermingled. But it wasn’t only those areas, because both the object of study (place as experienced by man, cultural landscape), as well as the new hermeneutics (emphasis placed on understanding, and not explaining) also brought humanist geography ever nearer literary studies.

• 24 Hanna Libura, “Geografia i literatura,” Przegląd Zagranicznej Literatury Geograficznej 4 (1990): 10 (...)

For humanist geographers, literature is also important as a source of examples of genius loci that might escape the grasp of other, more scientific methods, as well as ways of experiencing space and lending it affective hues.²⁴ In other words, literature provides the language for understanding “mute” and “anonymous” territories, and it is thanks to this that they are able to signify.

• 25 Beata Tarnowska, Geografia poetycka w powojennej twórczości Czesława Miłosza (Olsztyn: Wyższa Szkoł (...)

23Beata Tarnowska’s Geografia poetycka w powojennej twórczości Czesława Miłosza [Poetic Geography in Czesław Miłosz’s Postwar Work] is an important and extremely thorough book within Polish literary criticism.²⁵ Its object is Miłoszean topographies, poetic descriptions of American landscapes, as well as Lithuanian and French landscapes, considered along two axes: the geographic and the metaphysical. Place, that is, the fundamental category drawn from the discourse of humanist geography, attains a dual status and is both a concrete place on Earth, experienced and interpreted, as well as Place, with its symbolic meaning.

• 26 Chris Philo, “More Words, More Words, Reflections on the «Cultural Turn» and Human Geography,” in C (...)

25The evolution of humanist geography into cultural geography was a consequence of the cultural turn within the field of geography,²⁶ the latter being linked to the former by the recognition of cultural mediation as the basic framework for the experience of space, but it is different in its decidedly greater emphasis on the question – to invoke today’s mantra – of race, class, and gender, sensitivity to issues of power and symbolic violence as well as the politics of representation.

• 27 Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 198 (...)

26What, then, unites both disciplines after the cultural turn? The link seems to be the rejection of those definitions of culture that treat it as the product of an intellectual elite, the recognition of its positionality, the situation of it within local parameters, research into popular culture, an emphasis on cultural pluralism, and the idea that culture is a battlefield. For example, Peter Jackson, one scholar associated with cultural geography, defines culture in a manner clearly borrowed from British cultural studies, as “a domain in which economic and political contradictions are contested and resolved,”²⁷ although of course, as he immediately adds, it cannot be reduced to those economic and political contradictions. The fundamental question posed by the new cultural geography of how culture lends meaning to places and spaces also applies to literary practices and research.

• 28 Amongst the newer works see, for example, Jowita Kęcińska’s Geografia życia literackiego na Pomorzu(...)
• 29 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “Introduction: Locating the Modern,” in Geographies of Modernism: (...)
• 30 See for example Jeri Johnson’s “Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City,” in The Blackwell Ci (...)

27The flow of cultural and geographical concepts into literary research leads, meanwhile, to the next reconfigurations – to literary geography being more open than it once was to the “positional” dimensions of literary texts. As much as literary geography in the Polish context is commonly thought to be an auxiliary area for the research of the spatial location and activity of literary life,²⁸ other conceptions exist within, for example, Anglophone literary geography. Beginning with the obvious, that is, research into the interaction between literary representations of authentic geographical places and those places,²⁹ and continuing on to such tasks as situating literature in global contexts. The anthology Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces gives a number of diverse examples of literary geography after the cultural term, reading modernism after the topographical turn. The rationale for the reconfiguration of modernism in terms of geography and cultural criticism, say the editors of that volume, is the fact that our situation in the world, as well as our conceptions of home, work, travel, information, as well as the cultural identities that emerge from those, are the object of radical change.³⁰ That change applies equally to modernism in literature, which should be reviewed from the perspective of colonial history, at the very least.

• 31 Dorota Kołodziejczyk, “Antropologiczne fabulacje – hybryda, tłumaczenie, przynależność we współczes (...)

28A wonderful and inspiring example in Poland of literary geography is Dorota Kołodziejczyk’s work, which combines an analysis of the new spatial imagination in Anglophone literature with the categories of cultural geography.³¹ What is more, it sets in motion and dislocates spatial metaphors, making use, for example, of Foucault’s heterotopias in order to describe postcolonial identity:

• 33 Ewa Rewers, Język i przestrzeń w poststrukturalistycznej filozofii kultury (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nau (...)

30The chiasmatic understanding of the relationship between space and language has been most aptly formulated by Ewa Rewers in her book Język i przestrzeń w poststrukturalistycznej filozofii kultury [Language and Space in Poststructuralist Cultural Philosophy] which was, incidentally, the harbinger of the spatial turn in Polish humanities. The textualization of space and the spatialization of discourse as two inseparable and mutually influencing processes had as their goal above all the dismantling “the relationship, established in the tradition, especially the philosophical tradition, but immeasurably more complex, between language and space, logos and logosphere, text and environment, speech and khora.”³³

• 34 See among others bell hooks’ “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in From Yearning (...)
• 35 Peter Brooker, for example, does not define place or space in his Glossary, placing them positional (...)

31If something new might be added to these findings, it is worth noting those critics who testify to the limitations of the “cultural” and anthropocentric conception of space, these critics appearing, among other places, in ecocriticism. Secondly, it is also worth nothing that the current understanding of language points more and more frequently to its ideological and political dimension.³⁴ One of the localizations (and dislocations) of culture consists in the fact that there is no way to point up essentialist, universal conceptions and definitions of space and place.³⁵ It is thus worthwhile to recall Tim Edensor’s book National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life, extremely valuable not only in terms of its original characterization of the eponymous issue, but also because it is particularly representative for contemporary thought on space and place. It takes into account above all the fact that both our conceptualizations of space, as well as our cultural spatial practices, including those that come from the sphere of every life, are a dynamic configuration undergoing ceaseless transformations. Edensor does not ask, in other words, what space is, and he does not come up with any “theory” of space, but in drawing on diverse cultural experiences, he does show places as constellations of variables.

• 36 Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life (New York: Berg Publishers, 2002 (...)

32Edensor does emphasize that at the level of everyday experiences, of equal importance is the setting of that experience within the world of culture (elite and popular), ideology, ideas, and immersion in pre-reflexive and somatic experience. The ability to perceive and to weave into the scholarly narrative that private experience, that appreciation of a child’s perception of places, which outlines that primal, not yet pragmatic, but entertaining map of the space of the everyday, allows the discourse of contemporary theory to attain an important counterpoint here. In a word, Edenson understands space as a dynamic configuration of ideology, everyday life, and sensuality.³⁶

• 37 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité March (1984). English tran (...)
• 38 Piotr Piotrowski, “Drang nach Westen,” in Sztuka według polityki. Od „Melancholii” do „Pasji” (Krak (...)

33A significant feature of current spatial research is also its tying together spatiality with temporality, geography with history. This was how Michel Foucault was already viewing heterotopias: “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies.”³⁷ From a different perspective historicity was set in space by Pierre Nora when he created the conception of places of memory (lieux de mémoire). In the social sciences, meanwhile, David Harvey recognized timespace compression as a quality specific to postmodern culture. Also noteworthy is research on “geohistory,” of which, in Poland, a terrific example is the work developed by art historian Piotr Piotrowski.³⁸

• 39 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1992).

34In discussing the return of place in contemporary theories, we must first, of course, recall the crisis of the traditional concept of the place, its erosion, disappearance, or depreciation. Usually the phenomenon of placelessness, to use Edward Relph’s term, is linked to modernizing processes, with societal and economic transformations on the one hand and, on the other, a notion of nation marginalized by local and regional values. The visual testimony to those universalist pretensions of modernization was clearly architecture’s International Style, while further development only strengthened mobility (and thus the absence of belonging to a place) as well as the homogenization of the landscape, as Edward Relph believes. The problem of place erosion affects numerous cultural phenomena significant in supermodernity, according to Marc Augé.³⁹ His brand of non-places (non-lieux) calls attention to the transitive character of contemporary spaces, the transient spheres of airports and train stations, shopping malls and amusement parks.

• 40 See Adam Nobis, “Kategoria hybrydyzacji kultury w dyskusjach, sporach i koncepcjach globalizacji,” (...)

36Nor is it difficult to discern that the spatial turn has been directed particularly at certain places on the world map. At border regions, sites of subordination, ancient metropolises – that is, at wherever space is subject to circulation, dislocations, and symbolic violence. These are seconded by theories of the hybridization of culture and identity, Edward Said’s “real-and-imagined space,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza,” and Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” among others. All of these demonstrate the importance of these frontier territories for contemporary culture, as well as the importance of new conceptualizations of individual and collective identity. Of course, it is difficult to determine to what extent the interest in border space is the effect of contemporary theories of hybridization, creolization, and mestization,⁴⁰ and to what extent those concepts originate in the experiences of such spaces. That question would, in any case, be a poorly formulated one – better, yet again, would be the vantage point of circulation.

• 41 Suggestive examples of this type of linguistic “politics of place” are provided in the volume Kresy (...)

38For the purposes of culturally-oriented literary research, we can distinguish several “fields” showing the effects of a politics of place. Firstly, politics of place is a linguistic issue, as well as an issue of lexicon and of the question of to what extent power over space is articulated in language. A simple example is: border or frontier? Recovered territories or territories obtained?⁴¹

• 42 See Lora Romero, “Bio-Political Resistance in Domestic Ideology and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Li (...)

39Secondly, politics of place is a sphere of imagology, or, to employ Edward Said’s term, imaginative geography, and thus a question of the significance of the literary representation of space in creating an imaginarium important for an image and/or constructing ethnic, national, social, and gender identities. An example could be the problem of power in space from the perspective of gender – from the ideology of the hearth⁴² through the dominance of public space over private space to the subjugation of the female body in a university building that used to be a barracks.

• 44 Ibid., 10.

41Janusz Sławiński’s article, which contains the above citation, was published in 1978 and was the introduction to a volume entitled Przestrzeń i literatura [Space and Literature]. Reading both his article and the rest of the collection almost forty years later is conducive to comparisons – historical but not exclusively – as well as to a certain amount of skepticism. In fact, after that reading, making predications on the future of the topographical turn in Polish literary studies would be risky business. Nonetheless, I do consider the new areas of research and spatial concepts valuable in the pursuit of Polish literature because – and here I quote Sławiński again – “the need for an exchange of languages of study along with its attendant reformulations of well-known topics, diagnoses, and theses is also one of the most basic driving forces in work in the humanities.”⁴⁴

• 45 See Inga Iwasiów, “Inna uległość. Trudne początki szczecińskiej lokalności,” in Narracje po końcu ( (...)

42That type of revision and new language is undoubtedly required by the question of a regionalism that in Poland has been reduced to a nostalgic and escapist variant of “local patriotism,” while of course the ideological project of a homogenous national culture effacing regional differences and local histories is a problem that both pre- and post-dates World War II. The concept of an open (and simultaneously critical) regionalism developed in Borussia did not become widely known, but it could serve as a starting point for further research. Thus it is perhaps local narratives that are most in need of examination from a new perspective.⁴⁵