Mobility, Space, and Resistance: Transformative Spatiality in Literary and Political Discourse draws from various disciplines—such as geography, sociology, political science, gender studies, and poststructuralist thought—to posit the productive capabilities of literature in political action and at the same time show how literary art can resist the imposition and domination of oppressive systems of our spatial lives. The various approaches, topics, and types of literature discussed in this volume display a concern for social issues that can be addressed in and through literature. The essays address social injustice, oppression, discrimination, and their spatial representations. While offering interpretations of literature, this collection seeks to show how literary spaces contribute to understanding, changing, or challenging physical spaces of our lived world.

This collection shows how literary spaces contribute to understanding, changing, or challenging notions of mobility and physical spaces of our lived world. This project draws from various disciplines-such as geography, sociology, political science, gender studies, and poststructuralist thought-to posit the productive capabilities of literature in examining the politics of movement and spatial transformations. At the same time, this volume shows how literary art offers alternatives to oppressive institutions, practices, and systems of thought. In this way, this book is more than a collection of essays interpreting pieces of literature, it gestures outward to our space and encourages the creation of new spaces that meet the needs and desires of people, not institutions determined to control our movement, actions, ideologies, and thought. This volume outlines, diagrams, and maps the ways in which literature informs resistance, movement, and space. Christian Beck is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Central Florida, USA. He has published on a wide array of topics ranging from medieval English literature to graffiti and hacktivism. He recently published Spatial Resistance: Literary and Digital Challenges to Neoliberalism (2019) and is currently working on his next monograph, The Figure of the Vigilante: Concepts for Political and Social Justice.

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, as this volume also demonstrates, travel writing’s reception and ideological interventions also transform personal and cultural realities. This book thus examines the ways in which politics’ material effects inform and intersect with personal experience in travel texts and engage with travel’s dialectic of mobility and stasis. In spite of globalization and efforts to eradicate the colonial vision in travel writing and in travel writing criticism, this vision persists in various and complex ways. While the travelogue can be a space of discursive and direct oppression, these essays suggest that the travelogue is also a narrative space in which the traveler employs the genre to assert authority over his or her experiences of mobility. This book will be an important contribution for interdisciplinary scholars with interests in travel writing studies, global and transnational studies, women’s studies, multicultural studies, the social sciences, and history.

This book uses literary analysis and digital humanities to show how social justice can be enacted in everyday actions through changing the way we think about lived spaces. As corporate and state powers increase, it is necessary to examine ways to democratize space based on the shared values of equality, liberty, and solidarity.

This collection of essays investigates the convergence between the postmodern politics of mobility and a politics of metaphor, a politics, in other words, in the context of which the production and displacement of meaning(s) constitute the major stakes. Ranging from discussions of re-territorialization, multiculturalism, “digisporas” and transnational politics and ethics, to September 11th, the Pentagon’s New Map, American legislation on Chinese immigration, Gianni Amelio’s film Lamerica, Keith Piper’s online installations and Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, the collection aims to follow three different theoretical trajectories. First, it seeks to rethink our concepts of mobility in order to open them up to the complexity that structures the thoughts and practices of a global order. Second, it critically examines the privileged position of concepts and metaphors of mobility within postmodern theory. In juxtaposing conflictual theoretical formulations, the book sets out to present the competing responses that fuel academic debates around this issue. Finally, it evaluates the influence of our increasingly mobile conceptual frameworks and everyday experience on the redefinition of politics that is currently under way, especially in the context of Post-Marxist theory. Its hope is to contribute to the production of alternative political positions and practices that will address the conflicting desires for attachment and movement marking postmodernity.

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

The phrase “spatial turns” signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: “Mapping Spaces” addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; “Spaces of the Urban” takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; “Spaces of Encounter” considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and “Visualized Spaces” concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.