Defining and Redefining Space in the English-Speaking World: Contacts, Frictions, Clashes

Abstract

Contacts, on the individual and institutional levels and in the political and aesthetic spheres, lead to redefinitions of existing identities through frictions and, sometimes, clashes. Focusing on the material conditions of such contacts, frictions, and clashes, this volume particularly explores their essentially spatial nature, highlighting the stakes of such definitions and redefinitions of space. Efforts at defining and mapping spaces, physical experiences of contacts, frictions and clashes, tensions between different groups or genres and literary or political competition for space and influence lead to geographical, social, political, and aesthetic, but also bodily and psychological, definitions and redefinitions