Naming No Man’s Land: Postcolonial Toponymies (2024) (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture)

Synopsis

This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia, the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning, reference and cross-cultural equivalence. Recognising the ‘sense of place’ values that accrue to placenames, Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason, to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics. Naming No Man’s Land argues for a practical, community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure, showing that, when the principle that ‘places are made after their stories’ is followed, new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies, creativity studies, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, historical ethnography, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, (Australian) Aboriginal studies, and related disciplines.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9783031606885

Related ISBNs:

9783031606878

Publisher:

Springer Nature Switzerland

Date of Addition:

10/21/24

Copyrighted By:

The Editor

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Psychology, Social Studies, Language Arts, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.