Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael Haneke, Chandna analyzes the depiction of ever-changing borders and spatial grammar within the colonial project. In so doing, he also examines the ongoing resistance to the spatial legacies of colonial practices that act as omnipresent enforcers of colonial borders. Literature and film become sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture the dominance of these borders. Through its analyses Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces shows that colonialism is not a finished project relegated to our past. Colonialism is present in the here and now, and exercises its power through the borders that define us.

Proxemic studies concentrate on the structure and organization of space, its design and use, allocation, and the relations encoded in it as aspects of cultural communication. Space is perceived through the senses, and since cultures use the senses differently, they create boundaries differently. Pellow, in her edited collection of boundary studies, focuses on the social conception and production of boundedness. The essays by 10 scholars, eight of them anthropologists, explore the nature of boundaries in terms of change, space and place, society and culture, politics, class, urbanization, housing, and secular and spiritual life.

This volume is an important re-evaluation of space and spatiality in the late Renaissance and early modern period. History of science has generally reduced sixteenth and seventeenth century space to a few canonical forms. This volume gives a much needed antidote. The contributing chapters examine the period’s staggering richness of spatiality: the geometrical, geographical, perceptual and elemental conceptualizations of space that abounded. The goal is to begin to reconstruct the amalgam of “spaces” which co-existed and cross-fertilized in the period’s many disciplines and visions of nature. Our volume will be a valuable resource for historians of science, philosophy and art, and for cultural and literary theorists.

Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses. In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.

This book shows how Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days changed the global imagination. Through his novel, the world was converted into a personal itinerary, scaled to the individual traveller and, by extension, to the individual reader. Exploring Verne’s modern legacy, this study shows how subsequent generations of artists and writers took on Around the World in Eighty Days as an adaptable guidebook to the modern world. It investigates how Verne’s work leads its reader beyond the book itself. It considers Verne’s place in world literature, traces some of the many real reenactments of Verne’s itinerary, and recalls the theatrical adaptations of Verne’s story. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation and the 150th anniversary of Verne’s novel, this book offers new insights into the largely overlooked influence of Verne on twentieth-century literature and culture and on the field of global modernism.

Space, place and territory are concepts that lie at the core of geography and urban planning, environmental studies and sociology. Although space, place and territory are indeed polysemic and polemic, they have particular characteristics that distinguish them from each other. They are interdependent but not interchangeable, and the differences between them explain how we simultaneously perceive, conceive and design multiple spatialities. After drawing the conceptual framework of space, place and territory, the book initially explores how we sense space in the most visceral ways, and how the overlay of meanings attached to the sensorial characteristics of space change the way we perceive it – smell, spatial experiences using electroence phalography, and the changing meaning of darkness are discussed. The book continues exploring cartographic mapping not as a final outcome, but rather as an epistemological tool, an instrument of inquiry. It follows on how particular ideas of space, place and territory are embedded in specific urban proposals, from Brasília to the Berlin Wall, airports and infiltration of digital technologies in our daily life. The book concludes by focusing on spatial practices that challenge the status quo of how we perceive and understand urban spaces, from famous artists to anonymous interventions by traceurs and hackers of urban technologies. Combining space, place and territory as distinctive but interdependent concepts into an epistemological matrix may help us to understand contemporary phenomena and live them critically.

A poetic, autobiographical collection from famed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, engaging with loneliness, desire, violence, and aging. “I’m sick of biting off and chewing this dust, of scratching with my thin claws, searching for some chunk of literary gold to hell with all the disarrayed images of our homelands reflections of our particular misery.” From eminent Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, a collection that transgresses genre lines with poetic, autobiographical flow. The pieces herein address the resonance of personal memories and regrets, the political world, and sexuality. In light of the complexity of human identity, Devi emphasizes the importance of each word chosen, speaking directly to the reader and asking them to “peel back my skin. Unclothe me of myself.”