Editors: Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch and Daan Wesselman (the University of Amsterdam)
Can
heterotopia help us make sense of globalisation? A heterotopia, in Michel
Foucault’s initial formulations, describes the spatial articulation of a
discursive order, manifesting its own distinct logics and categories in ways
that refract or disturb prevailing paradigms. As part of the “reassertion of
space” or “spatial turn” that has gathered pace in the humanities and social
sciences from the 1980s onwards (Soja 1989; Warf and Arias 2009), the concept
of heterotopia has enjoyed broad critical appeal across literary studies,
visual culture and cultural geography (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). Allowing
critics to grasp how discourse and space fold together in the construction of
enclosed or discrepant domains, the term has been applied to an enormous
variety of real and imagined cultural spaces, ranging from Hashima Island to
Melville’s Pequod, Ramadan festival to Kowloon Walled City. And yet, despite
its popularity, the concept of heterotopia stands in tension with other
critical approaches and spatial terms in cultural theory. If heterotopias are
marked off by virtue of the discursive difference they embody, current concepts
of world systems, planetarity and above all globalisation emphasise “the
widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness” (Held,
McGrew and Goldblatt 1999, 2).
