Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces

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.

The Colonialist Roots of Democratic Decay: Collective Action, Experimental Psychology, and Spatial Discourse

Democracy and dictatorship both depend on collective action, which humans avoid because it takes more effort than it is worth. Experimental psychology reveals that positive spatial discourse, explicit or implicit, reduces the effort that humans project a task to require. If so, dictatorships arise because explicit positive spatial cues, capable of retaining coherence only if assigning only to relatively few members of any population, generate the collective repression by a minority that establishes any dictatorship. Conversely the implicit cue to group size in a color metaphor, capable of assigning throughout a population, generates the universal franchise establishing a democracy. By supplementing spatial cues dividing Europeans with a metaphor of whiteness unifying Europeans and their settlers, colonialism made democracy possible once European withdrawal ended white dictatorship over colonial territories. But by erasing the condition that once secured the universal franchise among Europeans and their settlers, loss of colonies invigorates whites’ fears that hard won political rights have reverted to insecurity. That insecurity is responsible for the democratic decay now evident across Europe and its settler territories.

Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces

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.

A Living Spatial Movement of Relation. Reconceptualising Ricœur’s Oneself as Another and Heidegger’s Being and Time

Beyond the disparate and mainly fleeting references to life in Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, whether as life as power, living well and with others, or as Ricoeur’s attempt to develop a concept of embodied subjectivity as flesh, which is presumably living flesh, not dead flesh, a further and arguably primordial life principle needs emphasis, namely, living space. Ricoeur’s recognition of the vital significance of space primordiality, as a pivotal dimension that is even prior to language, offers a significant conceptual leap in Ricoeur’s later work, Oneself as Another. Ricoeur’s proposed ontology of the flesh is one dimension towards expression of an authentic phenomenology of spatiality, though not necessarily the only one. Building upon but going beyond Ricoeur, the article explores concentric and diametric spatial interplay in relation to the early Heidegger’s existential spatiality, Angst and care, as candidate living spatial movements. This proposed primordial spatial discourse re-examines Ricoeur’s conatus as power to act, and his quest for a structure of relation to the other that is not closure, separation, or diametric opposition.

Postcolonial Spatiality

This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence, and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment, infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases.