Remapping and Renaming

New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland

Bibliographic Data

ID3945409
AuthorsC Nash (0000-0002-0868-7164, corresponding author)
Year1993
Volume44
Issue1
Pages39-57
Publication date1993-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.1993.19
OpenAlexW2063364497
LanguageEN
Citations received81
References cited34

In discussing Mahasweta Devi's story 'Douloti the Bountiful', Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the story's ending. Douloti, the daughter of an Indian tribal bonded worker, is sold into bonded prostitution in order to repay her father's loan. Devastated by venereal disease, she dies walking to hospital, having lain down on the comfort of the bare earth where the local schoolmaster had drawn the map of India in order to teach his students nationalism in preparation for Independence Day. The next morning the schoolmaster and his students find Douloti on the map (Spivak, 1992a). This tension between the assertion of national identity in the postcolonial nation and the presence of the female subaltern, can be paraphrased as a problematic relationship between the map and the body. The map in Devi's story stands as a symbol of the national territory, the geographic outline both constituting and symbolizing the 'imagined community' of the nation (Anderson, 1983). In considering contemporary Irish culture, I am concerned not only to consider the issue of identity in relation to both feminism and postcolonialism, but to raise the issue of'place' and its intersection with identity. The issue of place operates at the abstract level ofthe nation. It also concerns the visual relationship to place associated with the concept of'landscape' (Rose, 1992), and the sensual, lived experience of the local environment. In contemporary critical writing, spatial metaphors the terms position, place, site, space, ground, field, territory, terrain, margin, periphery and map recur (Diprose and Ferrell, 1991, Tagg, 1992). The metaphor of mapping functions at a number of levels. It stands most commonly for a positioning on a theoretical and ideological plane. It also describes a location within geographical space. In the relationship between the Western and Third Worlds, this is not

Aesthetics · Art · Feminism · Gender identity · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Philippine History and Culture · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

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