Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-sqlfs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-12T13:52:14.983Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 8 - Empire, Nation, and the Question of Space

from Part II - Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

By
Sandeep Banerjee  and
Atreyee Majumder
Edited by
Elizabeth Evans
Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
Get access

Summary

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

Keywords

spaceempirenationboundarycapitalismterritorystatedecolonizationutopiaideology
Type
Chapter
Information
Space and Literary Studies , pp. 140 - 155
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Verso, 1992.Google Scholar
Amin, Samir. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Translated by Brian Pearce. Monthly Review Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Holquist, Michael, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 259–422.Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sandeep. Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony. Routledge, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banerjee, Sandeep. “World Literature, the Text, and the Critic: Re-Reading The Country and the City, Re-Situating Raymond Williams.” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 20, 2022, pp. 19–39.Google Scholar
Basu, Subho. “The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity.” Modern Asian Studies, 44, no. 1, 2010, pp. 53–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited by Arendt, Hannah, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 253–64.Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Translated by Neville Plaice et al. MIT Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Cornell University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration, edited by Bhabha, Homi K.. Routledge, 1990, pp. 44–70.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, 8th imprint edition. Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Frank, Andre Gunder. On Capitalist Underdevelopment. Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Goswami, Manu. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. University of Chicago Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991.Google Scholar
Löwy, Michael. The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution. New Left Books, 1981.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Introduced by Ernst Mandel, translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976.Google Scholar
McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Poulantzas, Nikos. State, Power, Socialism. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Verso, 1980.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1978.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. “Secular Criticism.” The World, the Text and the Critic. Harvard University Press, 1983, pp. 1–30.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd edition. University of Georgia Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. Translated by Max Eastman. University of Michigan Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition. Oxford University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. University of Hawaii Press, 1994.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×