In the past few decades, what has been called “the spatial turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been marked by an enhanced awareness of the significance of space, place, mapping, spatial relations, and so on, in those fields. According to the research influenced by this turn, space has been revealed to maintain an active and productive presence in society and culture, as well as in various art forms, rather than functioning as mere setting, an empty container, or a backdrop in front of which the matters of “real” significance unfold. More recently, but perhaps relatedly, a planetary turn in many of these disciplinary fields has reoriented spatial critical theory and practice toward a more global frame of reference, owing much to the imperatives of the worldwide ecological crisis and the prospects of apparently inevitable climate change, as well as to the realities of multinational capitalism and globalization, along with the diffuse, specific, and often local effects of all of this. The conception of the “world,” which can be closely related to both spatiality and planetarity, profoundly influences the ways we imagine space and place. Worlds may be either vaster or more limited than other spatial frameworks, and the negotiation of worldly spaces presents challenges to traditional means of mapping or making sense of one’s place. In this chapter, I discuss the effects of worlding on spatiality studies, beginning with a discussion of the spatial and planetary turns, then focusing on the crises of representation and of lived experience connected with a global frame of reference.

The Spatial Turn

Although such spatial or geographical considerations have no doubt always been a part of literary and critical practice, the recent resurgence of spatiality and the explosion in the number of spatially oriented books and articles in literary studies follows what has been referred to as the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The spatial turn has no particular date of inception, but one may perceive more and more critical attention being paid to matters of space in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Denis Cosgrove has explicitly connected the spatial turn to poststructuralist theory, and so it is not surprising that Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorist of their time have been closely associated with the spatial turn.