Land Notes

“Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think

about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and

therefore must do something about its indigenous residents. At some very basic level,

imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is

distant, that is lived on and owned by others.” --- Said, C&I 7

Modernism and space: “When you can no longer assume that Britannia will rule the waves

forever, you have to reconceive reality as something that can be held together by you the

artist, in history rather than in geography. Spatiality becomes, ironically, the characteristic of

an aesthetic rather than of political domination, as more and more regions---from India to

Africa to the Caribbean---challenge the classical empires and their cultures.” -- Said, C&I 189-

190.

“By ‘Place’ we do not simply mean ‘landscape’. Indeed the idea of ‘landscape’ is predicated

upon a particular philosophic tradition in which the objective world is separated from the

viewing subject. Rather ‘place’ in post-colonial societies is a complex interaction of language,

history and environment. It is characterised firstly by a sense of displacement in those who

have moved to the colonies, or the more widespread sense of displacement from the

imported language, of a gap between the ‘experienced’ environment and descriptions the

language provides, and secondly, by a sense of the immense investment of culture in the

construction of place. A sense of displacement, of the lack of ‘fit’ between language and

place, may be experienced by both those who possess English as a mother tongue and those

who speak it as a second language. In both cases, the sense of dislocation from an historical

‘homeland’ and that created by the dissonance between language, the experience of

‘displacement’ generates a creative tension within the language. Place is thus the

concommitant of difference, the continual reminder of the separation, and yet of the hybrid

interpenetration of the coloniser and colonised.” -- from Ashcroft ‘PCR’, 391