Rezensionen 195 Gerhard Stilz (ed.), Territorial Terrors. Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing. (ZAA Monograph Series 7). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Petra Eckhard Territorial Terrors grew out of a transatlantic graduate research project of the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the University of Maryland (U.S.A.) in which young scholars investigated how conflicting notions of territory are being translated into colonial and postcolonial literary discourses. The essays collected in the volume look at various notions of contested space that include, for example, home, native country, colony, metropolis and also, to mention a few more recent terrains of conflict, body space, alien country, or globalized space. These cultural contact zones are discussed in five major chapters entitled “Precarious Homes”, “National Territories, Colonial Terrors”, “Submerged in the Metropolis”, “Metropolitan Spaces Appropriated” and “The Global and the Local”. The last three sections of the book are primarily devoted to cultural tensions in urban space and highlight the importance of the metropolis as a microcosm of transnational conflict. In the introductory chapter Stilz refers to the complexity of social divisions that emerges from postcolonial urbanity: “In the postmodern metropolis shaped by global capitalism, [the] balance [of interests and powers] is widely threatened or lost […] by non-liberal majorities, by powerful global capital, by radical minorities, by segregation and ghettoization” (13). One of the key arguments in Stilz’s introduction is that literature, “not refraining from but rather pointing out the pluri-voiced, ambiguous double-dealings in human encounters, can illustrate the complexity of colonial and postcolonial contact zones, where people and their utterances can frequently not be located as being ‘either here or there’” (8). Furthermore, he argues that the examination of literary works on territorial anxieties can facilitate an understanding of the ‘real’ territorial threats and fears. Indeed, the fictional accounts discussed in the book provide an innovative response to lived power relationships between dichotomous social groups such as ‘dominant’ and ‘marginalized’ or ‘native’ and ‘other’. What makes Stilz’s volume stand out amongst other works on postcolonialism is that it does no longer understand and use the term postcolonialism solely in its strict temporal sense (i.e. coming after colonialism). Instead, it can be seen as a critical work of cultural mediation that looks at the field through the lens of spatiality. Sebastian Duda’s essay “Imagined Origins - Language, Space and Identity in three Novels by V.S. Naipaul”, for example, convincingly illustrates how V.S. Naipaul, a distinguished Trinidadian novelist of Indian descent, addresses the difficulties of retaining an authentic cultural identity in colonial space. The postcolonial culture clash and alienation Naipaul’s protagonists experience results, first and foremost, from their detachment from Caribbean and Indian cultures, but also, as Duda argues, from the “misrepresentation of colonial space [i.e. England] in the language of the colonizer” (43). For example, the characters’ attempts to find ‘wholeness’ and ‘authenticity’ in London, which they imagine as a “space of colonial desire” (ibid.), is doomed to failure, precisely because the sign system of the empirical city lacks culturally determined points of reference. The terror, therefore, lies in the feeling of continuous AAA Band 34 (2009), Heft 1 Rezensionen 196 emptiness and confusion, which the alien country imposes on the colonial subjects. Duda sums up this dilemma as follows: “The imagined mother country […] symbolizes a lost paradise, another lost origin, which, like the cultural heritage of the original East Indian settlers, cannot be restored” (53). The contributions to the second chapter, entitled “National Territories, Colonial Terrors” display a similar interest in the antagonism between real and chimerical colonial zones. Katrin Kuplent’s analysis of Mudrooroo’s novel Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, for example, shows how different and incompatible “geographical imaginations” (108) can result in territorial terrors and death. Rewriting the history of dispossession and extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines by invading Europeans during the nineteenth century, Mudrooroo juxtaposes the colonizers’ Eurocentric notion of “[c]ontainer-space” (110), encouraging a hierarchical world-view that does not legitimize alternative cultural narratives, with relativist space, i.e. space which is “not an explicit object of perception […] but a medium imparting particular social and cultural knowledges” (115-116). Despite the novel’s tragic closure, Kuplent regards Mudrooroo’s depiction of the “native apocalypse” (115) as an optimistic call for a human geography that allows multiple views of the world to coexist and new cross-cultural identities to emerge. Kelly J.S. McGovern’s fascinating study “Burying Con O’Leary: New York Cartographies of Identity in Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness” exemplifies the thematic shift away from the force-fields of global colonialism to those in the (post)metropolis. By analyzing The Side of Brightness (1998), a New York novel written by an Irish expatriate, McGovern enters a discourse on immigrant life which, due to the character’s complex hybridity, transcends common notions about ‘Irish- Americaness’. McCann’s portrayal of the Walker family, a social unit which unites Irish, African American and Native American histories and identities, illustrates the fragmentation and “variety in hybridity” (174) that originates from the metropolis. According to McGovern, New York’s “multiethnic conglomeration of immigrants” (179) calls for an “identity tectonics” (173), a new model of cultural interaction that aims at contributing to an understanding of the conflicts the working-class immigrants come into. The retreat of one character into the dark subterranean structures of the city points not only to the difficulties of positioning oneself in globalized urban space but also to the fact that issues of homelessness and marginalization do, symbolically as well as literally, operate along the vertical axis. In a similar fashion, Michael Rosenberg also sheds light on the representation of marginalized spaces. His essay, entitled “Aestheticizing Slum Cities”, examines Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1997), a novel which records the migration of the Martiniquan underclass from a rural to an urban environment. Going beyond the politics of globalized space as articulated by Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis and Henry Lefebvre, Rosenberg analyzes Chamoiseau’s narrative along the lines of a slum aesthetics which “seeks to balance the beautiful with the ugly, the pleasing with the disturbing, and, perhaps most importantly, the dignified with the pitiable” (286). Rosenberg’s challenging of the common practice to read the slum solely as “the object of a larger Marxist discourse on late capitalism” (283) gives rise to a more authentic and complex account of the marginalized urban poor. In going beyond the conventional discourses of victimization and criminality, Rosenberg’s aestheticization of the slum works against abstract and theoretical representations of “disadvantaged Rezensionen 197 problem places with suffering people” (286) and thus attempts to narrow the gap between the privileged and underprivileged voices of the global city. The final article of the volume, Dennis Hannemann’s essay on Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, discusses the dichotomy between a global and local Manhattan as represented in the construction of Eric Packer, the novel’s main character, who ideologically transforms from “the literal epitome of global finance” (295) into a scepticist subject questioning the values of capitalist and technocratic society. The territorial terror Packer has to endure emerges from the destructive forces of information technology and monetary flows, bringing about a denial and loss of history, spirituality, and genuine humanity. For Hannemann the clash of the artificiality and one-dimensionality of market culture and the archaic reality of local street life is illustrated in Packer’s own fall at the novel’s end. Shortly before his death, he becomes aware that he is nothing but a victim of cybernetic systems, strips off his professional identity and enters a more humane and ‘real’ Manhattan. Hannemann regards Packer’s reconsidering of priorities at the end as a process of maturation, of ‘coming of age’, and thus concludes with labeling Cosmopolis “a postmodern variation of the Bildungsroman” (308). As a whole, Territorial Terrors is an interesting and ambitious study on the postcolonial imagination, as diverse literatures come into productive dialogue with each other. Key concepts of cultural studies such as otherness, deterritorialization, marginalization, and displacement emerge as leitmotivs throughout the volume, furthering the understanding of how postcolonial space is constructed, perceived, and imagined. The essays assembled in this book reflect the wide variety of divergent territorial disputes that emanate from postcolonial contexts and, most notably, from the (post)metropolis. It is indeed the book’s focus on the representation of the city, probably the most complex zone of both contact and separation, which points postcolonial literary studies in a new and fruitful direction. Therefore, the volume is an important book not only for students and scholars interested in postcolonial studies but also for a more heterogeneous audience that seeks to understand conflicting tensions apparent in our globalized world. Petra Eckhard Department of American Studies Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz