| The recent interest in the politics of landscape and place within the humanities and social sciences is driven by a growing awareness that places are not only the location, source, and product of conflicts over identity but influences that shape behavior and values in powerful if often not obvious ways. However, theorists of postmodernism and postcolonialism have tended to assimilate discussions of ethics to discussions of politics. This approach has provided much insight but does not appreciate the postmodern longing for "homeplaces," places outside the mainstream political arena. Home is not only a site of exploration, negotiation, and cultural reproduction but the site of a community's moral debates. Indeed, the political power that theorists like bell hooks find in the formation of homeplace rests upon its claim to produce an explicitly moral politics. This idea becomes especially crucial for marginalized communities, whose values stand in contrast to those in mainstream circulation. The act of forming and sustaining homeplaces represents the rejection of the imperial center and its endorsed histories and values.;This dissertation examines how postmodern and postcolonial. narratives of loss and yearning work to restore communal moral foundations in a world without moorings. Authors as diverse as Chinua Achebe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, and Jean Rhys share a sense that communal moral foundations can only be rebuilt by recovering lost places of memory. This process of recovery opposes the trajectory of modernity and its efforts to emancipate the psyche from the burden of the past. These novels propose to remember on behalf of those who have forgotten or been silenced. Memorializing loss provides the possibility of reconfiguring a communal history that provides in turn the basis for shared moral foundations. Thus, postmodernism turns to place not to restore a premodern world but to haunt us, to remind us that particular injustices repeat themselves over and over again. |
