Spatial Writing And The Process Of Othering

This dissertation takes Derek Gregory’s “geography as discourse” as the central axis to make a critical study of its literary and cultural significance.Gregory is a human geographer who combines spatial problems with literary theories.He put forward the viewpoint of “geography as discourse” in the process of studying the root of geography providing knowledge foundation for humanities.Different areas divided by geography determine the characteristics of people,thus separating “us” from “them”.Gregory regards geography as a discourse,which travels through social practice and is related to the distribution of power and knowledge.Therefore,the keynote of “geography as discourse” is to take theoretical travel as a way of inquiry and start the dialogue with social theory.In this process,different theoretical traditions in geography and social theory are questioned and repositioned.Gregory introduces the sociality and materiality of space into social critical theory.He combines the topics of knowledge and power in space theory and literary theory,aiming at explaining the topic of “otherness” in literary and cultural studies from a new theoretical perspective.Regardless of the early Oriental discourse or the present drone attack,Gregory always takes “power” as the foothold and discusses the collusion role of geography in the “othering” of non-Western peoples.This dissertation interprets the image of “the other” in literature from the new perspective of “geography as discourse” in four aspects:colonizing geographies,Oriental discourse represented by Egypt,gendered spatial representation and body in war representation.Colonizing geography serves as Gregory’s theoretical foundation and his studies on the East,gender and body all develop around colonial context.By emphasizing that the West tends to belittle and dominate “the other” through language and knowledge,he explores the geographical basis of imperialist discourse construction.The East,represented by Egypt,is the starting point of his Eurocentrism study.Through the geographical interpretation of Said’s Orientalism,Gregory examines how Europe defines the East as “inferiors” and eternal “others”.Gregory has always paid close attention to social radical thoughts and kept sensitive to the political nature of representation,so there is an obvious post-colonial turn in his theory.The first two chapters of the dissertation discuss the participation of geography in the process of “othering” in colonial context,while the last two chapters examine the issue from the perspective of representation.Gregory keenly captures the commonality of conquest between women and nature,and further explores the gender division from colonial space to urban public space.After 9/11,his attention turned to the Middle East battlefield.He insists that colonial thought is still shaping people’s way of understanding the world.Taking bodies in modern wars as examples,he reveals how those who regarded as “others” are presented in contemporary war culture.These four aspects are Gregory’s concentrated expression of thinking about how human geography depicts race,gender and nation through putting geography in social theory.They reveal the form and characteristics of how geography entering humanities.This dissertation focuses on “otherization” in literary studies,it bases on Gregory’s geographical imagination theory,meanwhile transcending his geographical disciplinary tendency.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this dissertation falls into four chapters,the specific contents are as follows:Introduction: this section summarizes the origins of topic,significance of study,research tendency at home and abroad,the basic text structure and research methods.Chapter one: colonizing geographies: the geographical exploration of colonial culture.This chapter will explore the role of geography in spreading and consolidating colonial culture based on Gregory’s “colonizing geography”.This dissertation holds that geography’s participation in the construction of colonial culture is mainly manifested in two aspects.First,it reconstructs the space to shape the colonial order.The cultural expression of the empire was clearly expressed through the transformation of colonial space.Secondly,geography strengthens the theme of imperial literature and imperial culture,which implies a deeper source of colonialism epistemology.This chapter will first analyze the deprivation of colonial culture with space as the core,which embodies the colonial strategy by means of spatial reconstruction and geographical possession.Then it analyzes the geographical factors,especially the tropical nature’s prominence and reflection on the theme of imperial literature.In novels such as A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness,the description of geographical environment and nature has greatly promoted the penetration of imperialism themes.Finally,the chapter analyzes the spatial imagination of imperialist culture.To a certain extent,the construction of imperial culture depends on the imagination of the colonists,this is manifested in the fact that scientific affairs such as cartography serves imperial purpose,colonial lands provided heterogeneous elements for imperial urban culture.Geography is a new entry point for post-colonial studies.Europeans’ exploration of the outside world has made geography a discourse that distinguishes “us” from “them”.This kind of discourse is taken as a natural fact integrated into writing system in the description of world history and the creation of literary works.Therefore,literary disciplines which seem to have nothing to do with politics are closely dependent on imperialist ideas and colonial practices.Taking geography as an active promoter of colonialism can trace back to the origin of cultural work and broaden the study of imperialism literature to geographical perspective.Chapter two: imagining and scripting Egypt: Orientalism beyond library.This chapter will analyze Gregory’s Orientalism represented by Egypt in the works of European and American authors in the late 19 th century and early 20 th century.Orientalism reveals how text and discourse practice can produce profound material consequences through space,and it allows Westerners to build identity and power by occupying space.This chapter first discusses the theoretical basis of Gregory’s orientalism.In the eyes of geographers and philosophers,the East is inferior to the West.However,the so-called “East”and “West” are artificially constructed without scientific basis.Based on the corresponding geographical characteristics,environmental determinism divides the personalities and characteristics of people by different regions,as well as their unique culture.Said’s “imaginative geography” is an important theoretical base to Gregory,besides,Gregory explains the process of establishing this geographical-based Eurocentrism from the great discovery of geography.Secondly,the chapter analyzes the establishment of orientalized discourse by illustrating The Description de l’Egypte and Aida.Geography,as discourse,not only consolidates the images of Europeans and non-Europeans,but also plays a positive role in the construction of cultural institution with these stereotype images.In analyzing these literary and artistic works,Gregory does not retake the path of Said,but always puts the connection between geographical space and power in the first place,and pays attention to geographical imagination in real space.This dissertation makes use of literary criticism and world history compilation to demonstrate the fact that European writers’ works ignore the personality and history of non-Europeans under geographical division.Finally,this chapter analyzes the materiality and heterogeneity of orientalism based on the travel writing of European and American tourists to Egypt.“Orientalism” is not an abstract idea,but a concrete doctrine which can produce some results that push Egypt conform to the cultural and aesthetic characteristics of Westerners.In this connection,the theory of “geography as discourse” demonstrates the essence of Egypt’s representation and rewritten by the West from three aspects: knowledge source,power formation and spatial representation.It is obvious that Gregory’s orientalism concerns the travel writing of European tourists and stresses on their rewriting and westernizing of Egypt.In a nut shell,Gregory’s exploration of the oriental discourse in practice transcends the oriental study which based on Said’s historical texts.Chapter three: gendered space: gender politics in spatial representation.This chapter will start with the political nature of representation and discuss the gender politics implied in spatial representation.Colonialism and discourse paradigm cannot be separated,therefore,this chapter will criticize the role of geography from a post-colonialism perspective.In the process of European expansion,exploring new territories has always been exclusive to men,and the new world has also been characterized by female features.Feminist theorists have found that the geography of “the others” has a natural connection with women,and they are also marginalized and represented.Geography has become a discourse that distinguishes the characteristics of men and women,which forms a binary opposition between Europe/male and East/female.This chapter first analyzes the feminization of colonial space with Flaubert’s Egypt travel writing.The freedom of “The flaneur” in social public space indicates men’s exclusive use of public space,it leads to the consequence that women are invisible in modern literature.All these are the spatial genderization in literary landscape.Secondly,taking the male symbols of post-modern architecture as an example,this chapter investigates the gendered metaphors in modern urban landscape and the marginalization of women in post-modern culture.Gregory’s analysis of gendered space also encourages women to use space as a prop to resist “otherization”.The last section of this chapter explores this effort through feminist writing and feminist geography.Nightingale’s travel log shows that women’s subjectivity and space are inseparable,which is a supplement to Showalter and Cixous’ s resistance to gender inequality from women’s writing.Female geographers start from resisting the neglect of women in geography,and this enables people to notice women’s discourse powers in space both at home and in the workplace.All these indicate that geography,as discourse,delimits the social activities,degree of freedom,geographical imagination and priority of men and women.Most importantly,these ranges are depicted in literary works.Uncovering the connection between geography and gendered space will certainly open a new interpretation perspective for literary and artistic criticism.Chapter four: corpography: “other” bodies in war representation.This chapter will discuss war culture with Gregory’s attention to the body in the long-distance war.Body is a heated topic in literature research,which has inscribed social power and ideology.In the first section,the distance fiction of modern long-range warfare in novels and war correspondent reports is expounded.The detailed description of drone attack in the novel I Saw a Man exposes the fact that modern optical warfare uses science and technology to achieve precise locking while causes many innocent injuries,as well as the power of “gaze” outside the monitoring screen in drone attack.In fact,the representation of body in war is the questions of power.Thus,the second section explores the display of power with Gregory’s view of body.Gregory’s focus shift comes the first,which is also the generative context of his“corpography”.To him,colonization is a process of culture,it continues to shape the way people perceive the world.“Architecture of enmity” divided by geography identifies that “they” are inclined to be violent,thus our invasion is reasonable.“Their” bodies are considered insignificant in the war.Gregory’s original intention of proposing “corpography” is to refute the“non-bodyization” of modern optical warfare and to reveal the truth that the so-called “bodylessness” ignores the victim only for the perpetrator.The third section discusses the significance of “corpography” to body research.Body research has permeated into many humanities and it is interdisciplinary because of its integration with these disciplines.“The others” body in war is the concern of Gregory’s “corpography”,which enriches the research scope of colonial body.Meanwhile,his geographical perspective also proves the interdisciplinary relationship between body research and geography as well as visual culture.Studying the process of “otherization” of the body from the perspective of visual culture is a leap over the traditional text analysis,which indicates that post-colonial study has got rid of the theoretical discrimination from text to text and reveals the essence of the connection between space and power from colonization perspective.The conclusion part summarizes the positive significance of “geography as discourse” to the study of literature and culture and its limitations.Gregory insists that all theories are one-sided and situated,thus all disciplines are interdisciplinary and the theory itself isn’t single.Geography as a kind of discourse,which not only demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of theory,but also promotes the integration of geography and literature.It has a positive inspiration for literary theory to be aware of external forces and the integration of multidisciplinary theoretical characteristics.“Geography as discourse”transcends the limitations of geography and broadens the attention of literary texts to existing genres in literary criticism.It also motivates literary studies to pay more attention to the social nature of texts,thus exploring fictional and real space of texts.Nevertheless,the limitations of Gregory’s theory cannot be ignored.He regards geography as the carrier of power,which also has a negative impact on literary studies.Firstly,literature is not equal to cultural power.Secondly,geography is not just a carrier of power.Lastly,the perception of otherness should not limited to colonial perspective.Most importantly,as a geographer,literature is simply the way to construct his theory of human geography rather than the destination.We are supposed to learn from his ideas of theoretical construction and make best of his human geography perspective,but the literary standard ought not to be neglected and the aesthetic value of literature should not be hided.