Abstract
Globalization has brought with it a sort of leveling or homogenizing force, but at the same time it had introduced hitherto unthinkable diversity and difference. This paradox lies at the heart of Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch and Daan Wesselman’s edited collection, Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century. Offering the example of a Bohemian or ‘hipster’ coffee house in Amsterdam, but one which could just as easily appear in New York, Beijing, or Buenos Aires, they note that its space and character are marked by difference; the whole point of the enterprise is to be different from its surroundings, and the global spread of such places is a feature of the present century. The editors refer to this as ‘discrepant emplacements’, and they draw upon Michel Foucault’s evocative concept of heterotopia in order to ‘grasp the clashing, incongruous spatiality of contemporary globalization’ (p. 2).
As Kevin Hetherington points out in the Afterword, Foucault himself never really developed this concept more fully. Foucault mentions ‘heterotopia’ briefly in The Order of Things (1966) and gave a lecture devoted to it in 1967, but that was only published as ‘Of Other Spaces’ in 1984; Foucault’s rather spatial studies of the 1970s – what could be a more heterotopian than the space of a prison? – do not mention the word even once. Nevertheless, it has become a key concept for cultural geography, urban studies and the humanities over the past 30 years in part because it seems to capture many different possibilities in a single term. As the editors of this volume note, ‘heterotopias are discrete segments of larger discursive totalities’ (such as the geographical space of a nation state, for instance), and in relation to those totalities, ‘heterotopias manifest their own distinct logics, moods, and norms’, which in turn may ‘refract, disturb, but also accentuate aspects of the wider social or discursive totality’ (p. 2). Despite the frequent allusions to heterotopia as a progressive or even revolutionary site, there is nothing particularly good or bad about such places. Yet, in them, the possibilities of new social structures might emerge.
In the 11 chapters that make up Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century, plus the Introduction and Afterword, the contributors examine different heterotopian spaces, but they also connect them to larger dynamics, such as tourism and migration, climate change, digital technologies and so on. The paradox of globalization marks these essays as well, for they all deal with the widespread and seemingly standardized effects of difference. Lieven De Cauter, for example, repurposes the concept of heterotopia to imagine a new way of instantiating a ‘commons’ in the Anthropocene, where this commons become a place of recovery or hospitality from the devastating effects of wars, occupations, famines and so on. Cathy Elliott also invokes the Anthropocene as she examines multiple temporalities in the genre of British New Nature Writing, and Mary Gearey’s chapter focuses on climate change by looking closely at challenges facing riverlands and waterside villages in the United Kingdom, and discussing the innovative ways that activists have addressed land management issues. In ‘Agricultural Heterotopia: The Soybean Republic(s) of South America’, Gladys Pierpaili and Mariano Turzi analyze the ways that global agribusiness has reorganized national industries and spaces on that continent. Adam Kildare Cottrell’s chapter involves a careful reading of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997) about the day-to-day life of an impoverished district within Lisbon, where the spatiotemporal flows associated with globalization in a cybernetic age are countered with an aesthetic of deceleration, typified by long cinematic shots or stunted plot progressions, which, in turn, seek to reinstate heterotopian spaces amid the homogenizing effects of late capitalism. Henrietta Simson examines landscape as a means for contemporary art to challenge neoliberal processes, while Ursula Kluwick and Virginia Richter focus on littoral space, namely the beach, as an exemplary heterotopian space. In the following chapter, Elham Bahmanteymouri and Farzaneh Haghighi look at tourism in the digital era, with an emphasis on Airbnb as an ephemeral heterotopia. Peter Johnson also looks at technology, finding heterotopian elements in the interface between human users and digital communications, and bringing the work of Michel Serres to bear on the question. Hannah Stuit shows the interrelations of play and discipline in the game Prison Escape, in which players experience a sort of carceral imaginary in pretending to be imprisoned. And Graham St. John provides a critical look at the participatory spectacle Burning Man, where the boundaries between producer and consumer, artist and tourist, are blurred and transgressed. Finally, Hetherington’s Afterword situates Foucault concept of heterotopia among current events, notably Greta Thunberg’s effort to promote awareness of catastrophic climate change juxtaposed with Donald Trump’s bizarre, intransigent vision of hyper-capitalism.
Overall, the essays in Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century reflect the diversity and scope one would expect from a book so titled, and it will be of interest to scholars of these complex, but critical phenomena.
