LANDS OF DESIRE AND LOSS. BRITISH COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SPACES: THEORIES AND NARRATIONS

In my dissertation, based on the conception of geographical imagination and on the interplay between geography and literature, British colonial and postcolonial spaces are investigated as lands of desire and loss. The first part of the dissertation includes major theoretical formulations and imaginings of space and develops a survey of selected perspectives ranging from humanistic geography to postmodern and postcolonial approaches. In particular, the issues of the new cultural geography are considered and juxtaposed to a number of philosophical and sociological standpoints. The result is what can be termed a “geopoetics of space”, including perceptions, emotions, memories, mental projections and ideological stances. Subsequently, the first part examines the conceptual framework related to the representation of space in the narratives of the British empire, shaped by a rising colonial ideology and literary patterns, leading towards the appropriation of space in cultural terms, finally opening up the question of the revisitation of imperial ideologies in postcolonial writing, where space is reconfigured in terms of dislocation and loss. The relationship between space, text, narration and ideology is crucial, because space is textualized, i.e. perceived, imagined and transformed into text through language, while an important role is also played by cartographic discourse and its developments. The second part of the dissertation analyses a selection of literary texts, belonging to three main periods of British history and culture, considered as the beginning, the climax and the end of a cultural and literary trajectory: the Renaissance, the close of the nineteenth century and the Victorian age, the postcolonial era. Desire and loss are present from the very beginning of the representation of the “spatial other”: these two seemingly opposite tropes of representation of the new territories acquired by the British empire find their origins in the experience and textualization of the New World. El Dorado turns out to be the archetypical land of colonial desire; its manifold representations following Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), a paradigmatic text of exploration, disclose the recurrent dreams of the colonizers, who projected their fantasies of power and wealth onto remote unknown lands. El Dorado, or the city of the golden man, symbolizes the deferred imperial quest for a New World paradise; yet, it also embodies unfulfilled desire, disillusionment, failure and ultimately death. The analysis of late-Victorian representations of the lands of imperial desire constitutes the central section of the second part: while H. Rider Haggard imagines South Africa as a fabulously rich territory conquered by English adventurers and soldiers and, in She (1887), dwells on a topography of male desire projected onto a subterranean feminine land, the South American forests re-visited by W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904) are the literary manifestation of a longed-for but never fulfilled desire centered on the lands not colonized by the British empire, and therefore even more mysterious and fascinating to British eyes. After Haggard’s Ayesha, in Hudson’s romance another female figure, Rima, embodies the elusive quality of spatial otherness and, at the same time, emphasizes the impossibility of reaching a personal Eden. In Hudson the quest for El Dorado – although broadly located in the South American landscape not so far away from the territory visited by Raleigh – becomes an emotional jouney towards the inner self, the ecological powers of nature, the longed-for wholeness of an enchanted love story. The golden future eluding colonial enterprises is envisaged in a number of twentieth-century literary representations: the tragic structure and unremitting pessimism of Conrad’s vision, especially in Nostromo (1904), prove that the dream of progress and wealth ends by becoming a shadowy mirage, devouring hopes of political ideals and private glory and happiness. The last section of my dissertation deals with the imaginative construction of the lands of loss in the decolonized world, in relation to the new interpretations of the myths of the New World. In this sense, V.S. Naipaul’s Trinidad in A Way in the World (1994) should be considered as a historical and symbolic island of loss, where the drama of colonization is encoded and decoded through several historical perspectives and personal stories, a real and imagined place whose marginality encompasses postcolonial as well as historical crossroads, diasporic movements and intersections. In A Way in the World contemporary nostalgia and uprootedness are connected with the act of rethinking the world beyond the oppositional system of values embedded in colonial cultures. Throughout the centuries of British colonization and decolonization El Dorado, and spatial desire enclosed in this pervading myth, which is continuously transformed and takes on many shapes and geographical connotations, has embodied opposite principles and generated a whole literature in English. Finally, the “unstable zones”, both in geographical, cultural and “mental” terms, where the encounter with the other takes place and is textualized, are at the core of my dissertation, focusing on both theoretical perspectives and narrative constructions.