Contested Spaces in Contemporary North American Novels

Book excerpt: This volume investigates the ways in which Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You engage with the physical, ideological, and socially constructed “real-and-imagined” spaces of colonialism, justice, diaspora, and risk. Building on a range of theoretical approaches to the production of space, this study argues for the significance of literature as a cartographic practice charting the intricacies of the socio-spatiality of human life. Through rigorous readings, this book examines each novel as a critical map that both represents and explores contested spaces and alternative spatial negotiations. These spatially oriented literary analyses contribute to recent conceptualizations of space as socially and relationally produced, open, dynamic, and contested, and enrich the existing scholarship on the novels discussed here.