Naming No Man's Land

Postcolonial Toponymies
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-60690-8
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 251 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 417 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia, the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning, reference and cross-cultural equivalence. 

Recognising the ‘sense of place’ values that accrue to placenames, Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason, to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics.  argues for a practical, community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure, showing that, when the principle that ‘places are made after their stories’ is followed, new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies, creativity studies, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, historical ethnography, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, (Australian) Aboriginal studies, and related disciplines.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carter, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Sozialpsychologie
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: practising toponymic decolonisation.- Chapter 1 Relating Country: some recent Noongar placenaming projects.- Chapter 2 Proper Names: differences between Aboriginal and colonial toponymy.- Chapter 3 Naming and Renaming Places: politics, poetics and psychology.- Chapter 4 Decolonising No Man’s land: writing back against the map.- Chapter 5 Making Place: yarning and the protocols of poetic geography.- Chapter 6 Anticipating arrival: migrancy and creative toponymy.- Conclusion: right ways of meeting, their naming and mapping.

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Carter  is Professor of Design (Urbanism) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a distinguished public artist and sound designer. The Indigenous place renaming projects discussed in were delivered through the Aboriginal-owned cultural consultancy, Nyungar Birdiyia, of which he is co-director.