Extraterritorial

A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction

Matthew Hart (Columbia University)

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English

Columbia University Press
25 August 2020

Literary theory; Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Social groups; Human geography

"The future of fiction is neither global nor national. Instead, Matthew Hart argues, it is trending extraterritorial. Extraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. They cut across geography and history but do not point the way to a borderless new world. They range from the United Nations headquarters and international waters to CIA black sites and the departure zones at international airports. The political geography of the present, Hart shows, has come to resemble a patchwork of such spaces.

Hart reveals extraterritoriality's centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction. He shows how extraterritorial fictions expose the way states construct ""global"" space in their own interests. Extraterritorial novels teach us not to mistake cracks or gradations in political geography for a crisis of the state. Hart demonstrates how the unstable character of many twenty-first-century aesthetic forms can be traced to the increasingly extraterritorial nature of contemporary political geography. Discussing writers such as Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, Amitav Ghosh, Chang-rae Lee, Hilary Mantel, and China Miéville, as well as artists like Hito Steyerl and Mark Wallinger, Hart combines lively critical readings of contemporary novels with historical and theoretical discussions about sovereignty, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. Extraterritorial presents a new theory of literature that explains what happens when dreams of an open, connected world confront the reality of mobile, elastic, and tenacious borders."

By: Matthew Hart (Columbia University)
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231188395
ISBN 10: 0231188390
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 25 August 2020
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Matthew Hart is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Poetry (2010).

Reviews for Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction

Extraterritorial is a brilliantly original study of the global culture of our times and the extraterritorial space that it occupies, a space at one and the same time outside nations and states and within them. Hart offers a powerful argument for taking seriously how political geography is not just a topic for literature but a force that shapes it from within. Indispensable for thinking the global culture of our times. A provocative and convincing work both of theory and criticism. -- Adam Tooze, author of <i>Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World</i>