Space, Place

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Space, Place Home
EDU1142
Culture Identity

• Week 9
• Prepared by Jon Austin

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Basic Premises

• Space is different from Place
• Place is crucial to a sense of belonging
• Belonging evokes loyalty to a place
• Some places are particularly significant
• Home is one of those places of significance

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Main ideas about Home

• Home is a central place in identity formation
• Home is both a physical an imaginary
  (psychological?) place
• Home mediates the development of other axes of
  identity
• Home belonging are crucial aspects of national
  identity

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Space cf Place
Space suggests little that is tangible or
specific (Yencken) Outer space indeterminate,
unknown Place Immediate, known, lived We move
through space we stop in are directly involved
with places
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Geography as a discipline of the social imaginary

• Physical features continent
• Cultural features Asia Europe
• National identities

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Place

• Space that has been invested with meaning
• Formed out of particular social relations
  interacting at location
• ? identities of place always unfixed, dynamic
• Past is no more fixed than present
• No essentialised past
• bell hooks importance of the struggle of
  memory against forgetting in constituting placed
  identities.
• not nostalgic yearning but illuminating
  transformative remembering

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Place

• Social relations constituting a place stretch
  beyond its borders
• Disorientation ? search for placed identities
  for placeless times (Robins)
• ? emphasis on exclusive localisms, tightly
  bounded place-identities
• new enclosures enclaves to separate self from
  others.

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Anxieties of Place

• Every place undergoing realignment
• trans as critical signifier
• Flows investment, culture, human
• Boundaries borders
• Time-space compression (Massey)
• Disorientation, fragmentation of local cultures
  loss of sense of place
• the simultaneous presence of everywhere in the
  place you are standing

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Exploring Home
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What is Home?

• Defining characteristics
• House becomes Home when we invest it with our
  personal meanings associations

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Where is Home?

• Past?
• Present?
• Here?
• There?
• Diaspora
• Refugee / resettlement camps
• Hansonism simultaneous erasure of Asian
  Aboriginal claims to home in favour of white
  settler subjectivities

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Home as a Special Place

• Imaginary space between here there (hybrid
  where we come from where we are)
• Constructs a We as well as a discursive right
  to a space
• Test site for Belonging Foreignness
• Exclusionary, territorialising, xenophobic
• OR
• A utopian ideal need to believe in a place of
  shelter where we belong are safe

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Australia as Home
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(National) Home as Physical Space
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Home as a Complex Place

• View of place-called-home as stable unambiguous
  not supportable
• Complex locations where different, conflicting
  (?) communities intersect
• Reverse invasion encounter with exotic
  alien now instantaneous immediate (periphery
  inhabits the core)
• Protective filters of time space have
  disappeared
• Home as Meeting Places even original
  inhabitants usually came from somewhere else
  (Massey)

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Australia as Imaginary Space

• an alluring enigma in the European imagination
  (Arthur)
• Colonisation playing out colonial drama already
  rehearsed on the stage of European imagination

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The Antipodes

• Antipodal opposite footed
• Something entirely different from known world
• A space of Other
• Great Southern continent 5th Century BC Greek
  imagination
• Pythagoras balance northern landmass
• Spur to European colonial search
• A border / boundary region of difference
• Point of distinction between old world new
• Equator dividing line between sanity / madness

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Antipodal Ambivalences

• Antipodes as Hell-on-Earth
• Mythical monsters, hermaphrodites, giants
• Antipodes as Earthly Paradise
• 12th century universality of Garden of Eden
  narrative
• To the East, physically isolated
• Last plausible location the Antipodes

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Australia as Place

• Terra australis incognito
• (Unknown Southern Land)
• Terra nullius
• (Empty Land)
• Alien landscape
• Hedonistic space (beach/island)
• Down under