Description
‘Places’ invoke thinking about disciplinary articulations of what counts as political, and by extension, epistemological. In differentiating ‘places’ from ‘spaces’, environmental writer Julian Hoffman (2019 : 12) identifies ‘place’ as a “piece of a whole environment that has been claimed by feelings,” which invokes (re)thinking of disciplinary conceptions of spaces and how they often belie such affective investments. Who/what do we stand to lose in unemotional framings of disciplinary spaces? In this paper, I glean insights on the rearticulation of spaces from the literary genre of magical realism- which is specially hospitable towards the human ability to transform stultifying realities through their emotional dreaming. By reimagining belonging through the lens of emotional-relational humans who inhabit them, I propose magical realist fiction as an important feminist, aesthetic and decolonial method of reading/feeling spaces- the private, public and the international. Searching for emotional texture and affective geography as a critical project of reimagining and indeed, dreaming up political spaces, can become an important method learning “where knowers are situated” in learning “what the purpose of knowledge (and theory) itself is” (Tickner 2011 : 214). By looking at relational understandings of people with places in three books from magical realism, this paper shall also contend with the idea of belonging as a re-mapping of human- space relations.
