Mapping the Sacred : Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures

Interweaving the interpretative methods of religious studies, literary criticism and cultural geography, the essays in this volume focus on issues associated with the representation of place and space in the writing and reading of the postcolonial. The collection charts the ways in which contemporary writers extend and deepen our awareness of the ambiguities of economic, social and political relations implicated in “sacred space” - the sense of spiritual significance associated with those concrete locations in which adherents of different religious traditions, past and present, maintain a ritual sense of the sanctity of life and its cycles. Part I, “Land, Religion and Literature after Britain,” explores how postcolonial writers dramatize the contested processes of colonization, resistance and decolonization by which lands and landscapes may be viewed as now sacred, now desacralized, now resacralized. Part II, “Sacred Landscapes and Postcoloniality across International Literatures,” draws upon postcolonial theory to inquire into how contemporary fiction, drama and poetry represent themes of divine dispensation, dispossession and reclamation in regions as diverse as Haiti, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Arctic, and the North American frontier. A critical “Afterword” considers the implications of such multi-disciplinary approaches to postcolonial literatures for present and future research in the field. Writers discussed in the essays include Russell Banks; James K. Baxter; Ursula Bethell; Erna Brodber; Marcus Clarke; Allen Curnow; Edwidge Danticat; Mak Dizdar; Sara Jeannette Duncan; Zee Edgell; “Grey Owl”; Haruki Murakami; Seamus Heaney; Peter Høeg; Hugh Hood; Janette Turner Hospital; James Houston; Dany Laferrière; B. Kojo Laing; Lee Kok Liang; K.S. Maniam; Mudrooroo; R.K. Narayan; Ngugi wa Thiong'o; Ben Okri; Chava Pinchas-Cohen; Mary Prince; Nancy Prince; Nayantara Sahgal; Ken Saro-Wiwa; Ibrahim Tahir; Amos Tutuola; W.D. Valgardson; Derek Walcott; and Rudy Wiebe. Maps accompany almost every essay.

JAMIE S. SCOTT received his PhD in Religion and Literature from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and he now teaches in the Division of Humanities and in the Graduate Programmes in English and Geography at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Christian and Tyrants: The Prison Testimonies of Boethius, Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1995) and edited the Cross/Cultures volume 'And the Birds Began to Sing': Religion and Literature in Post-Colonial Cultures (1996). PAUL SIMPSON-HOUSLEY received his PhD in Geography from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and he now teaches in the Department of Geography at York University, Toronto, Ontario. He has also taught at universities in Quebec, Saskatchewan and Chile. Geography and Literature and human perceptions of natural hazards are his main areas of research. His books include The Arctic: Enigmas and Myths (1996) and Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, Metaphor (1992).