Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures(48 Cross/Cultures)

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 Hooeg; Hugh Hood; Janette Turner Hospital; James Houston; Dany Laferriere; 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.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION 1. Jamie S. SCOTT: “Mapping the Sacred Across Post-Colonial Literatures” PART I LAND, RELIGION AND LITERATURE AFTER BRITAIN IRELAND 2. Brian ROBINSON: “Negotiations: Religion, Landscape and the Post-Colonial Moment in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney” CANADA 3. Dorothy LANE: “The Dominion Project: Strategies for Political and Religious Colonization in Canadian Settler Writing” 4. Barbara PELL: “National Place as Theological Space in Hugh Hood’s Novels” 5. William CLOSSON: “ ‘A Land Beyond Words’: Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers” AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND 6. Dorothy LANE: “ ‘Deliver Their Land from Error’s Chain’: Conversion, Convictism and Captivity in Australian Fiction” 7. Fiona COYLE: “A Third Space? Post-Colonial Australia and the Fractal Landscape in Janette Turner Hospital's The Last Magician and Oyster” 8. Trevor JAMES: “ ‘Pitched at the Farthest Edge’: Religious Presence and the Landscape in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry” THE CARIBBEAN 9. Jocelyn MOODY: “Unsentimental Journeys: Christian Landscapes of Slavery” 10. Victoria CARCHIDI: “ ‘Heaven is a Green Place’: Varieties of Spiritual Landscape in Caribbean Literature” 11. Yvette CHRISTIANSE: “ ‘Monstrous Prodigy’: The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Derek Walcott’s Poetry” AFRICA 12. Trevor JAMES: “Theology of Landscape and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between” 13. Mary HARVAN: “The Gods of the Delta: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Literature of the Ogoni Struggle” 14. John HAWLEY: “Levels of National Engagement in Ibrahim Tahir's The Last Imam” 15. Brenda COOPER: “Landscapes, Forests and Borders within the West African Global Village” INDIA AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA 16. Clara JOSEPH: “The Hindu Mother's Space in Nayantara Sahgal's Mistaken Identity” 17. Chelva KANAGANAYAKAM: “Charting a Secular Ganges: Revisiting R.K. Narayan's Malgudi and 'Little India' in the Malaysian Fiction of K.S. Maniam and Lee Kok Liang” PART II SACRED LANDSCAPES AND POSTCOLONIALITY ACROSS INTERNATIONAL LITERATURES 18. Pierre DESLAURIERS: “African Magico-Medicine at Home and Abroad: Keeping and Diffusing Haitian Religious Traditions in a Neo-Colonial Setting: The Fiction of Dany Laferrière and Russell Banks” 19. Miriyam GLAZER: “ ‘In the Language That Women Who Live in the Land Know / But Men Who Are Born Here Do Not Speak': Language, Gender and Eretz Yisrael in the Poetry of Chava Pinchas-Cohen” 20. Amila BUTUROVIC: “ ‘A Word about Land,’ ‘A Word about Sky’: The Sacred Landscapes of Bosnian History in Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper” 21. Ila GOODY: “Lethal Space: Post-Colonial Environment as Spatial Extinction in Contemporary Writings of the Sub-Arctic North” 22. Joe SHERIDAN: “ ‘'When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came’: Post-Colonial Theory and Native American Lessons of Place” AFTERWORD 23. Gareth GRIFFITHS: “Post-Coloniality, Religion, Geography: Keeping Our Feet on the Ground and Our Heads Up”

About the Author :
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).

Review :
”Mapping the Sacred is an important resource for academicians in a range of fields. It embraces a range of geographical locations and its expansive overview is likely to address some material that is unfamiliar, and to create a wider readership for the works cited and discussed. The book could also be of interest to a well-read general public hoping to remain at the cutting edge of fields engaging society and culture. The collection should succeed in generating further interest in a topic that it delineates persuasively, advancing the important message that inter-disciplinary work of this kind is essential and has contemporary relevance.” in: IMPERIUM, Vol. III, Spring 2002
“…long-awaited and exciting new volume…” in: Literature and Theology, Vol. 17, No. 2 June 2003
“…this is a text that anyone interested in contemporary literature and religion should explore.” in: Religious Studies Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2003