Publisher's Synopsis
The contributors to the collection of essays in this volume raised a set of questions that are indirectly shaped by the defining issues of these days, such as the emerging network of world cities, an increasingly globalised economy, new conceptualisations and also practices of empire, and the diasporas of migrant and deterritorialised peoples. They address the above scenarios with varying degrees of directness but consistently with a heightened sense of place, with renewed curiosity toward those intersections where historical, national, and global concerns merge with local standpoints. The outcome is a geocritical 'extended site'. Each of the authors has chosen a site that especially interested them and then proceeded to work it within the referential boundaries suggested and yet problematised by the volume's subtitle. While each of these admittedly porous categories already assumes a set of established, as well as contested functions, the specific aim here was to assemble and juxtapose them in new relations the better to reconceptualise them.
