Naming No Man's Land: Postcolonial Toponymies
This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia, the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning, reference and cross-cultural equivalence. He suggests that colonial naming was a form of unnaming, involving the creation of a no man's land designed to forward the colonial agenda of Indigenous cultural erasure. For this reason, postcolonial toponymies should not follow a substitutive logic as this risks reinscribing the previous erasure.
Recognising the 'sense of place' values that accrue to placenames, Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason, to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics. Showing how colonial names represent the geographical unconscious of imperial cartography, he demonstrates the profound (and productive) entanglement of old and new names. Naming No Man's Land argues for a practical, community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure, showing that, when the principle that 'places are made after their stories' is followed, new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies, creativity studies, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, historical ethnography, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, (Australian) Aboriginal studies, and related disciplines.
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