ERRITORIA
XTR
Extraterritorial A P O LITI CA L G E O G R A P HY O F CONTEMPORARY FICTION
MATTH EW HART
INTRODUCTION Four Types of Extraterritoriality Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. — COLSO N WHITE HE A D , Z O NE O NE
TH E SOME WH AT F R E E S E A S I’m watching a video of a single-masted sloop moving slowly across the Eastern Mediterranean. Its course is matched by another small vessel. The two boats are joined by more than their common speed and direction. They are tethered by a beam of light, with the sail of the first boat acting as the screen against which the second projects a video (fig. 0.1). The video shows many things. A half-naked man wearing antlers; burning vehicles in a desert landscape; scenes of dancing; portraits of women wearing hijab. Later, I watch another video of a video being projected onto a sail. In this short sequence, a woman wearing black is framed against a blue background. She walks from left to right along what might be a wall, the edge of a stage, a balance beam, or a tightrope. It is hard to tell: the rectangular image of the video projection is imperfectly framed on the triangular mainsail and, in any case, the sloop on which that sail is rigged lies some distance away from our documenting videographer. I can’t work out whether the creases in the video’s blue background mean that the original footage was shot opposite a ruffled curtain or tent wall, or whether the
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FIGURE 0.1
Exterritory Project screening on the boat sails, 2009.
Credit: Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir.
mainsail that’s acting as a screen has started to luff in the wind. The distinction between image and support is blurred. So are the borders between the work, its exhibition, and its documentation. I can’t distinguish between the actions and intentions of artist and curator, curator and documentarian, curatorial team and sailor, sailor and marine environment. Finally, just before the woman reaches the right-hand edge of the sail, she falls or jumps down. We know she does not actually drop into the sea but, for a second, the thought is irresistible. The videos I’m describing are part of Exterritory Project, a curatorial initiative begun in 2009 by Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir, two Israeli artists who in 2011 were awarded a UNESCO prize for fostering cultural dialogue in the Middle East. Sela and Amir’s immediate goal was to find a way to curate artistic events and seminars in the context of the ongoing Palestinian boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.1 In particular, they were frustrated by the difficulty of finding a mutually accessible and agreeable space to show a compilation of video artworks, Wild West, by Arab and Jewish
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artists joined by a common interest in “questions of boundaries” and “hypernational claims.”2 Not wanting to exhibit in Europe or the United States— beyond the boycott zone but distant from their home region—they struck upon the idea of showing Wild West on the free seas. “Exterritorial waters,” they hoped, might serve “as an autonomic area that can bypass laws of territory and can allow at least temporarily the postponement of arbitrary stipulations.” Describing a 2010 event, Sela and Amir suggest that the oceanic “exterritory” might be an appropriate space for “reconciliation meetings” between artists from conflict zones. International waters have long symbolized the possibility of free space. In his famous early work of maritime law, Mare Liberum (1609), Hugo Grotius argues on behalf of the Dutch East India Company that the world’s oceans ought to be open to navigation by all and subject to the jurisdiction of none.3 From this distinction between geographies that are alienable and those that are not comes a fundamental opposition between closed (territorial) and open (extraterritorial) space. This legal distinction is central to a rich history of thinking, artistic and philosophical as well as jurisprudential, about global or transnational spaces that might exist beyond sovereignty or nationhood: geographies, to quote one recent humanistic critic, that give rise to an “extraterritorial imagination” in which the limits of the social and political world are put to the test.4 It’s with such ideas in play that Sela and Amir invited artists, writers, and curators to join them for their 2009 event on the mare liberum of the Mediterranean. In June 2010, they organized a more ambitious miniarmada, exhibiting over fifty artworks in the international waters between Israel and Cyprus. In what has become a kind of signature image of Exterritory Project, both events featured the projection of video works upon the sails of small yachts. 5 This curatorial practice poses an aesthetic question: How might the seas operate as an exhibition space? In exhibiting at sea, the curators transfer artworks into new contexts, creating an event somewhere between traveling exhibition, site-specific happening, and institutional critique. But the curators’ own comments about Exterritory Project also emphasize the continuity between the aesthetic qualities of maritime space and their own political commitments: “What kinds of images ‘benefit’ from
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being unstable?” they ask. “What types of images can survive a space in which borders are constantly changing?”6 This book is about artistic and literary works set in and about extraterritorial zones. It is about the condition that Gerhard Richter defines, in appropriately shifty terms, as “existing in a territory beyond territory, belonging to a territory while at the same time being ‘extra’ or superfluous to it.” 7 The images projected in the first Exterritory Project events certainly demonstrate such instability. But this is not because international waters exist simply beyond the national state and its laws, which is another way of saying that extraterritoriality is not, in fact, the antithesis of territorial power. In reality, the complicated “international” status of the open oceans proves one of the central points of this book: that what we think of as “global” space is the product of agreements, conflicts, and compromises between national states. By studying the art and literature of the extraterritorial we can better understand how the putatively global culture of the twenty-first century occupies a political geography that is only located outside borders, states, and nations by being simultaneously within them. This is pretty abstract stuff, so let’s get back to the Mediterranean. Sela and Amir’s homology between “autonomic” images and free ocean spaces requires that they simplify the real complexities of maritime law. As Amir put it in an interview with Art Dubai, Exterritory Project depends on an idea of the ocean as a heterotopic zone that “exists outside a place” and possesses “the power to delay and neutralise the whole power-relations present in a culture.”8 But the seas in which Exterritory Project sails are the same ones in which on 31 May 2010 the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) boarded and seized a Free Gaza Movement aid flotilla: a civilian convoy, at that point in international waters seventy-two nautical miles from land, that was attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.9 In that incident, the freedoms of navigation enshrined in the Law of the Sea were trumped by the Israeli state’s unilateral projection of power beyond its territorial waters. In this event, rather than witnessing the neutralization or suspension of political sovereignty within maritime space, what people observed was a state’s unilateral decision to project its power beyond borders at the expense of a
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multilateral agreement among all states to rescind jurisdictional claims over areas of salt water a long way from land. This problem is hardly specific to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, or to violent conflict in general. This is because, even when navies aren’t seizing civilian vessels in international waters, the oceans of the world are not divided nicely between unfree and free, national and international.10 A recent European Parliament report comments that maritime law has historically embodied “a constant tension between tendencies in favour of freedom and those in favour of exclusivity”; it also worries that the politics of the present have been “dominated by positions that favour exclusive rights” and by the increasing geographical extension of state sovereignty.11 The seas aren’t so free— and perhaps they never were. Grotius’s foundational legal account of the open seas in Mare Liberum was, after all, moderated by his later claim, in On the Law of War and Peace (1625), that territorial claims to oceanic space may be made through “the instrumentality of person if, for example, a fleet, which is an army afloat, is stationed at some point of the sea.”12 Maritime law represents an uneasy compromise between open and closed kinds of legal space: the territorial seas extend twelve miles from most coastlines, though plenty of exceptions hold for geographies in which maximal territorial claims would result in conflicting or overlapping borders. And so, to repeat: exterritoriality and territoriality are not opposites—or, if they are, they’re the kind of opposites that attract. If every state with a Mediterranean coastline were to make the maximum jurisdictional claims technically allowed under international law, that sea would contain no “free” space at all.13 As it is, the friendly and rivalrous states around the Middle Sea have seen fit to negotiate with one another so as to keep open the Mediterranean’s international waters. In this, they are no doubt encouraged by other states from other regions, some of them with powerful military forces and strong desires to navigate strategic corridors such as the Suez Canal and Black Sea; by nonstate actors such as fishing, energy, and logistics companies; and by their own strategic and ideological commitments to transnational institutions and international law. To exercise sovereignty within
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an international system means choosing when and how to refrain from claiming territorial jurisdiction as well as deciding to assert it. There is no zero-sum relation between political power and its territorial expression. A primary motivation behind Extraterritorial is the conviction that artists, authors, and academics would benefit from a more complex historical and theoretical understanding of the political geography in which we live. Over the last few decades, it has become a kind of academic orthodoxy to say that studying contemporary culture means taking a global or transnational perspective, even to say that twenty-first-century artworks are “global” in some intrinsic sense.14 It doesn’t follow from this that academic critics have done with particular detail; few would deny the centrality of local, regional, and national expertise to any scholarly sort of cultural criticism.15 Yet it’s now hard to imagine a serious account of twenty-first-century art and literature that would not grapple with, even if it did not begin from, the question of the global. That might mean, as in book history or literary sociology, attending to the absorption of publishing and book retail within a small group of vertically integrated transnational media corporations— a development that has led not to the homogenization of cultural life, but to increased specialization and diversification.16 Or, in art history, it might mean the way Miwon Kwon conceives of the contemporary arts as an affective and epistemological means through which we might grasp the “contemporaneity of histories from around the world” as a “disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon, integral to the understanding of the present (as a whole).”17 Or it might mean, as scholars have been arguing about for years now, supplementing the study of national and regional literatures with global or world literatures.18 In sum, the field is rife with planetary scales and ambitions. And yet our globalizing critical tool kit remains inadequate for the interpretation of individual texts and the analysis of culture at scale. The concept and practice of extraterritoriality represent possible solutions to such inadequacy. In the pages to follow, I show how critics of contemporary art and literature have neglected the role played by the state in the production of international and transnational space. They have done so, in part, because
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of a “sovereignty-territory ideal” in which state and nation are identified with a fetishized form of territorial authority, both broadly cultural and more narrowly political. As a result, almost any crack or gradation in a state’s political geography gets misrepresented as a crisis in its very being or purpose.19 The truth, however, is that state sovereignty helps produce international and transnational relations—and it’s this truth that the art and literature of the extraterritorial helps us to see.
A N A R GU ME N T OF TH R E E PA RT S Extraterritorial makes three interlinked claims, the first literary-critical, the second broadly historical, and the third conceptual. 1. The contemporary novel mediates human geographic experience, with extraterritorial spaces giving rise to extraterritorial forms. My first argument centers on the proposition that geography is not just a topic (topos) of the novel but an active force that shapes it from within. As Robert Tally has explored, there is a long tradition of thinking about writers— especially writers in narrative genres—as akin to cartographers. “Like the mapmaker,” Tally explains, “the writer must survey territory, determining which features of a given landscape to include, to emphasize, or to diminish. . . . The writer must establish the scale and the shape, no less of the narrative than of the places in it . . . [and] must determine the degree to which a given representation of a place refers to any ‘real’ place in the geo- graphical world.”20 But texts are more than the sum of their makers’ cartographic efforts. Because readers inhabit real and imagined geographies—cities of the mind, as well as places of everyday lives—they bring to the texts they read a wide array of spatial memories and experiences. The real spaces often represented in texts also possess histories that are irreducible to any one telling or evocation. Finally, the social, economic, and, as this book studies in particular, political dimensions of geographic
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experience exert pressures and set limits upon the forms and themes of artistic production in the present. For all these reasons, critical readers attuned to geography must, as Tally has it, develop “a form of reading that focuses attention on space and spatiality in the texts under consideration. . . . [but that also pays] attention to the changing spatial or geographical formations that affect literary and cultural productions.”21 There is no literary geography that is not also a materialist literary history. Influenced by such literary-geographic criticism, Extraterritorial focuses on the aesthetic representation of spaces such as airports, consular zones, freeports, detention camps, gated communities, and the oceans. These spaces have one central thing in common: within them, the puncturing and graduation of territorial sovereignty doesn’t erase state power but extends it throughout putatively “global” space. Through discussions of writing by contemporary novelists as different as China Miéville and Hilary Mantel, as well as selected developments within the contemporary arts more broadly, the following chapters explore how extraterritorial geographies shape cultural objects in large and small ways. In chapter 5, for instance, we ask why all of J. G. Ballard’s late fictions are set in the same kind of urban enclave—and why he insists that every part of his large and diverse oeuvre ought to be understood as recreating the extraterritorial International Settlement of Shanghai. But extraterritoriality also has crucial effects at the micro level of novelistic language, form, and genre. For that reason, chapter 3 analyzes the temporalizing diction of Emily St. John Mandel’s postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014), where events are repeatedly described in terms of distance in time from the collapse of our modern systems of international travel and telecommunications. And it links that linguistic pattern to a broader trend within the postapocalyptic genre, in which an increasing number of such novels are set in an archipelagic geography in which characters move uneasily between isolated settlements set in lawless and ungoverned space. Extraterritoriality is, in this way, sometimes the overt subject of the novels studied in this book. But extraterritoriality is also part of the deep symbolic architecture of novels that ostensibly have nothing to do with that topic. In such instances, it emerges as the subject not of the novel’s story
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but of its forms. The future of contemporary fiction is neither “global” nor “national,” my analyses suggest, but trending extraterritorial. As this last claim suggests, however, this book’s literary-critical argument is hollow without an underlying historical conjecture: 2. The political geography of twenty-first-century life is increasingly extraterritorial. In arguing thus, Extraterritorial draws on much work in spatial theory and political geography. Felicity D. Scott, for instance, has recently argued that post-1960s architectural space might be described in terms of the proliferation of “outlaw territories,” including “semi-utopian ‘open ends’ for social experimentation,” as well as sites about which few people would have utopian aspirations, including “refugee, detention, and resettlement camps” as well as “company headquarters and social scientific laboratories.”22 More broadly, I draw on the work of architectural and spatial theorist Eyal Weizman, who defines any human-occupied or -influenced space as a “political plastic” (or “politics in matter”) that can be considered “a map of the relation between all the forces that shaped it.”23 More than providing one useful way to think of rural, urban, and other spaces as intrinsically politicized, Weizman also provides evidence for the claim that the political plastic of contemporary life is taking extraterritorial shape. Writing with Ines Gleisman and Anselm Franke, he argues that extraterritoriality underlies and explains a pervasive condition in which we experience “contemporary political space” in general as having been “shattered.”24 Far from surfing in a borderless world of global flows, or sitting securely in a bounded and grounded sovereign territory, the twenty-first-century political subject is, they claim, forced to inhabit and traverse “discontinuous territorial fragments set-apart and fortified by makeshift barriers, temporary boundaries, or invisible security apparatuses. . . . a territorial patchwork of introvert enclaves located side by side, each within the other, simultaneously and in unprecedented proximities” (n.p.). This book does not argue that extraterritoriality is the determinative framework for understanding the present; its chapters do, however, provide evidence for the sorts of empirical claims made by Scott and Weizman. An important supplementary part of that project, therefore, is the argument
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ventured in chapter 1 but implicit throughout this book: that the so-called Westphalian nation-state that developed in early modern Europe has been afforded a falsely normative character in much cultural and political theory about the state and globalization. By focusing on extraterritoriality, we can better understand globalization as the long historical project of national institutions and elites. But what is extraterritoriality, anyway? This definitional question is the main subject of this introduction and is best explained by my third and final major claim: 3. Extraterritoriality is constituted by the interrelation between two antithetical pairs: open/closed and spatial/personal. To some writers and artists, such as Sela and Amir, extraterritoriality can designate openness or freedom; to others, as we shall see, it signifies imprisonment or subjugation. Some of us carry extraterritoriality with us as an aspect of our persons; others travel into and out of extraterritorial geographies. It is this fundamental dynamism that makes an extraterritorial zone like an embassy such a useful kind of space: an open door to some and a walled fortress to others, a piece of foreign space, but one rooted in the personal inviolability of an ambassador. Extraterritoriality is not one thing. It is a set of practices through which states govern populations by punching holes in their own political plastic, by stretching out into spaces formally governed by others, or by pooling and sharing jurisdictions and competencies. It denotes how states facilitate the production of international spaces by relaxing their authority over territory, preferring instead to claim sovereignty over persons. And, for sure, “extraterritorial” sometimes describes situations in which formal or effective territorial control breaks down. For some scholars, extraterritoriality is a feature of ubiquitous contemporary phenomena such as the internet, dispersed across actual and virtual space, but still also subject to localized “structural forces.”25 For others, its meanings are embodied by exceptional locations such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-9/11 “black sites” in Poland and Lithuania, in which terrorist suspects were tortured in extralegal hells.26 Finally, for others still, “extraterritorial” evokes the possibility of wilderness or outer
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space geographies inhospitable to human settlement and yet vulnerable to our actions.27 By attending to the extraterritorial as a contradictory idea and complex historical practice, this book moves beyond zero-sum accounts of global culture, in which every growth or innovation of a transnational kind is seen as an inevitable net loss for state or nation— and every assertion of state power is seen as the victory of “real” citizens or “real” communities against the fever dreams of “globalists.” Along the way, this book explains what the many different kinds of extraterritorial zone and experience have in common. Although previous writers on this subject have contributed much to the theory and history of extraterritoriality, they have largely done so from within aesthetic and disciplinary silos, with the result that they’ve been able to avoid having to reconcile the contradictory aspects of extraterritorial space and personhood.28 This book will bring together, but not wholly synthesize, those disjunct parts. Ultimately, it is the antithetical character of the extraterritorial that explains why it has become such a powerful figure for contemporary writers and artists, who delight in the way it confounds the boundaries between foreign and familiar, fixed and free, person and place. By testing these three theses, Extraterritorial develops a historical theory of extraterritorial space, elaborates the aesthetic forms that history takes, and argues that we can understand the national and global dimensions of contemporary culture more completely by studying its extraterritorial aspect. That process of understanding begins by more fully developing my last thesis, about the antithetical character of extraterritoriality.
FOUR TY PE S OF E X TR ATE R R IT O RIA L IT Y As we’ve seen, the extraterritorial can be invested with the power to liberate. But what then of a place like the United States’ military detention facility at
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Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which has been rightly described as an “extraterritorial space” that, because it is neither fully within nor without the United States, enables the “suspension of law” as “a permanent technique of rule”?29 In Exterritory Project, artists carve out for themselves a space of temporary relief from occupation and armed struggle; in Guantánamo, men are tortured and detained without trial or hope of release. Should one resist the extraterritorial, or run into it? The answer is neither. There is no question that we ought to resist what is happening in Guantánamo Bay. But that’s not because it’s an extraterritorial zone; it’s because torture and indefinite detention are crimes against humanity. But neither is extraterritoriality an actor’s category, possessing no fundamental qualities. Rather, the tension between free and unfree values is basic to extraterritoriality. Extraterritoriality is neither free nor unfree, but defined by the opposition between the values open and closed. Next, to open/closed we must add another such pairing, which this time identifies the relationship between two different sorts of extraterritorial object: person and space. Sometimes extraterritoriality is a property of individual people, in the sense that it inheres in someone’s legal and political personhood. 30 Consider a member of a UN diplomatic mission in New York. Wherever that person travels or abides, she is, by virtue of the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, immune from the domestic law of the United States. And this is the case even though neither her home country nor the United Nations make any legal or political claim to the ground beneath her feet.31 Such a person can wander about New York while always being somehow “at home,” displaced out of territorial space into an alternate jurisdictional and political universe, exactly the size of her body. In what follows, we’ll call this quality extraterritoriality of person. But, in other instances, extraterritoriality can be understood as a property of space itself, such that most everyone who enters an extraterritorial zone crosses into a new jurisdictional system or political regime. Imagine now that you’re a tourist visiting UN headquarters. The headquarters district is
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an extraterritorial space with respect to the United States, legally “inviolable” and under the “control and authority” of the UN Secretary General and General Assembly. 32 Article 3, Section 8, of the 1947 Headquarters Agreement gives the United Nations the power to “make regulations . . . necessary for the full operations of its functions” and to refuse to apply any US law inconsistent with those regulations. The complication, however, is that, just as our foreign diplomat friend is, when walking home through Manhattan, say, at once immune from US law and still very much within US territory, so is the headquarters district’s inviolability hardly absolute. For instance, the Headquarters Agreement’s lines about setting aside US laws immediately follow two earlier clauses in which the headquarters district is described as otherwise subject to the full range of federal, New York State, and New York City laws, and in which people within the district (at least, those people not protected by personal diplomatic immunities) are placed under the jurisdiction of the relevant US courts.33 The United Nations has the power to refuse persons entry to the headquarters district, and to expel them from its premises; but it has neither control over its own external security nor the ability to sell or otherwise dispose of the land on which its various buildings sit.34 The district is thus outside the United States for certain legal and political purposes, but it is never wholly beyond the de jure and de facto power of municipal, state, and federal courts and government agencies. In extraterritorial zones, the geography of power is divisible, graduated, and disaggregated, but rarely is that power wholly canceled and rarely is it cleanly transferred, as if flipped completely from one nation to another. Just as the alternate political valences of the extraterritorial often overlap, so is there often no wall between its personal and spatial aspects. Because it raises questions about who has authority over what people in which locations, the idea of an extraterritorial person makes sense only if the world is already a kind of political multiverse, made up of many territories, and not a universe in which a single source of authority prevails everywhere.35 In a perpetual and universal empire, there are neither exiles nor ambassadors. But in a world of many states, in which the power of one
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country depends in part on its citizens’ ability to move within another, extraterritoriality of person becomes inextricable from extraterritoriality of place. In the same vein, though flowing in the other direction, extraterritoriality of place can be produced by the actions of extraterritorial persons. For example, in Renaissance Europe, the consular immunities initially restricted to diplomatic ambassadors gradually became a property held in common by the ambassador’s household, beginning with his family and servants but eventually extending to the physical space of the consular dwelling.36 More broadly, any time a person moves within political or jurisdictional space, she invites the possibility of a change in her relation to other people, to various collectives or institutions, or to her own past. In the wake of World War II, the experience of exile led the Jewish intellectual Siegfried Kracauer to adopt the language of extraterritoriality to evoke how, first, the stripping of his citizenship rights in Germany and, later, his forced migration to France and the United States left him feeling personally adrift in space and time.37 Not all such experiences involve the formal ascription of extraterritorial personhood, or a physical movement across a space like a consular zone. But even when “extraterritorial” is more metaphor than literal fact— and this book is full of instances in which authors and artists transpose historical facts into metaphorical figures—we witness the same overlapping and overdetermination of qualities of place and person. The word “extraterritorial” was imported to English almost unchanged from juridical Latin. The OED gives its etymology quite simply: “Modern Latin phrase extrā territōrium outside the territory.” The dictionary’s first quoted example comes from Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace, which refers to the legal fiction through which an ambassador might be present in one country but, in the eyes of the law, be presumed never to have left the state he represents.38 Ambassadorial or consular inviolability is a primary example of an extraterritoriality of person—but one that is, from the start, inexplicable without the prior spatial division of the globe on political lines. Thus, although Barbara Woodward, the current British ambassador to China, might be attending a trade fair in Chengdu, hundreds of miles from her embassy in Beijing, for the purposes of law she remains
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forever as if outside Chinese territory, in a transparent and portable bubble of Englishness.39 An extraterritorial person is not simply located outside a territory: she is poised between places and potencies, between responsibilities to host and sovereign, at once in a free legal space and still subject to the border-hopping reach of her political masters. It will be important, in the next chapter, to ask what it means to belong to a territory, rather than to just be on some piece of land. For now, we should merely note that extraterritoriality is not limited to ambassadors. For instance, another way of defining that term is as the “operation of laws upon persons existing beyond the limits of the enacting state or nation but who are still amenable to its laws.” 40 In this definition, states extend their jurisdiction spatially, across seas and over borders, but they do so only so as to claim authority over certain individual persons or groups of persons. This kind of extraterritoriality applies to relatively uncontroversial legal instruments, such as reciprocal extradition treaties that prevent defendants escaping from justice in one country by fleeing to another; but it also covers the novel ways in which national legislatures have increasingly extended their courts’ jurisdictions overseas. Thus, since 2004 US government employees have come under federal or military law while serving abroad—and not only diplomats and soldiers, but also civilian contractors employed by private companies.41 In response to criminal and strategic threats that exceed national boundaries, countries such as the United Kingdom have expanded the number and nature of the unilateral jurisdictional claims they make over their nationals abroad. The Terrorism Act 2000, for instance, makes it an offense for a British person to incite someone to commit a terrorist act overseas, even providing for the unusual circumstance in which that act would be illegal in the United Kingdom but lawful in the country in which it’s actually performed.42 Likewise the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which gives the United States the ability to prosecute even non-US persons or corporations for business practices that are illegal in the United States but might not be in the place they take place.43 In such legislation, the spatial extension of state power rests upon the idea that political space is divisible not just by borders and buildings, but by making distinctions at the level of the person.
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Matthew Hart reveals extraterritoriality’s centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction. Discussing writers such as Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, Amitav Ghosh, Chang-rae Lee, Hilary Mantel, and China Miéville, as well as artists including Hito Steyerl and Mark Wallinger, Extraterritorial presents a new theory of literature that explains what happens when dreams of an open, connected world confront the reality of mobile, elastic, and tenacious borders. “A brilliantly original study of the global culture of our times and the extraterritorial space that it occupies, a space at the same time outside nations and states and within them. Hart offers a powerful argument for taking seriously how political geography is not just a topic for literature but also a force that shapes it from within. A provocative and convincing work both of theory and criticism.” A DA M TO O Z E, author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World “A fascinating book about why the idea of being extraterritorial has come to preoccupy writers and artists and a rejoinder to celebrations of the cosmopolitan intellect or the ostensible age of postnational globalization. Hart highlights the aesthetic appeal and confusion arising from extraterritoriality’s mixture of loosening and constraint, of being outside but also within, in spaces where political determination is at once constant and violable.” S A R A H B R O U I L L E T TE, author of UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary “This is an important study of the contemporary condition where people find themselves in weird enclaves of territory, strange folds of legality, or passing through those transitional pockets of airports, detention camps, freeports, or gated communities that increasingly define existence. Hart makes a compelling argument that this condition is tied to the shifting forms and genres of the contemporary novel. An essential read.” R O G E R L U C K H U R ST, author of Corridors: Passages of Modernity “Hart’s timely book zeroes in on fundamental tensions between sovereignty and territoriality that have only become more urgent in the current moment of crisis. Mining contemporary novels and works of art for insights into political geography, Hart expertly reveals the overlapping jurisdictions and mixed regimes of power that define our world. Extraterritorial offers a lively and engaging mix of theoretical speculation, historical thinking, and sophisticated cultural analysis.” M I C H A E L R OTH B E R G, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators M AT TH E W H A RT is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Poetry (2010). P R I N T ED I N T H E U. S. A .
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee
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