Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Dominika Ferens, Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, and Marcin Tereszewski: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

The recent collected volume Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands (2024) was edited by Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Dominika Ferens, Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, and Marcin Tereszewski, English and American studies scholars from the University of Wrocław. The book comprises 14 chapters by scholars from various fields related to literary, cultural and media studies. They address cultural texts similarly diverse in medium, form, and geographic point of reference, but united in their engagement with hinterlands. The volume opens with an informative introduction written by the editors, who lay out the four-part structure of the book and reflect on the current state of the study of the “hinterland” (1–22). Here, as in the articles that follow, it emerges as a multifarious concept that proves hard to reduce to any one meaning; equally, it produces and plays out in global spaces that often defy clear-cut definitions and binaries like urban and rural or center and periphery, terms that have traditionally cohered “hinterlands” as secondary, dependent (conceptual) spaces.

The three chapters of the volume’s first part center around the connection of hinterlands to “movement and transit” (23). Dominika Ferens opens with her text on the Japanese-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (25–38), which constructs a transnational hinterland for Los Angeles, but surprisingly locates it not in the city’s immediate vicinity but across borders, in near-by Mexico and far-away South-East Asia. S. U. Kriegel’s article “Mapping Identity and Memory in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow” follows, discussing the hinterland as a space or practice in post-Apartheid South-African literature (39–51). We move back to present-day US hinterlands, this time in film, in the next contribution with Zofia Kolbuszewska’s article on the movies Paterson and Nomadland (52–64), staged as a “no-place” and “site of weak resistance” against postindustrial capitalism’s dispossessions.

The second part of the collected volume addresses hinterlands as heterotopias: Marta Komsta’s “Spaces of Identity in Morocco: Maureen F. McHugh’s Nekropolis” (67–81) reads a Moroccan cemetery as a heterotopic haven. Izabela Poręba’s chapter discusses the construction of postcolonial hinterlands in two Haitian novels centered in part on the capital Port-au-Prince (83–4). The following article by Barbara Klonowska, “Haven, Rebellion, Revelation: Australian Hinterlands as Heterotopias in Peter Carey’s Novels” (98–110) demonstrates diachronically how Australian hinterlands, in the words of the editors, “function as spaces that have the power to expose the repressed and traumatic Australian past of racial violence” (12). Marcin Tereszewski next engages with hinterlands as heterotopias within (fictional) cities, breaking with the traditional equation of hinterlands with spaces beyond the center in a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s novels High-Rise and Concrete Island (111–23). The literary construction of California as a site of “post-anthropocentric hinterlands” in two recent novels by Susan Straight features in this section’s final chapter by Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice (124–35). Straight’s texts populate California’s urban/rural spaces with characters that blur the line between human and non-human, constructing transgressive models of a sustainable future within more-than-human communities.

The third part of the book discusses hinterlands in terms of nostalgia, memory and movements of return. In literary texts originating from Asia, India and Great Britain, these hinterlands become reinterpreted as sites of renewal, and serve as vehicles of imagining societal regeneration through the (re)turn to an imagined past. Raffael Weger analyzes the identity constructions of Han-Chinese urban intellectuals in the process of travel to the country’s hinterlands in two works of autofiction, Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Ma Jian’s Red Dust (139–56). The next chapter by S. M. Mithuna and Maya Vinai analyzes the “social imaginary” of a particular hinterland in India, the so-called “colony” of “Chenkalchoola” (161), a slum in the South-Indian state of Kerala, in the autobiography of one of its dwellers (157–73). Paulina Pająk’s final chapter in this section, “Neither Peace nor Haven: Sussex as Virginia Woolf’s Imagined Hinterland”, studies the author’s letters, unpublished essays, a novel and a play, where Woolf’s Sussex surfaces as a historical hinterland threatened by British industrialization and urbanization trends in the inter-war period.

The fourth and last part of the collected volume is perhaps its most innovative conceptually, casting new light on hinterlands in contexts that stretch from Central and Eastern Europe in the post-war period to Obama-era America. Either swallowed up by urbanization or delegated to the role of a no man’s land available to, and shaped by, the outside, the hinterlands analyzed here find their historical complexity denied and their inhabitants’ agency reduced, threatening to become mere stereotypes, or “landscapes of generalizations” (16), as the collection’s editors phrase it. Yet these spaces, their representations and imaginaries do not simply serve to revisit the traditional problematics of the hinterland, but the scholars utilize this return to arrive at new, transformed understandings of the concept. The final chapter by Sasha Pöhlmann offers a distinct, timely perspective on American hinterlands, centering on the study of a literary representation of Los Angeles (242–61). This is possibly the chapter that engages most intensely with the theoretical concerns set out at the beginning of the collected volume, seeking to overcome clear-cut binary understandings of hinterland and center. The article focuses on hinterlands caught up in ubiquitous processes of urbanization in the context of Paul Beatty’s satire of Obama-era “post-racial” Los Angeles. Pöhlmann discusses them as a “cultural metaphor” (242) and links them to the similar, but more specific American trope of the “flyover country” (ibid.). He seeks to abstract the term to expand its relevance as a broader analytic of regionalism, arguing that the “main meaning of ‘flyover’” is the delegitimizing “feeling that culture is elsewhere” and one’s way of life here thus does not matter. Rather than stressing regional specificities, this is an imaginary of “oppositional cultural meta-regions” which define themselves merely through contrast (245). The scholar critiques this polarizing discourse, speaking of it as in practice a “synecdochal contest” for hegemony, to be the single space representative of what a country (like the US) is, a “populist” quest for normative normalcy, whether defined by center or periphery (246). As he rightly observes, such problematic generalizations can be applied to the Midwest as well as coastal centers, and overlook the inherent diversity of both (247–8).

In conclusion, Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands (2024) as a publication is above all else marked by the great diversity of its contributors, geographies, and subject matters. Hence, despite its editors’ home in English and American studies, it may find a readership in many disciplines interested in literary and filmic analyses of hinterland spaces, their authors, and the larger cultural issues that surround them. It could further be relevant to scholars of regionalism, urban studies and certain area studies. Though it retains a clear focus on Anglophone texts, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship of global hinterlands in literature and (to a slightly lesser extent) film.