Place

This chapter argues that place serves as a powerful lens in the study of complex cultural forms like literature. Conversely, literature's examination of human and nonhuman existence in all its variety is particularly useful in exploring the significance of place in human life. The chapter combines phenomenological and sociocultural place theories by Edward Casey and Henri Lefebvre, among others, to explain place as a dynamic gathering of human-human and human-nonhuman interrelations - such as sociocultural structures, memory, imagination, emotion, and bodily perceptions interspersed with nonhuman phenomena and agencies. While hypothesising that such multiple operations of place become particularly visible in narratives of displacement, the chapter integrates Frantz Fanon's and Sarah Ahmed's analyses of embodied experiences in racialised spaces and gives a short analysis of the role of place in Toni Morrison's Beloved. The analysis shows how Morrison's portrayal of the Middle Passage, slavery, and everyday racialisation, along with her characters' struggle for re-emplacement, lay bare the primary importance of place for human social and psycho-existential belonging. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on how the Anthropocene and the concept of planetarity throw new light on the appearance of the place world in works like Beloved and raise questions about the future affordances of places in enabling social, emotional, and existential attachments.