Overview

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.  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. 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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9783031606908

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Paul Carter is Professor of Design (Urbanism) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a distinguished public artist and sound designer. The Indigenous place renaming projects discussed in Naming No Man’s Land were delivered through the Aboriginal-owned cultural consultancy, Nyungar Birdiyia, of which he is co-director. 

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