Affective Geographies of Transformation, Exploration and Adventure

Rethinking Frontiers

Hayley Saul, Emma Waterton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589189
• eBook ISBN: 9781351790437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Combining critical reflections from scholars around the globe as well as experiential records from some of the world's most tenacious explorers, this book interrogates the concept of the 'frontier' as a realm of transformation, exploration and adventure.

We discover the affective power of social, physical, spiritual and political frontiers in shaping humanity's abilities to change and become. We collectively unpack the enduring conceptualization of the frontier as a site of nation-state identity formation, violent colonization, masculine prowess and the triumph of progress. In its place, this book charts a more complex and subtle emotional geography amidst an array of frontiers: the expanding human psyche that is induced under free-diving narcosis and tales of survival on one of the most technically difficult mountains in the world, 'The Ogre'. Chapters consider solitude in the Sahara, near-death experiences in Tibetan Buddhism, the aftermath of a volcanic eruption in Bali, the Spanish Imaginary, snatched moments of sexual curiosity, and many more.

This book will be of upmost importance to researchers working on theories of affect, the Anthropocene, frontier theory and human geography. It will be vital supplementary reading for undergraduates and postgraduates on courses such as Heritage Studies, Human and Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Tourism Studies and History.

Part I

Transformation

1 Taboo desires?

James Baldwin, African Americans, homo-eroticism and the frontiers of mind/place/race and sex

Russell Staiff

Introduction: the year was 1966

With my cousin, four years older than me, I had taken the train from the country town where we lived in southern Australia into the provincial capital, Adelaide. It was one of those memorable events that break into the small world of seemingly bounded horizons of rural life. I do not remember what film we saw. After the movie, we arrived back at the railway station some time before our departure and found ourselves in a bookshop. I was looking for something to read on the long, two-hour journey home. My reading tastes, at the time, were dominated by comedy (Wodehouse and the like) and war thrillers (Alistair MacLean). All the MacLean titles on offer I had read, so I was perusing aimlessly. In a distracted manner I picked up James Baldwin’s Another Country (Baldwin 1965). I can’t recall what I thought this book may have been about, nor what piqued my initial interest, but when I turned it over and read the blurb, I was transfixed. Homosexual. The word tore through me like a storm. My heart raced. My legs felt weak. I looked around, sure that other customers had seen what I was looking at, had known that this book was taboo. My anxiety increased as my cousin signalled that we needed to leave. I hurriedly looked at the blurb again: ‘a study of a cat’s cradle of sex, and near relationships based on sex, chiefly between blacks and whites, and between homosexuals’. How I managed to purchase this book I can now only imagine. The embarrassment would have been acute. I had just celebrated my sixteenth birthday.

This essay charts a powerful triad of frontier/border crossings: the mobility of imagination, of places real and imagined and of sexual desires, obsessions and behaviours that criss-cross national boundaries, racial divides and notions of ‘normality’, that mobilize a transgressive and ‘secret’ self-made all the more potent by words like ‘taboo’. My mode of analysis is remembrance, a type of archaeology of the self/body that attempts to recall the power of these frontier/border crossings and the implications of such a narrative for our understanding of the complex ways imagination, desire, corporeal travel, racial cartographies and sexual behaviour are animated and performed in motion, where everything is improvised, fluid and lacking fixity (see Eguchi 2015). Only in retrospection is there a type of stasis, a pinning down in analysis, the illusion of solidity when, in fact, there was none at all.

I have chosen a narrative mode because of its constant drive forward, its relentless movement, its fusion of action and time, its ability to reshape time and place, its focus on character and its first-person capacities. But I also employ narration with extreme caution because of its often inbuilt teleology, its plot determination and its urge for resolution. These aspects of narrative will be eschewed. One thing that cannot be ignored is that my narrative/analysis is a representation of fluidities that are, almost wholly, experienced outside of representation. However, there is no way this conundrum can be easily circumnavigated.

How to describe a white teenager’s obsession with the male African American body when living in rural southern Australia? Decades later, only the contours still exist. Maybe of importance was the train trip home from Adelaide, appropriately into the growing darkness of night, a darkening landscape streaming past the window outside, but cocooned in a dimly lit carriage compartment, where my internal gaze was on a very different landscape prompted by my reading. Certainly Another Country enabled so many things simultaneously. I was reading about something I thought was not possible to utter: love and sex between men. But it was somewhere else; the locus of this ‘world’ was not the farm where I lived and the town where I went to school. It was New York. And this sexual landscape, so earnestly desired and yet seemingly impossible ever to be realized except in ever more elaborate sexual fantasies, was, yes, in ‘another country’ and so far away. And yet, disregarding geographic distance altogether, this masturbatory space – of desire, fantasy and acute physical and bodily sensations of great need and exultant release – was inhabited by images of African Americans. These images were so readily fed to me by television, magazines and the cinema. I secretly began to collect pictures of African American singers, actors, athletes and those who made it into the print media (usually criminals). The folio of pictures and the novel (and I soon added Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin 1963) to my collection) were hidden in a distant shed on the farm that stored sacks of charcoal used in burners in winter to ward off the frost in the growing season for hothouse vegetables. There, I could steal away from the oppressive ‘normal’ world of my everyday and into my forbidden world of teenage lust, where I imagined furtive meetings with African American men.

It was such a strange separation of the sexual self from the objects of desire; a constant moving between an imagined place (the USA and especially New York), people who had no physical presence in my daily life – African American men – and the intensity of masturbation. In the play Equus, Peter Shaffer (1977) ponders the mysterious way certain aspects of one’s life are magnetized by sexual desire; the indeterminate mobilities of body, mind and the material creating in their coalescing what Freud termed a ‘fetish’.

The following meditation is in two parts. I begin with Baldwin’s novel of alienation, Another Country, in an attempt to re-enter the fictive world read on a rural farm in southern Australia in the 1960s. It combines memory work and an unexpectedly intense emotional response to rereading the novel in 2016. The second part is a partial and incomplete reflection on the issues raised by the frontiers of mind/place/race and sex in the 1960s and now. However, I begin with a note about ‘borders/frontiers’, a contextual and conceptual musing that informs the analysis.

Borders/frontiers: a Janus-faced phenomenon

The commonsense understanding of frontiers is that of space/place (an admixture of the imagined, the conceptual and the physical) lying ‘beyond borders’. There is, persistently, the suggestion of something unknown, something tinctured with trepidation, wonder and desire. Critical to the frontier, in Western thought and action, is its hinged companion – border. The binarism is deeply cultural and social, political and geographical, historical and juridical, linguistic and economic, scientific and artistic. Henk van Houtum encapsulates the dynamism of this twinned phenomenology by assuming that borders/frontiers are complex spatial and social entities that are highly effervescent. He writes thus:

A socially constructed border is a form and manifestation of self-repression. It suppresses the total potential of personal mobility and freedom by constructing a sphere of trust inside and a fear of what is out there, beyond the self-defined border. Yet at the same time, the world outside that is constructed by a border also expresses a desire, a wish, the longing to be somewhere else. It is the desire to experience and live the personal freedom despite or thanks to the fear of the unknown, the non-routine. That is the desire to turn to the other, the desire to cross the line. The unknown, the stories about the exotic and the mythical, the adventure, the wild or the culturally different, can work like the Siren song on our ears. A border therefore also reflects liberty, the desire to de-border oneself, to become stranger oneself. The desire to leave behind whatever is familiar, to close the door behind, to turn the key and [go] into the world … to become strange and stay strange.

(van Houtum 2011: 58–59)

I’m attracted to the ‘queer’ flavour of this description, to the ‘othering’ that is seen as crucial to the idea of transgression, to delineation and to transformation, to attempted fixity and to the demarcation of inclusion and exclusion at the very moment when the liminal, the porous and the provisional exert a perceptual/conceptual ecology of constant and crucial cross-border processes and the idea of borderless realms.

In recent years, border studies have grown apace, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the profound impact of globalization, the EU experience and the more recent assertion of regionalism/localism (Wastl-Walter 2011). But following Foucault and other post-structural theorists, it is well understood that modernity and the construction of the self was via a proliferation of spaces and the multiple creation of distinctions and boundaries that produced ‘others’ (Foucault 1973; Gregory 2004). But such productions were in a time of radical critique of limits and so the frontier shifted from its nineteenth-century New Worlds conception (frontier lands) and its mid-twentieth-century scientific formulations (space, medicine) to a quest (individual and social) for a type of border defiance/infringement critique as ‘beyond borders’. The current asylum/refugee predicament epitomizes the flux that constitutes any notion of ‘frontier’.

Whether explicit or not, borders/frontiers are deeply embedded in most cultural logics; they are to a degree universal human experiences but expressed in specific cultural forms/norms. Language provides one clue. Every noun demarcates that which is not something else and in so doing defines a border and a space between this and that. Categories, in whatever epistemic field – from science to literature, art to geography, sociology to archaeology, literature to mathematics and so forth – are, on one level, an extension of the logic of nouns, the naming of things, and, on another level, abstractions that by their very nature have boundaries (that then gesture to that beyond the border line). A highly necessary and highly significant corollary of this is transgression, when phenomena migrate across borders, when borders are deemed permeable or when they fail or are removed, or when borders are limits that activate a desire for frontier phenomenon. Transgressions and cross-border thoughts/actions are as crucial as the borders themselves because, paradoxically, they make the borders so radiant. Frontiers, however, are not usually perceived as bounded; they are spaces of expansion, of possibilities, of utopias, of futures.

Time travel: the remembrance of reading James Baldwin’s Another Country

What follows is a reconstruction of the past. The cliché of memory being like the shifting sands of the desert or a mirage is apt. In memory, linear time evaporates; time folds in on itself ceaselessly. Nothing is fixed. The chronology of events gets muddled. James Baldwin, the television series Roots (Margulies 1977), Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (Twain 1884), Jimi Hendrix, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee 1960) are all in the mix but the chronology requires my concerted effort. Baldwin came before Lee; Twain after Baldwin and not long before Hendrix; Roots was still a decade away and Mapplethorpe’s images of naked African American men later still.

So what to make of my remembrance of reading Another Country? The rereading, fully aware that I would be writing this chapter, occurred in New York in June 2016. The rush of memories was unexpected, but, interestingly, I did not readily relate the novel to my being in that city. The ‘real’ New York was, obviously, peripheral to the imagined New York of my teen years and the conjured metropolis, although now entirely lost to me, I fleetingly recall as a phantasm of immense imaginative richness. Nevertheless, the New York of my travels (I have been there several times) is organically linked to Baldwin’s novel, to African Americans and to gay sexuality. While my professional interest was in the culture of New York (its museums, its theatre, its music, its dance, its architecture, its history), there was always the pull of being somehow immersed in an exciting subterranean world of gay sex and African American male bodies, of sensuality, of forbidden desires, of experiences where the racial ‘other’ had melded with my sexual fantasies. The eroticized black male body has been the subject of highly significant cultural/political analysis (see below) and in recent decades I have been acutely conscious of this critique – a critique that, ironically, has made New York all the more alluring because it has amplified the position of the African American in contemporary society, has turned a spotlight on race and racial/gender/sexual politics/divisions and, for me, has given a noble/heroic dimension to the ongoing struggle of African Americans for justice, equality, visibility and presence.

For a long time now, I have been trying to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the United States through African American sensibilities. What began as a teenager’s adulation of the black naked body has become a political/ideological position that extends to wherever race is utilized as a political and social tool. My support for Indigenous Australian land rights and sovereignty, and my years of anti-Apartheid activism against the white South African regime arose from a somatic process of desire/reflection/knowledge; of mental border crossing where a fetish had transformed itself into acute empathy.

While all this can be regarded as one of the end points of border transcendence, it is an intellectual response and not the somatic bodily response of a white sixteen-year-old living thousands of kilometres from Manhattan. In what follows, I want to focus on two passages in Another Country, both of which form part of Eric’s recollections as he prepared to leave his lover Yves in France and return to New York. As he took a shower ‘he was alone with his body and the water’, and the thoughts of his life in New York before his ‘escape’ to Paris ‘caused many painful and buried things to stir in him’ (Baldwin 1965: 152). And what were those painful things?

They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene … he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.

(Baldwin 1965: 152)

Eric had grown up in a sterile emotional environment where his parents’ world was one of ‘habit’ and ‘courtesy’, and where their separate and busy lives kept them away from home. Emotional sustenance came from the African American cook, Grace, and her husband, Henry, who managed the boiler system in the building’s basement. Eric spent many hours with Henry but on one occasion he found him sitting alone in the furnace room:

[W]hen he spoke Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened … He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and coloured, and he was a little boy, and white.

(Baldwin 1965: 153–154)

Even after such a long time, the description of Eric and Henry is still affecting. I no longer remember the exact emotional terrain of my sixteen-year-old response, but what did surprise me was the unanticipated depth of feeling the erotically charged passage provoked in me in my recent rereading. At sixteen, I had never felt a man’s arms around me, not even my father’s. At sixteen, I was both frightened and excited about my same-sex attraction. Perhaps there was something deeply dist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rethinking frontiers: transformation, exploration and adventure
• PART I: Transformation
• PART II: Exploration
• PART III: Adventure
• Index