Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction by Matthew Hart

Reviewed by: Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction by Matthew Hart Craig Melhoff Hart, Matthew. Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 2020. Pp. 328. US$95.00 hardcover, US$30.00 paperback, US$29.99 ebook. It is apt that Matthew Hart’s Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction should appear in late 2020, amid the spatial dislocations of COVID-19 confinement. With many workplaces traded for the virtual nowheres of online meetings, the shift between public and private lives is marked not by physical transitions but by the crossing of imaginary frontiers between indeterminate and imbricated conceptual zones. Hart’s timely new book explores similar instances of blurred and overlapping borders in contemporary fiction and in physical, social, and political geographies that are both organized and destabilized by extraterritorial enclaves. For example, consider the arrivals hall in an international airport; “Where are we,” Hart asks, “once we have left the plane but not yet passed passport control?” (67). The arriving traveller is at once inside and outside, physically but not legally in the destination country, about to cross an international border while in a city that is likely nowhere near where that line appears on the world map. Another example, pertaining to extraterritorial persons rather than places, is that of travelling diplomats who are considered outside the local jurisdiction and still within their countries of origin, occupying portable domestic spaces while moving through foreign territory. Where are we when we visit the United Nations Headquarters in New York on a diplomatic passport? And how do these and other extraterritorialities shape our concepts of the sovereign territory and the national border? Extraterritorial is a provocative study of contemporary literature set in and dealing with such zones. More than just intriguingly uncanny, extraterritorial spaces reveal the “outside-within” logic of a putatively transnational globalization that is, Hart argues, not a new boundary-dissolving threat to the interstate system but rather a phenomenon arising from it. For Hart, the study of literary and artistic representations of extraterritoriality in the age of globalization helps to uncover how the global order itself is “trending extraterritorial” (9). Geography is “not just a topic (topos) of the novel but an active force that shapes it from within” (7); this book thus captures not just the portrayal of extraterritorial places and persons in recent fiction but how extraterritoriality increasingly shapes cultural objects in what Hart calls their “deep symbolic architecture” (8). In this regard, Hart’s new work synthesizes and contributes substantially to a range of related fields from political geography to literary formalism. In Chapter One, “Zone,” Hart considers a series of extraterritorial case studies, including three works by British artist Mark Wallinger: Zone (2007), State Britain (2007), and Threshold to the Kingdom (2000). These installations reflect and embody the operation of extraterritorial sites in a juridicopolitical order in which nations “subdivide [End Page 443] and graduate territorial sovereignty so as to manage phenomena as diverse as immigration, international security, and internal dissent” (33–34). Hart gathers cases in which extraterritorialities figure in international relations, such as the granting of land for foreign embassies, the negotiation and administration of colonial holdings, and the yielding of control over international waters. Such examples demonstrate how the global interstate system has long depended not just on maintaining structures of distinction, demarcation, and dominion, but also on disaggregating power and cooperatively managing liminal spaces. Extraterritorial zones thus help to define and uphold sovereignty and state power rather than threaten these and consequently throw the geopolitical order into crisis, a claim that undergirds the literary arguments in the chapters that follow. Chapter Two, “City-State,” reads the political theory of Giorgio Agamben along-side a selection of China Miéville’s novels of the “new weird” to account for both the imaginative geography of narrative setting and the novel’s “wider form” (70) as itself extraterritorial. Hart focuses on Miéville’s The City & the City (2009), in which two municipalities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, share the same physical space, their respective buildings side by side on the same streets while they nonetheless remain separate cities. The novel reimagines the concept...

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