Novel Spaces

Matthew Hart's Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction opens with a signature deconstructive move. Setting out the operating concept of the book, Hart reminds us that the “global” is only “global” by simultaneously remaining national, albeit in a curious way: “The putatively global culture of the twenty-first century occupies a political geography that is only located outside borders, states, and nations by being simultaneously within them” (4). This inside-outside “political geography” is what Hart terms the “extraterritorial”: spaces—airports, maritime space, free trade zones, refugee camps, the little sovereign bubble of the diplomat—that are both external to the conventional borders of the nation state but no less integral to statecraft for it. Such spaces, far from being superfluous or a troubling excess, nor the exception that proves the rule, are in fact foundational to state formation in the twenty-first century: “These spaces have one thing in common: within them, the...