Heterotopias: Making and Remaking Imaginary Spaces
Heterotopias: Making and Remaking Imaginary Spaces

Summary/Abstract: Space is no longer seen as a homogeneous construct with the capacity to resist dispersive forces. On the contrary, space is through its very nature heterogeneous. Having as a starting point different socio-political contexts, some researchers have addressed issues of fragmented, dispersed spaces, existential and reassembled spaces out of various incompatible emplacements. They have also dealt with geographies of exclusion, of migration and Otherness, with liminal spaces and portals, linking them to notions like mobile, hybrid and fluid identities that transgress and traverse these spaces. In the context of migration, concepts like border and nomadic or hybrid identity are questioned, as visions and perceptions on cultural and socio-political spaces have irreversibly changed. Portal-quest fantasy belongs, by definition, to the literature of space and illustrates symbolical migrations of characters from a primary world engulfed by a crisis towards a magical and miraculous secondary world. There are several types of spaces, like eutopian and dystopian ones that are part of the texture of these secondary worlds. Moreover, these secondary worlds become geographies of Otherness criss-crossed by fluid, hybrid and reassembled identities. Following a similar path as other researchers in literary theory and social sciences, I will use heterotopia in my study as the conceptual matrix in defining fantasy genre.

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