A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"

Analyzing the poem in spatial terms might seem to undermine my concern with social processes and political movement. Indeed, the modern Western philosophical trend has been to oppose both place and space to time. (9) Geographer Doreen Massey outlines this dominant schema in Space, Place, and Gender, explaining that the spatial would be marked by stasis, by the absence of time, and therefore by the impossibility of movement or change. In Foucauldian terms, space signifies "the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile" (149). Place and space, in this framework, are mutually opposed to history and progress, so any local claims, any political action based on a sense of place could only be variations on "reactionary nationalisms." Clearly, this implies a judgment of "the politics of location" as anti-progressive and a historical. (10)

Recent postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern approaches, however, suggest alternative senses of place--of geographic, social, and subjective locations-that are not simply reactionary. Sites of identification, these theories suggest, are both contested and contestatory territory: Even as particular places are fought over, they provide space for critique of other, more apparently stable or central places. Similarly, in the work of Black feminist critics bell hooks and Barbara Smith, "home" (as in "home girl") operates as a figurative space that can accommodate retreat as well as resistance. (11) All such particular locations, hooks and Smith imply, are in some sense multiple.

In approaching a politics of location more explicitly, hooks, Carol Boyce Davies, and others exhibit this double-edged sense of place. In her argument for "choosing the margin as a place of radical openness" (Yearning 145-53), for example, hooks refuses the temporal and geographic closure that would claim to define a place once and for all, and so resists the labels "anti-progressive" and "ahistorical." hooks's work, among others', demonstrates what Michael Keith and Steve Pile assert in Place and the Politics of Identity: A different sense of place is being theorized, no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer undialectical--because disruptive features interrupt any tendency to see once more open space as the passive receptacle for any social process that cares to fill it--but, still, in a very real sense, about location and locatedness (5). In Massey's terms, this is an "extraverted" sense of place, which means seeing in terms of "open and porous networks of social relations" (121) rather than borders or boundaries. It means acknowledging that "localities can be present in one another, both inside and outside at the same time" (6), and that "the fortunes of individual places cannot be explained by looking only within them." Larger economic relations, for example, play a role in constructing particular social spaces (20). Place, which exists as "a particular articulation" of social relations, thus also "includes relations which stretch beyond--the global as part of what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside" (5).