Naming No Man���s Land

<p>This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning reference and cross-cultural equivalence. </p><p>Recognising the ���sense of place��� values that accrue to placenames Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics. <em>Naming No Man���s Land</em> argues for a practical community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure showing that when the principle that ���places are made after their stories��� is followed new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies creativity studies cultural geography sociolinguistics historical ethnography eco-criticism environmental humanities (Australian) Aboriginal studies and related disciplines.</p>