ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, antipodean boundaries and contents remain unfi xed. Whereas the Oxford English Dictionary traces the gradual narrowing of the meaning of antipodes to a region in the South Pacifi c, people who live in the region today still don’t have a specifi c defi nition as to the boundaries and make-up of the area: Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacifi c Islands; just New Zealand and other islands; Pacifi c Islands exclusive of Aotearoa/New Zealand; or only the Pacifi c Islands in the more southern parts of the Pacifi c. As we have seen, the antipodes always had these peripatetic and compound qualities. Greek and Roman cosmologists and others reasoned that the antipodes were merely mathematically relative to where one was in space and time. Every point on the earth was potentially antipodal to another point. When they considered the antipodes in terms of a region opposite Athens or Rome, the area was pictured as spatially and temporally isolated. This condition led Europeans to refl ect on themselves as also confi ned and solitary with a radically limited temporal and epistemological outlook. In the later Middle Ages, even a merely relative symmetry became undone. The antipodes became itinerant, their podes, or feet, wandering in other directions than a refl ective relationship with Europe. When antipodeans appear in medieval manuscripts with their feet turned backward, they often are alongside sciopods, creatures admired for their “wonderful swiftness.” 1 Moreover, a person could travel around the earth or through the earth and to the antipodes, but that action might never lead to rediscovering his or her way back home. This unsettling quality carried over to the Early Modern period, particularly in Richard Brome’s play, The Antipodes, where the disorientation caused unexpected social relations to form, ones that developed beside an increasingly strong imperative to have children. Historical forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shape the antipodes into a place in the South Pacifi c that is approximately opposite Britain, but the antipodes still don’t quite become fi xed in one place or as one stable entity. The literature of this time often reiterates tropicalisms, but sometimes they enact a sense of the unfi xed, which disturbs contemporary discourses. This period also gives us, not the earliest, but the fi rst extended narrative, featuring Mai, that originates in the
antipodes, goes to Europe, and returns to the antipodes, an inversion of narrative course that begins new discursive orientations and directions.
