ABSTRACT
The local is a difficult terrain. The very terms and concepts we employ in order to describe the specificities of a locality may be misleading because they are too general for what they are supposed to capture: the here and now often elude common linguistic categories. Language works through opposition and comparison. So if in Shakespeare, as shown in the introduction to this volume, the adjective ‘local’ is linked to the act of namegiving, this link suggests a promise as much as a problem. How can new cultural spaces be aptly named and understood? Does the act of naming indeed function as an act of siting which localizes experience? Or does it rather displace its referent into an unstable signifying system and thereby dislocate it? Historically, such questions have been most powerfully addressed within the context of colonial encounters.
