ABSTRACT
Drawing on geopolitics, historical and urban studies, the spatial turn in literary theory, cognitive mapping, and the recent critique of urbanization, the editors have revived and recontextualized the historical concept of hinterlands in an interdisciplinary entanglement with literary and cultural studies. They make a case for a broader understanding of hinterlands as a political, social, and aesthetic process, developing the argument in dialogue with Neil Brenner, Nikos Katsikis, Andy Merriedield, Christian Schmid, David Wachsmuth, Nigel Thrift, Fredric Jameson, Hazel Andrews, Tim Ingold, and the historical study by Matthew Unangst. The productive reformulations of hinterlands in terms of movement, semiotic palimpsest, heterotopia, regenerative nostalgia, and a process of reimagining, reinventing, and reinhabiting capture the ontological and epistemological complexity underestimated by the earlier studies, which tended to adhere to a more rigid urban/rural dichotomy.
