ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intertwined spatial dominants of place and/as body as a semiotic framework for the hinterland's social and symbolic identity in Maureen F. McHugh's SF novel Nekropolis (2001). The narrative interrogates the semiotic affinity between the urban body of the eponymous Nekropolis, a cemetery district and an enclave of the impoverished in twenty-second-century Fez, Morocco, and the characters of Hariba and Akhmim, whose low socioeconomic position and hybrid ontology relegate them to the status of a commodity, rendered symbolically invisible in the novel's semiosphere. By pursuing the interlaced tropes of spatial and symbolic exclusion as crucial aspects of the hinterlands’ identity politics, McHugh's novel foregrounds the tension between the representations of the hinterland as a heterotopic site marked by repression and marginalization but also as a territory of resistance and fluidity, engendered by the Other's struggle to reclaim their subjectivity.
