ABSTRACT
The location of metaphors of space and position right at the centre of feminist and postcolonial discourses seems to have given geography a metaphoric shot in the arm, increasing its visibility and its significance to scholars in other disciplines. There is now a rapidly expanding set of books and papers by geographers dealing broadly with space as imaginary, or as textual, as well as ‘real’ in the sense of distances to be overcome and unfamiliarities to be conquered. At the same time, literary theorists and others working in the humanities have become entranced by material spatial relations as well as by metaphors, as vast flows of people and capital across borders challenge the relationships between space, gender and identity and produce hybrid cultures and polities. These two books are recent examples of the exciting new work that is being done in these interfaces on women’s relationships to place and nation in periods of transition and transformation.
