Naming No Mans Land

This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia, the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning, reference and cross-cultural equivalence.

Recognising the 'sense of place' values that accrue to placenames, Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason, to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics. Naming No Man's Land argues for a practical, community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure, showing that, when the principle that 'places are made after their stories' is followed, new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies, creativity studies, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, historical ethnography, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, (Australian) Aboriginal studies, and related disciplines.

Introduction: practising toponymic decolonisation. - Chapter 1 Relating Country: some recent Noongar placenaming projects. - Chapter 2 Proper Names: differences between Aboriginal and colonial toponymy. - Chapter 3 Naming and Renaming Places: politics, poetics and psychology. - Chapter 4 Decolonising No Man s land: writing back against the map. - Chapter 5 Making Place: yarning and the protocols of poetic geography. - Chapter 6 Anticipating arrival: migrancy and creative toponymy. - Conclusion: right ways of meeting, their naming and mapping.