The Transdisciplinary in Literary Postcoloniality: Sacred Spaces

This special issue, titled “Spaces of the Sacred: Mapping Literary Mysticism”, aims to map literary mysticism and spiritual literature in a transdisciplinary framework. The contributions cover a complex range of themes, from poetry of sacred spaces and shrines to narrative traditions. The common thread uniting these articles is the dynamics of spatialisation of identity in response to the threat of globalisation. In the past, interdisciplinary studies and research on sacred spaces and the concept of literary narrative and textual production seemed to be adjacent and interstitial to the leading disciplines, or blurred under the umbrella term of globalisation. Subsequently, humanist geography interfaced with the topological and the spatial turn, as many scholars who developed their concepts in the 1990s furthered their transdisciplinary analyses. What has not been represented to its full potential, however, is not so much the complex triadic issues related to literature, geography, and religion, but rather the mysticism of sacred spaces and postcolonial textuality in multilingual and multicultural forms of expression negotiating alternative geographies and spatial spiritualities. Literary postcoloniality, in its many forms and genres and as featured in the present contributions, aims to resist cultural homogenisation, (de-)sacralisation, and the dispossession of sacred spaces. The ambition of this issue has been to challenge the fixity of the dual approach of traditional academic disciplines by pairing geography, literature, and religion, and in so doing to broaden the horizon towards a transdisciplinary perspective.