can be redefined. Thinking in diasporic ways and through notions of
hybridity, Hall conceives of post-colonial theory in terms of the
liminal in the hope of reconfiguring identity politics. The epigraph to
Huggan’s essay is taken from Thomas Shapcott’s ‘Maps’ (1987)
whereby the map is fixed and needs to be remapped by a journey:
The problem with maps is they take imagination.
Our need for contour invests the curve,
our demand for straight lines will have
measurement out in bones. Direction
rips the creel out of our hand. To let go now
is to become air-borne, a kite, map, journey [Ö]^41Abandoning conventional maps, becoming rhizomatic and remapping,
the poetic voice can attempt to become less located, airborne and free.
But how free is this remapping? In relation to the notion of
crossing borderlands, nomadic and fluid identity, Clair Wills mentions
how post-colonial discussion of the
[c]ontemporary fluidity of borders, mobility or previously settled peoples [Ö]
accords with psychoanalytic investigation into the unconscious to render the
dissolution of bonds and communities both natural and inevitable [Ö] There-
fore contemporary geopolitics and multinational capitalism causes the de-
centring of subjectivity.^42Notions of fluid borders are connected with ëpsychoanalytic inves-
tigation of the unconsciousí with the effect of a ëdissolutioní of
boundaries and the ëdecentring of subjectivityí. The decentring of
subjectivity and dissolution of boundaries suggests that migration
becomes a cure for both nationalism and imperialism since their res-
pective boundaries and notions of containment do not hold.
Importantly, Wills suggests that these effects can be caused as much
by ëmultinational capitalismí as a decolonizing politics and so refuses
to offer a naÔve understanding of the ëcontemporary fluidity of
bordersí as ëfreedomí per se. How far a post-colonial understanding of
migration wholly ëexplainsí the poetry of McGuckian as she remains
41 Ibid., p.115. Cf. Thomas Shapcott, Travel Dice (St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1987).
42 Clair Wills, ëStrangers To Ourselvesí, rev. Julia Kristeva, Women: A Cultural
Review, Vol.13 (3), 1992, p.284.