Urban Space as Spatial Biography in Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love and Kicking the Sky

Abstract

For the last few years scholars such as Edward Soja and Doreen Massey have tackled the notion of spatial biography in inspiring terms. According to Soja, we are "intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities" (Thirdspace 1). In his conceptualization of the trialectics of space, he relates the concept of thirds pace to the reading of individual life experiences as spatial biographies, claiming that "understanding lived space can be compared to writing a biography, an interpretation of the lived time of the individual" (Soja, Postmetropolis 11). Massey focuses on the concepts of trajectory and story as related to movement and change (12) and declares that "we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far" (9). However, it is Michel de Certeau who interweaves the concept of subjectivities as "spatial trajectories" (115) with literature, suggesting that stories "traverse and organize spaces" (115) and that the material and verbal presence of these fluid narratives becomes the discursive representation of an urban "opaque and blind mobility" (93, emphasis in the original).