Decolonising No Man’s Land: Writing Back Against the Map

Chapter 5 argues that the object of colonial place naming was the rhetorical production of a no man’s land or terra nullius. The counter-object of toponymic decolonisation is not to replace colonial names but to name the prior colonial unnaming. These propositions suggest that place renaming recommendations informed by the other, etymological tradition in toponymy studies are also practically and symbolically inadequate. Instead of looking for original (precolonial) forms, a decolonising toponymy exposes the placelessness at the heart of colonialist ‘sense of place’. Revealing the emptiness of the toponymic signified implicates the signifier, the way naming may be a radical (creative and ironic) severance from past interpellation. A connection is made between the mutation of signs and the fate of personal names in migration. A critical etymology is proposed that focuses on the mutability of the placename: the continuous production of sense suggests that ideological resistance is performed at an everyday scale through the de-standardisation of placenames in usage. The ‘Golden Mountain’ debate about names illustrates this reality