Anticipating Arrival: Migrancy and Creative Toponymy

Chapter 7 sums up findings in earlier chapters about the nature of placenames. It recapitulates discussions of critical toponymic and etymological approaches to this question. Linguistic and affective dimensions of placenames suggest a close connection between what is named and the way it is named. What is named in the placename may be the act (the event) of place naming, a real or failed act of communication in which are embedded kinetic histories of arrival and meeting. This suggests that a decolonised toponymy involves a kinopoetics of meeting places and, with the migrant experience of deferred arrival in mind, that placenames have always perhaps named what is there (not here), a direction rather than a destination. The proleptic character of placenames is reflected in poetic figures: folk etymologies that overcome gaps in collective memory produce new conceptual places of possible coexistence and belonging. Drawing on the Chapter 2 case studies, the general thesis of Naming No Man’s Land is reiterated: the politics of any decolonised toponymic theory and practice is in the poetics.