Old and New Spaces: Imagining Exclusion and Inclusion in Austin Clarke’s “Four Stations in His Circle” and Shani Mootoo’s “Out on Main Street”

Abstract

This essay deals with the fictional creation of such geographies of exclusion and inclusion in two selected short stories by Canadian authors that were written roughly thirty years apart and focus on diasporic identities in radically different ways: Austin Clarke, “Four Stations in His Circle” (1965; 1971 When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks) on the one hand, and Shani Mootoo, “Out on Main Street” (1993), on the other. My aim is to investigate the ways in which urban space is used in the stories as a strategy for including or excluding otherness, by paying special attention to fictional representations of space and to configurations of human relationships within space. I would like to suggest, firstly, that the two stories illustrate that there is a significant shift in focus in novels and short stories about the Canadian city, from a multiculturalist to a new, globalized ethnic diversity, and that this change is conditioned by demographic changes in urban environments and the advancement of globalization; and, secondly, I maintain that characters configure their relationships of inclusion and exclusion to the city in terms of consuming its space. In addition to concentrating on notions of literary representation of space and identity typical of literature as a medium, the following analysis also pays attention to the generation of urban space. It is informed by a vocabulary and methodology borrowed from cultural studies, namely from Stuart Hall’s work on identity as difference, and from anthropology, in particular from Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s 1992 essay, “Beyond Culture.” After an individual analysis illustrating the arguments formulated in this introduction, the final part of the paper, using Hall’s and Gupta and Ferguson’s texts, places the stories in a theoretical and comparative perspective in order to outline the fundamental conceptual differences on which they rely.