Exploring spatiality of human life: A geographical gaze at Kavikandura

Abstract

Conventional methodologies in Human Geography have touched upon the surface relations of human beings over and in space, but spatiality as a fundamental element of being has captured attention of non-geographers with the spatial turn in the humanities. Literary turn in Geography and the spatial turn in literary criticism provide an important theoretical moment to read a prose published in 2012 in Sri Lanka and explore how spatiality of human life can be insightfully understood through literature. The primary objective of this paper is to show how literature is able to express the spatiality of human life beyond its perceived and conceived modes to capture the everyday lived space. First, I want to show how spatiality is a fundamental element of human existence together with the historical and the social by analyzing the content of spaces that the author constructs while arguing how imaginative geographies are essential in constructing a narrative. Second, I will examine how these spaces shape and more specifically create diluted identities of people. It is quintessential to understand and I do make this assumption in my work- that while the individual authors may experience the world in a particular way, the imaginative worlds that they construct are social in two senses. First, these imaginative worlds are not entirely the unique experiences of any author, as the author herself is situated within a particular social context. Second, the imaginative worlds thus constructed are involuntarily shared by others in various capacities (i.e. readers). Then, the imaginative geographies constructed by an author in a literary work can obviously be visited, experienced and explored as a ‘’field site’’ for human geographers. It is in this sense that I explore Kavikandura through a geographical perspective.