Abstract:

This essay explores the relationship between terror and spatiality in Maria Irene Fornes’s Terra Incognita (1991), a play rooted firmly, as its title suggests, in the production of spatiality. Fornes turns conventional spatial conceptions upside down by synchronising history with the present. Spatiality corresponds to both the social and political practices of terror and the alternative spaces opened up in the play to resist such terror, providing the grounds, both literally and metaphorically, from which to examine the inscribed modes of terror in the play. The essay’s main line of argument is informed by the concept of heterotopia proposed by Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces (1967). Heterotopias are real spaces (as opposed to imaginary spaces) that exist in stark contradiction to other real spaces, thereby problematising their existence. By constructing such a heterotopic space where the specificity of space and time, territorial borders, and religious, racial, ethnical, and national sovereignty lose their prescriptive significance, Terra Incognita opens to debate the human maladies that risk the future.

摘要：

本文探讨了 Maria Irene Fornes 的Terra Incognita (1991) 中恐怖与空间性之间的关系，正如其标题所暗示的那样，该剧在空间性的生产中根深蒂固。Fornes 通过将历史与现在同步，颠覆了传统的空间概念。空间性既对应于恐怖的社会和政治实践，也对应于剧中为抵制这种恐怖而开辟的替代空间，提供了从字面上和隐喻上审视剧中恐怖模式的基础。本文的主要论点来自米歇尔·福柯在《其他空间》中提出的异托邦概念(1967)。异托邦是真实的空间（与想象的空间相反），它们与其他真实的空间存在明显的矛盾，从而使它们的存在成为问题。通过构建这样一个异位空间，在这种空间中，空间和时间的特殊性、领土边界以及宗教、种族、民族和国家主权都失去了规定性意义，Terra Incognita开启了对危及未来的人类疾病的辩论。