Between Displacement and Renewal : The Third Space in Roddy Doyle's Novels

Abstract

In his Acts of Resistance, Pierre Bourdieu argues that there is an urgent need to mount a resistance to neo-liberalism, or as he calls it, 'the new conservative revolution.'1 According to Bourdieu, this globally dominant force threatens to affect whole communities, as it tends to ignore the needs at the local, grassroots level far removed from the decision-making. The resistance he would like to see would be a result of what he terms 'the social movement,' one where the increasingly disempowered groups, such as workers and community organisations, that is, groups at the bottom of or outside the political power, join forces with intellectuals, that is, a group from within the establishment. Significantly, Bourdieu thinks of this type of resistance in spatial terms, suggesting that so far it is 'an empty space,' and he goes on to say that this space 'is theoretically empty, because it has not been thought through.'2 However, it seems to me that for the last decade or so geographers and cultural critics dealing with resistance theory have attempted to define and come up with models for the kind of resistance Bourdieu seems to propose. For example, Homi K. Bhabha, drawing on Frederic Jameson, conceives of resistance in terms of space, namely 'the third space,'3 a term which has proved to be a fruitful tool in discussions of the ways in which dominated groups can, at least temporarily, interfere with the plans of the dominant groups. To some extent drawing on Bhabha, but even more on theories put forward by Steve Pile and others in Geographies of Resistance,4 the social and cultural geographers David Butz and Michael Ripmeester propose that the third space should be seen as a space, or unarticulated strategies, 'of the radically disempowered those condemned by their location in a field of power to struggle, not to win, but merely to fight another day.'5 In other words, in addition to direct confrontation, as in riots or demonstrations, third space, they hold, is more frequently characterised by what could be termed 'everyday resistance.'6 Closely related to survival tactics, this type

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.