Ruxandra Mandoiu, Emory University

Extraterritorial Spatiality: Intersections between the Postimperial and
the Postcolonial in Ingeborg Bachmann's Writing

This paper explores issues of space and belonging in post-Austro-Hungarian
Europe in a novella by Ingeborg Bachmann. Since its publication in 1972, the novella Drei Wege zum See (Three Paths to the Lake) has galvanized a variety of literary-critical approaches. We have seen studies of gender, of narrative strategy, of intertextuality into Joseph Roth's and Jean Amery's writings, and of topography. Drawing briefly on previous scholarship, this paper proposes a new analytical direction for Bachmann's
text, through the postcolonial approach. The major trope the essay explores is extraterritoriality. Etymologically, to be extraterritorial means to be outside a given territory, but in legal discourse extraterritoriality designates diplomatic immunity. Through an analysis of extraterritoriality in Bachmann's writing, I address questions of geography and (post)-colonialism in Europe and the Third World. Bachmann borrows the
term "extraterritorial" from J. Roth, for whom the extraterritorial signifies a post-imperial crisis of belonging. Most importantly is the fact that Roth suggests thinking about nostalgia in spatial terms. At the moment of the collapse of the House of Austria, imperial space concedes to national space. However, what European geopolitical history has never acknowledged is that in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a
third space comes into being. It is the space of the extraterritorial. Roth only briefly hints to its existence at the end of his novel The Emperor's Tomb. It is left to Bachmann to reexamine its validity and its underlying meanings.

Bachmann develops further the idea of extraterritoriality, looking at imperial nostalgia half a century after the collapse of the Double Monarchy, at a time when countries of the Third World are undergoing liberation movements from colonial rule. In her text the postimperial gradually segues into the postcolonial. Questions of post-imperial space and belonging become more complex with the intervention of postcolonial
terms and issues.

For the theoretical and philosophical implications of this paper, I draw on Homi K. Bhabha's scholarship regarding the (post)-colonial nation as well as on Giorgio Agamben's utopian conceptualization of extraterritoriality.