Ho, Olivia;
(2025)
Breach and suture in China Miéville’s interstitial cities.
Textual Practice
10.1080/0950236x.2025.2551341.
(In press).
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Abstract
Henri Lefebvre, seeking to point the way towards a different space in The Production of Space (1974), describes his project as straddling ‘the breach between science and utopia, reality and ideality, conceived and lived’. In China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009), two fictional cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same geography but are kept separate by a semiotic code by which their inhabitants deliberately ‘unsee’ the other city; to disregard this sign system is to commit Breach, a crime punishable by the police force of the same name. Yet Breach itself operates interstitially, transgressing the boundaries it is tasked to keep intact, threaded ‘like a suture in and out’ of both cities. This essay will examine the subversive topographies of Miéville’s fiction as spaces that activate interstices on three levels: in the built environments of his worlds; in the gaps between genre boundaries; and in between representation and reality. The interstices of his cities materialise the dialectical tension between opposing yet juxtaposed elements, generating change via a process of contradiction towards a social and historical totality. Through these breaches and their suturing, he seeks to point an interstitial way towards a different space.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Breach and suture in China Miéville’s interstitial cities |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/0950236x.2025.2551341 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2025.2551341 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Cities; urban space; architecture; interstitial; weird |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214578 |
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