The Idea of the Antipodes

This study uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes—the places and people on the other side of the world—from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media. Taking into account maps, letters, book illustrations, travel writing, poetry, and drama, Goldie reveals that the history of the idea of the antipodes might be seen as different modes or discourses: mathematical and geographical in the earliest era, cartographical and kinetic in the medieval period, social and sexual in the Early Modern, sartorial and littoral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and bodily and humorous in the latest era. Using the theories of Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Epeli Hau‘ofa, and others, this book extends postcolonialism’s historical scope and challenges the theory’s approaches and perceptions: center-periphery, East-West, and mimicry.