Naming No Man’s Land

“This book is likely to revolutionise inclusive approaches to critical toponymy, moving away from the modern fixist paradigm towards the semiotic creative path of a toponymic situationism.”
Frédéric Giraut, Professor and UNESCO Chair “Naming the World”, University of Geneve, Switzerland

“Carter operates both on the ground, in an intricate and subtle form of empirical attention, and at a high level of stratospheric speculation, where he reflects, connects and imagines fabulous options. The quality of the writing in this book is outstanding.”
Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor in Australian Studies, The University of Melbourne, Australia



This book is a practice-based exploration of the politics and poetics of replacing colonial placenames with Indigenous ones. From a horizon of case-studies in Western Australia, the study develops a lively dialogue with international critical toponymy theory and with older etymological approaches to place renaming and legitimation. The author shows how renaming raises fundamental questions of meaning, reference and cross-cultural equivalence. 

Recognising the ‘sense of place’ values that accrue to placenames, Carter argues that placenames have a creative as well as discursive function: they are talking points that bring places into being. For this reason, to decolonize toponymy involves a postcolonial poetics. Naming No Man’s Land argues for a practical, community-shaped toponymic poetics that escapes from the binarist logic of imposition/erasure, showing that, when the principle that ‘places are made after their stories’ is followed, new creative mechanisms of co-existence can emerge. A must read for anyone engaged in postcolonial studies, creativity studies, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, historical ethnography, eco-criticism, environmental humanities, (Australian) Aboriginal studies, and related disciplines.



Paul Carter is Professor of Design (Urbanism) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a distinguished public artist and sound designer. The Indigenous place renaming projects discussed in Naming No Man’s Land were delivered through the Aboriginal-owned cultural consultancy, Nyungar Birdiyia, of which he is co-director.