Thirdspace

-In his book Thirdspace, Edward Soja describes space and spatiality as an integral and neglected aspect of what he calls the “trialectics of being,” the three modes that determine how we inhabit, experience and understand the world. He argues that critical theories in the Humanities and Social Sciences study the historical and social dimensions of our lived experience, neglecting the spatial dimension.He builds on Henri Lefebvre’s work to address the dualistic way in which humans understand space—as either material/physical or as represented/imagined. Lefebvre’s “lived space”and Soja’s “thirdspace” are terms that account for the complex ways in which humans understand and navigate place, which “firstspace” and “Secondspace” (Soja’s terms for material and imagined spaces respectively) do not fully encompass.

-Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of Third Space is different from Soja’s Thirdspace, even though both terms offer a way to think outside the terms of a binary logic. Bhabha’s Third Space is the space in which hybrid cultural forms and identities exist. In his theories, the term hybrid describes new cultural forms that emerge through the interaction between colonizer and colonized.