Territorialization / Deterritorialization / Reterritorialization

Paulo M. Barroso (NOVA Institute of Communication, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal)

Territorialization refers to processes through which meanings become spatially stabilized and culturally anchored; deterritorialization designates movements through which these meanings become displaced, destabilized, or detached from their original contexts; reterritorialization describes the subsequent reorganization and reattachment of meanings within new assemblages. The concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization were developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, most notably in Mille plateaux (1980), as part of a broader philosophical project concerned with movement, multiplicity, assemblages, and the instability of cultural formations.

For Deleuze and Guattari, territory is not merely a geographical space, but a set of affective, symbolic, and expressive marks that make a place familiar and meaningful; it is the subjective appropriation of space, the sense of a “home” or “milieu.” As François Zourabichvili (2003, p. 28) writes, “le concept de territoire implique certes l’espace, mais ne consiste pas dans la délimitation objective d’un lieu géographique”. Applied to literary tourism, this means that literary places do not exist naturally as destinations: they become territories through narratives, affects, symbols, and cultural practices associated with literary works and authors.

Deterritorialization refers to the movement of leaving this familiar territory and opening oneself to strangeness, exteriority, and transformation. In literary tourism, both reading and travelling can function as experiences of deterritorialization, since they displace individuals toward new imaginaries, sensibilities, and ways of inhabiting space, without necessarily establishing a fixed new identity or territory.

According to Zourabichvili, every deterritorialization is accompanied by a reterritorialization, through which meanings, affects, and forms of belonging are reorganized within another assemblage. This is particularly relevant to literary tourism, where visitors reinterpret places through literary narratives, producing new symbolic appropriations of space (e.g., when a city is experienced less as an ordinary location and more as a literary or imaginative territory).

Territories differ in their openness to the outside and to transformation. This distinction is important for literary tourism, since some literary places become fixed, closed, and heavily patrimonialized, while others remain permeable to becoming, multiplicity, and the continuous reinvention of literary and touristic experience.

However, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that territories are never fixed or permanent. Every territorialization simultaneously contains movements of deterritorialization (i.e., processes through which meanings escape their original spatial, historical, or cultural coordinates). In literary tourism, deterritorialization occurs when literary texts circulate globally through translation, adaptation, media reproduction, tourism marketing, digital mediation, and transnational readerships. Literary places become detached from their immediate local contexts and enter wider global circuits of consumption and imagination (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).

In literary tourism studies, this conceptual triad (territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization) provides a productive framework for understanding how literary meanings become attached to places, circulate globally, and are subsequently reconfigured through tourism practices, institutional mediation, and visitor experiences. It enables a critical reading of literary heritage that moves beyond static notions of authenticity or simple correspondence between text and geography. Instead, literary places emerge as unstable assemblages shaped by narrative, memory, tourism economies, media circulation, and performative encounters.

In the context of literary tourism, territorialization occurs when symbolic meanings become spatially anchored through the association of literary texts, authors, or fictional narratives with specific geographical locations. Through repeated cultural circulation, places become identifiable as “literary territories,” acquiring symbolic density through their relation to authors, fictional worlds, or literary imaginaries. Literary texts do not merely describe places; they actively produce spatial meanings and shape the cultural perception of places (Brosseau, 1994; Westphal, 2011).

Literary territorialization can be observed when specific places become symbolically inseparable from particular authors, as in the well-established association between Prague and Franz Kafka.

Literary texts territorialize urban space by transforming ordinary locations into culturally charged sites of memory, imagination, and pilgrimage. Streets, cafés, cemeteries, houses, and monuments become embedded within narrative geographies that exceed their material existence. Literary festivals, commemorative plaques, guided tours, museums, and heritage institutions reinforce these territorializations by stabilizing interpretations of literary space and authorial identity.

This process is particularly evident in contemporary tourism economies, where literary meanings are increasingly mediated through films, social media, digital mapping, merchandising, and global tourism branding. Literary sites are no longer experienced exclusively through reading practices or local historical knowledge, but through multilayered transmedia representations. The literary place becomes mobile, reproducible, and consumable across different cultural contexts. As a result, visitors often encounter literary destinations through preconstructed imaginaries that may diverge significantly from the original textual or historical conditions.

The deterritorialization of literary space is closely linked to globalization and the increasing mobility of readers, tourists, and cultural products. Authors themselves frequently become transnational cultural brands detached from their original sociohistorical contexts (e.g., Kafka’s Prague is often consumed internationally less as a historically complex urban environment than as an abstract symbolic landscape associated with alienation, bureaucracy, absurdity, and existential modernity). The global circulation of “Kafkaesque” imagery produces a form of symbolic deterritorialization in which Prague functions simultaneously as a real city and as a floating cultural signifier shaped by tourism discourse, publishing industries, cinema, and heritage commodification.

At the same time, deterritorialization should not be understood solely as loss or displacement. For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization also enables creativity, transformation, and the emergence of new assemblages. Literary tourism frequently generates unexpected reinterpretations and hybrid appropriations of literary meaning. Readers and visitors may construct personal, emotional, or imaginative relationships with literary places that exceed institutional narratives or authorial intentions. The literary site thus becomes a space of negotiation between official heritage discourses and individual affective experiences.

In literary tourism, reterritorialization occurs when displaced literary meanings are subsequently reorganized and reattached to places through tourism practices, visitor performances, institutional curation, heritage policies, and commercial infrastructures. Literary places are continuously reconstructed through museums, exhibitions, themed itineraries, festivals, souvenirs, digital platforms, and interpretive narratives that stabilize new configurations of meaning.

This process can be observed in the musealization of writers’ houses and literary districts. Once transformed into heritage institutions, such spaces often undergo selective reconstruction designed to produce authenticity, intimacy, and symbolic proximity to the author. Furniture, manuscripts, personal objects, and reconstructed interiors function as material devices through which literary meaning is spatially reterritorialized. Yet these reconstructions are never neutral; they are shaped by institutional choices, economic interests, tourism expectations, and national cultural narratives (Watson, 2006; Hendrix, 2018).

A clear illustration of this conceptual triad can be observed in the case of Franz Kafka and Prague, where literary meaning has undergone successive processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. During the twentieth century, Kafka’s writings became globally deterritorialized through translation, academic criticism, cinema, philosophy, and popular culture. Subsequently, Prague reterritorialized Kafka through museums, guided tours, statues, souvenir economies, themed cafés, and urban branding strategies, thereby transforming the author into a central component of the city’s international cultural identity. Yet this reterritorialization also raises critical questions concerning commodification, simplification, and the transformation of literary complexity into consumable tourism imagery.

The conceptual triad of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, therefore, enables literary tourism scholars to analyse literary heritage as a dynamic process rather than a fixed cultural object. It challenges essentialist assumptions that literary places possess stable or authentic meanings waiting to be discovered by visitors. Instead, literary places emerge as assemblages continuously produced through interactions among texts, readers, institutions, tourism industries, media systems, and embodied practices.

These concepts also intersect with broader theoretical discussions in cultural geography and mobility studies. Michel de Certeau’s analysis of spatial practices emphasizes how places are transformed through movement, narration, and everyday practices (de Certeau, 1984). The space is conceptualized as relational, open, and constantly under construction, a perspective that resonates strongly with Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-essentialist understanding of territory. Literary tourism can therefore be understood as a mobile and performative practice through which meanings are continuously negotiated rather than simply inherited.

Furthermore, this framework contributes to critical analyses of heritage commodification and cultural capitalism. Literary tourism often participates in broader processes of urban branding and the cultural economy, in which literary identity is instrumentalized for economic development and marketing. The transformation of literary places into marketable experiences may reinforce cultural visibility and preservation, but it may also reduce literary complexity to simplified narratives and consumable symbols.

Ultimately, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization are linked to power, memory, and symbolic production. They provide literary tourism studies with a critical framework for understanding how literary geographies are continuously produced, destabilized, and reconstructed rather than existing as fixed spaces of meaning.

How to cite this entry: Barroso, P.M. (2026). Territorialization / Deterritorialization / Reterritorialization. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Brosseau, M. (1994). Geography’s Literature. Progress in Human Geography, 18, 333-353.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. (Original work published 1980).

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Les Éditions de Minuit.

Hendrix, H. (Ed.). (2008). Writers’ houses and the making of memory. Routledge.

Watson, N. J. (2006). The literary tourist: Readers and places in romantic and Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan.

Westphal, B. (2011). Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published 2007).

Zourabichvili, F. (2003). Le vocabulaire de Deleuze. Ellipses.