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Sarah Littisha Jansen, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs sarahl.jansen@carleton.caThirteen year-old Juliet,fictional character of the renowned Elizabethan playwright Shakespeare, quitepoetically voices the question that is now the raison d’être of the entire academic discipline of critical place-namestudies: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name wouldsmell as sweet”1. This question can be echoed today with allrelevance if one substitutes the name Romeo Montague for any contested toponym,also known as a place name. Kosovo, Kosova, Kosovo and Metohija; Myanmar andBurma; Gvozd and Vrginmost; Aotearoa and New Zealand; Ferizaj and Uroševac;Stalingrad and Volgograd. What are in names such as these? How could a toponympossibly be at the heart of a costly dispute between Greece and FYROM/Macedoniaspanning decades? Language, like most things, is political and so too aretoponyms. The choice to use one name over another makes a decisively politicalstatement. In cases where place names are a feature of contested territory orregime authority, as in many of the above examples, neutrality becomes the rarecommodity of the distinctly creative or is, more simply, impossible. In regardsto the Kosovo/Kosova debate, attempts to textually reflect the contested natureof the territory in a neutral manner have yielded such hybrid forms as Kosovo/aor Kosov@.2 Although few official toponyms are as fiercely debatedas some of these examples, which include rival names deemed official by decreeof competing authorities, the phenomenon of place-names as contested ratherthan irrelevant is actually the norm and not the exception.            Theseemingly innocuous goal of toponyms is to provide spatial orientation forindividuals. This is called denotation and it is this labeling that enablespeople to give directions or converse about a specific location. The denotationfunction of toponyms is thus primarily practical. Yet, toponyms can also beused to evoke a symbolic association as well. This is referred to asconnotation.3 Frequently the denotation and connotation functions oftoponyms overlap and blur. The very act of naming conveys power over the thing,in this instance a landscape, which is named. The power of nomination is anintegral part of the power of possession.4 More important than the toponymsthemselves then, are those with the power to create toponyms, to designate thatsuch a place will henceforth be referred to by such a name. There are threebroad categories of societal agents that may wield this power. Firstly, there are foreigncolonial, imperial, or occupational forces. Colonial regimes often importednames from their respective imperial power. For instance, Singapore had streetsthat emphasized its colonial connection to Britain with street names such as:Victoria Street, Bristol Road, and Sussex Garden.5 Additionally,certain locations were given racialized toponyms, which reflected the “colonialtendency to order society by separating the colonized into distinct,recognizable containers (for example, China Street in Chinatown; Baghdad Streetin the Muslim quarter and Hindoo Road in Little India).”6 A morerecent, arguably neo-colonial, toponymic phenomenon in this first category isthe Americanized names given to streets in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. MajorDean Thurmond of the US Army’s Combined Joint Task Force Seven has argued thatin “the world of the occupier, name familiarity breeds security”, hence thehabit of American soldiers to substitute Iraqi toponyms for nostalgia-evokingAmerican ones such as Main Street, Cigar Street, or South Street.7The second group of place namedesignators is made up of local hegemonic political regimes. It is easiest toobserve this group at work in countries that have recently undergone radicalpolitical or ideological regime changes, such as post-colonial, post-Communist,or recently created states. This is because the creation of toponyms has becomepart and parcel of the nation-building process and of legitimating new socialideologies. The “renaming of streets in post-colonial societies has beeninterpreted as an ideological tool to divest the landscape of its colonialassociations and achieve political legitimation”, as such “streetnames are‘among the first to undergo refurbishing to commemorate new regimes’”.8Place names, as pedestrian, banal, and quotidian as they inherently are, havethe enormous yet subtle power of normalizing existing social power hierarchiesand ideologies. It is for this reason that regimes, especially those that areinsecure because they are new, embarking on the difficult process ofnation-building in a non-homogenous community, or face a crisis of legitimacy,will pursue toponymic overhauls even to the point of hilarity or to thedetriment of the navigational and common sense nature of toponyms. Two examplesillustrate this well. The first is the well-known urban irritant of splitting asingle continuous thoroughfare into multiple parts in order to “accommodatemultiple commemorative names, each of which is assigned to a particularconsecutive segment of a thoroughfare between neighboring intersections.”9While this may maximize the number of commemorations a given geographical areacan possess, which is politically useful, it is likely to be confusing tomotorists who assume that one name should refer to the entirety of thecontinuous thoroughfare. More ridiculous, was post-colonial Singapore’s initialdedication to creating a sense of common space and culture through the use ofexclusively Malay words in street-naming. “The available Malay vocabulary relatingto Malayan fauna, flora and material culture was soon exhausted and painstakinglyscraping of the bottom of the lexicographical barrel produced names which theDeputy Prime Minister described as ‘comic and unintelligible’”.10Finally, marginalized andminority populations can play a paradoxically significant role in determininglocal toponyms. This is because hegemony is never complete; it must consistentlycontend with counter-hegemonic challenges and the decision-making process thatproduces toponyms is precisely one area where social and cultural powerstruggles arise. After all, “landscapes are not just the products of socialpower but also tools or resources for achieving it.”11 In Iraq,Shi’a communities have embarked on a process of renaming public spaces in atoponymic exorcism of Saddam’s legacy.12 The pronunciation of placenames in a manner sympathetic to the Maori of Aotearoa/New Zealand is practicedby both indigenous and non-indigenous citizens is a way of recognizing thecultural rights of local indigenous people.13 Political graffitithat modifies toponyms has targeted street signs from Chicago and NorthernIreland to Kosovo and Basque. These stunts, seen as “cases of people claimingand reinscribing the landscape through place-naming practices of various kindsare evocative and contribute to bringing visibility, albeit often temporarily,to their cause.”14 In the case of road sign vandalism in Kosovowhere Serbian toponyms are effaced, it has been described as a form of protestagainst the strict minority protections enshrined in law for ethnic Serbiancitizens, which are perceived as unfair in that they stand in stark contrast tothe lack of minority protections, especially linguistic, that were afforded toethnic Albanians in Serbia or the former Yugoslavia.15 The contestednature of toponyms is perhaps most clearly illustrated in cases wherehistorically marginalized populations assert their presence through defiant useof certain toponyms, engaging in what some authors have referred to as“toponymic warfare”.16Conscious of the potentialpolarizing power and potential socio-political nightmare involved in revampingtoponymic systems, what merit is there then in the idea of depoliticizing toponyms through the use of ostensibly neutral namingmechanisms such as numerical systems? Unfortunately for this concept,place-naming can be situated within a wider discussion of organizing andcontrolling geographic space, which inherently is related to power and socialcontrol. Toponyms, even in their strictest denotation function, “are elementsof a geolocational regime thatenables governmental authorities to more easily tax, police, and provideservices to their populations [and] allows companies to spatially targetpotential consumers using various geodemographic information systems”.17Toponyms are inexorably related to power in that they consistently servegovernmental ends and in an age of neoliberalism, they increasingly also abetcommercial aims. The very popularity of the idea of “street numbering as an‘apolitical’ method of spatially organizing” cities comes from the World Bank,which encourages this system in order to help cope with social problems inAfrican cities; social problems which themselves originated from imposedstructural adjustment policies.18 Thus the prima facie non-political solution is an illusion; in reality it isa means of shoring up the global hegemony of neoliberalism. In a similar vein, and equally alarming, is the growing trend to commercialize toponyms. The new building at Ground Zero in New York is one of the most poignant examples. Originally to be named the “Freedom Tower”, the city has reverted to the legal and sanitized name “1 World Trade Center” in order to rent a significant portion of the new building to a Chinese real estate company, the Beijing-based Vantone Industrial.19 Auctioning off the naming rights of public spaces to commercial enterprises substitutes the social use of toponyms for their quantifiable economic value. This assists the spread of neoliberalism by turning previously public spaces vital to collective memory, identity, and culture production into privatized advertising space. If, as Humpty Dumpty from Wonderland proposed and Emmerson elaborates, “names are rooted neither in reality nor custom, but express instead the power of the namer over the thing named” then there is no apolitical way of creating toponyms20, instead it is critical to become engaged in the politics of place-naming to create toponyms in a manner that is democratic, inclusive, and promotes social justice.