In answer to the question “Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?" during an interview with a French journalist, the Irish playwright responded, “Au contraire" (Heaney 405). Where does Beckett's “Au contraire" place him or his country of birth then? This paper aims to extend the notion of the Global South to locations beyond its strictly geographic contours; locations which seem to share a “mode" of being elsewhere, of being “otherwise", even if they lie in the northern part of the map. By focusing on the Irish playwright Brian Friel's invented town “Ballybeg" [Little Town] as a setting for many of his plays this paper explores notions of space and place, and their importance in decolonial context. This paper, thus, focuses on Ballybeg as an invented space as well as a premise for engaging in discussions of mapping geographies, and the narratives of place evident in many of his works, most visibly in Translations.[1]
 
[1] This is a reworked version of an earlier paper that has appeared in Portuguese translation under the title: “Os Espaços Inventados de Brian Friel e a Topografia Cultural do Ser" (translated by Luiza Magalhães) in Modos de Ser Sul: territorialidades, afetos e poderes (Resende, Robalinho and Amaral, eds.), e-books, 2020, pp. 105-120.