ABSTRACT
The chapter draws on Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the production of space to re-imagine colonization and decolonization as projects in global space-making. Specifically, it sets up the literary field of colonial South Asia as a key site for the cultural politics of decolonization. It proposes that the spatial imaginaries of colonial and anti-colonial texts gesture towards a spatial desire that informs their ideological task of instantiating imagined geographies. While the spatial desire of colonial texts makes them reaffirm the hierarchical vision and division of the world, anti-colonial texts refuse these colonial imaginaries to re-imagine Indian space in a counter-colonial vein. These anti-colonial texts, thus, engage in the utopian task of re-imagining the colony as the postcolony, even as they perform the pedagogical task of providing an aesthetic education about it. The chapter also devises an interpretive strategy to read the spatial desires of colonial and anti-colonial texts in a comparative manner and across the English-vernacular divide. Drawing on and developing reading protocols outlined by Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Edward Said, and, in particular, the globalectical mode reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, it proposes to read English and Bengali texts from colonial South Asia (from across the colonizer-colonized divide) to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation.
