Reading Place/Space in Postcolonial Narrative: Geocriticism in the Postcolonial Context in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not

Abstract

Literary studies have often accorded an important position to place. This is the physical setting of narrative which is one of the main literary elements. The advent of postcolonial studies witnessed an increased interest in place within literary studies. This is because, far from just constituting the setting of the events, it now played a political role. Place in postcolonial studies continues to constitute a vexed question given the ways colonialism intruded into the lands of the colonized; seizing and transforming the lands as well as displacing the indigenes. Geocriticism, for its part, is a reading practice which is specifically concerned with the treatment of place in literature. Given the involvement of postcolonial studies with questions of place and geocritism’s focus on place, this paper is interested in merging the two approaches. The paper, therefore, forges a nexus between the political preoccupation with place of postcolonial rhetoric and the geocritical outlook of place within literary texts. The aim is to conceive a definition of postcolonial geocriticism while simultaneously experimenting its application to Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter and
Dangarembga’s The Book of Not. The main contention of this paper is that in postcolonial narratives, the interest in place and space encapsulates the myriad abuses and excesses of the colonial undertaking. Since Geocriticism is the theory that is particularly based on the literary study of place/space, it becomes interesting to experiment with it within the context of postcolonial theory to imagine ways in which place can be adequately and effectively theorized within postcolonial studies. Through this sustained attention to place, the paper creates room for a postcolonial version of literary geography.