MAPPING HEGEMONY: DECOLONIAL KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICAL AESTHETICS IN SOUEIF’S THE MAP OF LOVE

Abstract

This article analyses the strategies through which colonial hegemony is sustained through aesthetic forms of knowledge in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love. Using Walter Mignolo’s framework of decoloniality, the study shows the persistence of coloniality within modern forms of historiography, geographic mapping, and narrative formation. Mignolo insists that there should be plurality in knowledge, as one central approach creates hierarchies that bring one side to the light and hide the other. Soueif explains how imperial powers operate through epistemic binaries that have been centred in European systems of knowledge. These binaries privilege Eurocentric ways of understanding, recording and acting on the history and knowledge. Amal’s character is central to this intervention, who is narrating, mediating and repositioning the locus of enunciation. Through Amal’s character, the author challenges the colonial way of representation by enacting a form of epistemic disobedience. The article argues that Soueif’s use of aesthetics, archives, maps, translations, tapestries, journals, etc., as an epistemological practice, disrupts linear history, endorses border thinking and destabilises Eurocentric truths. In this regard, The Map of Love becomes a critique of modernity enforced by the colonisers. Moreover, it exposes the literary foundation of hegemony and insists on the persistent nature of the decolonial struggle through two different time periods: the colonial era and the postcolonial era.