Cities in Life-Writing Narratives: A Geocritical Reading of Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love (2003) and Radwa Ashur's Al-Tantouria (2010)

Abstract

The present paper investigates the topographical aspects of literature that have gained an outstanding academic attention within the last decades acknowledging the "spatial turn" in social sciences and humanities. My study espouses a "polysensuous" approach to places and the spatialtemporal scheme addresses postcolonial identities, exile and geographic displacement to argue forcefully the role of the subjective experience of places so as to enhance a textual geographic reading of colonial/postcolonial histories. The present geocritical reading examines the "reassertion of space" in Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love and Radwa Ashur's Al-Tantouria to present, hopefully, a key contribution to the growing body of work in spatial literary studies within the paradigm of life-writing narratives to interrogate the "where" of postcolonial terrains. As such, a geospatial story-telling is a key trope to feature the interest in the interaction between spatial practices and life-writing narratives that depict the two Arab women writers as postcolonial cartographers. The two narratives have been selected since they are relevant to explore life-writing postcolonial geographic critiques to offer a montage of the Self within wounded nations and to blur the borderline between memoirists' personal stories and postcolonial turbulent histories. Within this rationale, the present paper interrogates the spatial discourse as a geographic rupture which represents the core of postcolonial critiques. This post-national comparative literature questions multiethnic zones as well as diasporas to map the postcolonial terrain of the speaking subaltern. The affective literary mapping offers an insightful illumination of poetic topos to experience cities through senses, to inspire spatial transgression and to record personal sensations.