Alternative Geographies and Urban Parks: Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino in Imperial London

Computational study of books published in Britain 1880–1940 revealed distinctive geographic features in writing by foreign-born authors of color: a preference for famous British cultural sites and for London's parks. This essay suggests reasons for those trends through close analysis of the work of two such authors, Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino. Their otherwise diverse work negotiated racialized spatial and social divisions to resist imperial hierarchies and re-vision transnational relations. Centering the socio-spatial politics of London's parks, their work employed the sites as tools for reshaping imperial London into a place of belonging.