Postcolonial Imaginations: Approaching a “Fictionable” World through the Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris

Postcolonial geographers’ calls for greater multivocality in geographical knowledge can be approached through a deeper and more explicit engagement with postcolonial literature. The article draws from postcolonial studies and literary theorists to argue that an exploration of literature tends to reenvisage the world as “fictionable”; that is, open to multiple interpretations and perspectives. A brief review of geographical approaches to texts and to literature highlights the notion of the “text event,” in which writers, texts, and readers jointly create meaning. This notion of “text event” is then explored through the “geographies of disorientation” of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris, including close readings of extracts from “La Colonie du Nouveau Monde” and “Jonestown.” Using postcolonial literature to help establish the world as fictionable opens up experiences of not only reading but of being read by the “other” and warns that this opening to difference, although necessary, can be painfully disturbing.