Mare Incognitum: Postcolonial Geographies, Literary Landscapes

This paper investigates the spatial turn in postcolonial literary theory, foregrounding the entanglement of place, narrative, and power in literary representations of geography. The title ‘mare incognitum’—the ‘unknown sea’ marked on colonial maps—serves as a metaphor for the epistemic violence of imperial cartography, and for the counter-cartographic strategies deployed by postcolonial writers. This study interrogates how literary texts unsettle colonial spatial logics and reimagine geography as a discursive and affective terrain. The concept of landscape constitutes the central focal point to the inquiry. It is a hybrid neologism that fuses ‘landscape’ with ‘space’ to emphasize the relationship between spatial representation and narrative form. Drawing on postcolonial theory and geography, this study examines how spatial metaphors—particularly the oceanic, the archipelagic, and the periphery—disrupt hegemonic cartographies and open sites for subaltern expression and transnational solidarity. In this article, the term ‘landscape’ will be approached as a hybrid concept that will simultaneously mean landscape and space. The analysis presents a selection of postcolonial literature from the Indian subcontinent and South Asia including Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, as well as the narratives of E. M. Forster and Daniel Defoe. This study investigates how spatial tropes—borders, thresholds, ruins, and archipelagos—mediate histories of displacement and resistance. The texts in question do not merely represent space; they perform spatial critique, reconfiguring geography as a palimpsest of violence, memory, and survival. Ultimately, the present study theorizes literary space as a site of epistemological intervention, where dominant narratives of territory, belonging, and modernity are deconstructed and rewritten. By treating geography as a semiotic system subject to contestation, this study also contributes to ongoing debates in literary theory about the politics of space, the aesthetics of place-making, and the decolonization of knowledge.