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In recent years, focus on issue of the spatial has increased exponentially. Briefly charting this rise in its various theoretical forms, we may locate a common theme within many of the positions taken up in response to the spatial: a concern with turmoil and oppression, and with a shifting of both physical and political boundaries. Nowhere is this concern more explicit than in the post-colonial response to what may be seen as the most violent violation of space: the colonial appropriation of land and territory as part of the various imperial projects of previous centuries. In post-colonial writing the colonial space is acknowledged, rejected for its inauthenticity and then re-made. A detailed reading of a particular text – Ben Okri’s Infinite Riches – and of a particular space within this text – the city – allows us to exemplify some of the narrative strategies by which such a powerful reclaiming of space may be asserted by the post-colonial author.
June 2004: Sara Upstone is an AHRB-funded research student at Birkbeck College, where she also teaches. She is working on transformations of space in the postcolonial, magical realist novel. She has published articles on subjects ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien to Toni Morrison. Her research interests include postcolonial, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, cultural and spatial theory and popular culture.