Carmen Thong

CESTA Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship Project:

Encoding the Postcolonial in Place

I hypothesize that places can be imbued and encoded with ideas that correspond to the overall narrative structure of the nation, and that literature plays a big role in these processes of encoding. I aim to investigate if, for postcolonial nations, this process of place encoding is largely dominated by colonial discourses. If so, how might knowing what has been encoded into postcolonial locales, and how, be used to overwrite these encodings with local narratives?