A decolonial reading presupposes provincializing the Eurocentric modernity/coloniality, which evaluates non-European cultural traditions exclusively in light of the European model, and from within the European tradition, instead of perceiving these traditions from the outside, and from an external position. As a result, non-European cultures are recognized and framed as subordinate not for being unfamiliarly different to their Western counterpart, but for being a deformed aberration to the universalized monolithic norm. Under such coloniality of imagination, the particular complexities of the non-European imaginaire are devalued by the rhetoric of modernity. A decolonial reading of Khayri Shalabi’s imaginary travelogue Rehālāt al- Torshagi al-Halwagi fi al-Zamān (1983) embarks from exploring the poetics of deconstruct- ing “the colonization of the imagination” (Quijano 23). The paper examines the revalidation of the local cultural heritage, and the restitution of narrative traditions as manifestations of alterity to modernity.

Full paper: https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4510