E-Thesis 31 views
Femilial Cartography: The Hybrid Aesthetic as Decolonial Practice / NASIA SARWAR-SKUSE
Swansea University Author: NASIA SARWAR-SKUSE
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DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUThesis.71474
Abstract
This thesis includes a creative work, Femilial Cartography, and a critical exegesis, The Hybrid Aesthetic as Decolonial Practice, both of which explore how the hybrid aesthetic functions as a decolonial methodology, challenging dominant epistemologies and offering alternative ways of narrating self,...
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Swansea University
2026
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Farebrother. R. |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa71474 |
| Abstract: |
This thesis includes a creative work, Femilial Cartography, and a critical exegesis, The Hybrid Aesthetic as Decolonial Practice, both of which explore how the hybrid aesthetic functions as a decolonial methodology, challenging dominant epistemologies and offering alternative ways of narrating self, history, and community.Femilial Cartography, a formally innovative work, begins as an intimate exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and unfolds into a broader meditation on memory, identity, and inheritance. Through a fragmented, non-linear structure, the narrative traverses time, borders, family, history, to unearth stories buried by colonialism, migration, and gendered silence.Disrupting singular historical accounts, it asks how the legacies of empire shape national identity, cultural expectation, and personal memory.Assembling and interpreting a family archive, I uncover subjugated histories and reconstruct personal and collective memory, tracing how ordinary lives are entangled with colonialism, Partition, migration, and inherited identity. This engagement becomes a way of challenging dominant epistemologies rooted in colonial logics. Through opacity, affect, and the fragment, my creative methodology resists these frameworks, reimagining the archive as a living, unstable, generative space.Femilial Cartography also considers how memory is transmitted, fractured, and reshaped across generations, revealing the entanglement of family narratives with broader political forces. The work links the enduring influence of Indian colonisation to contemporary Pakistani norms around nationhood, motherhood, and the gendered expectation that women act as custodians of cultural identity.The critical exegesis theorises the strategies of the creative text, articulating a hybrid aesthetic as decolonial practice. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, it defends fragmentation, non-linearity as aesthetic refusals of dominant epistemologies and a disruption of narratives that demand clarity and categorisation. It introduces the new critical termfemilial to describe the nuanced mother-daughter dynamic. Unlike familial, which generalises kinship ties, femilial emphasises the specifically gendered and affective dimensions of the relationship. |
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| Item Description: |
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| Keywords: |
Creative and Critical Writing |
| College: |
College of Arts and Humanities |
| Funders: |
Swansea University Research Excellence Scholarship |