This thesis examines elements of the conceptualization of literature within literary studies and literary production in a UK context, considering the concept of exclusionary practices based on the negligence of intersectional categories of identity such as race, gender, class, sexuality, etc., in the practice of understanding and interpreting literature. The methodologies I employ are close reading of various narratives, such as literary texts, as well as a narrative analysis aimed at a holistic understanding of my material. The second part of this thesis envisions a decolonised approach to literature in which we situate our positionalities when we read and interpret literary works. I demonstrate this through the analysis of several poems, informed by decolonial concepts and sensibilities. The results show that the maintenance of these exclusionary practices advances a grand-narrative of Western civilisation, ignoring the multiple sites people inhabit both from within, and outside, the West and that these practices are effectively harmful. I argue that through the project of decolonising literature there is a possibility of disrupting the perpetual macro-narrative of Western domination and universality.

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).