The Imperial Cartography in Maugham’s Novel Ah-king

Zilin Wang

doi:10.63313/LHP.8028

Authors

Zilin Wang School of Foreign Languages, Nanning Normal University, Nanning, 530000, China Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63313/LHP.8028

Keywords:

Literary Cartography, Maugham, Ah King, Southeast Asian

Abstract

Britain’s 20th-century colonial expansion constructed Southeast Asia as a crucial geographical and cultural Other. Maugham’s collection of short stories, Ah-king, reveals the psychological dislocation and power anxiety of imperial subjects in spatial practices through its depiction of colonizers’ inhabitation, mapping, and loss in foreign lands. Drawing on Robert Tally’s theory of literary cartography, we can examine how architecture, clubs, navigation guides, and travel itineraries became media for colonizers to understand, control, and symbolically reshape Southeast Asia. However, these acts of cartography failed to truly consolidate imperial authority: the guidebooks’ “poetic” qualities masked a desire for conquest, the clubs’ “rituals” maintained a fragile community, and the shift from a “cartographer-based” gaze to an “iterative” experience foreshadowed the complete collapse of the colonial cognitive system. Maugham not only depicts the disorder of colonial space but also reveals spatial countermeasures and resistance to imperial cartography.

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