Dr. Ahmed Shalabi:

Dr. Ahmed Shalabi obtained his PhD from the  University  of  Jordan in 2023. He currently works as an assistant professor at the Department of English Literature at Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Jordan. His research interest includes contemporary Anglophone diasporic Arab literature and the emerging Occidentalist discourse.

Prof. Yousef Abu Amrieh:

Prof. Yousef Abu Amrieh is a professor of contemporary Arab diasporic literature at the University of Jordan. He is the founder of Contemporary Arab Diasporic Literary Studies (CADLS), an international research group based at the University of Jordan.

In Leeds City Art Gallery, visitors can see George William Joy’s painting General Gordon’s Last Stand (1893). The painting, which depicts the last moments of the life of General Charles George Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan who was killed during the Mahdist Revolution in 1885, stirred the British public’s and government’s sense of vengeance because it depicts the “savagery” of the crawling native and the “heroic” end of one of the carriers of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ It represents a perfect example of how pro-colonial art and artists helped mobilize the Empire’s colonial project. As a Sudanese British novelist, Leila Aboulela (b. 1964) has depicted in her novels Sudanese people’s (mis)fortunes under British colonialism. Hence, the aim of this paper is to examine how Aboulela’s most recent historical novel River Spirit (2023) interpolates the grand narrative that Joy’s painting perpetuates. We argue that the novel decolonizes what pro-colonial art narrates about the “heroism” of the colonizer and the “backwardness” of the colonized in overseas colonies. On the one hand, Aboulela creates a fictional artist whom she models on Joy’s character and vividly depicts his aspirations of garnering fortune and fame while in Sudan. On the other hand, Aboulela’s fictionalization of Gordon’s assassin, a Sudanese man named Musa, is meant to deconstruct the historical narrative of the dominant culture by giving the natives a space to tell their versions of the story. By doing so, Aboulela encourages readers to view one of the most significant events in British colonial history with fresh eyes, and consequently, re-interpret historical colonial accounts.