E. M. Forster among the Ruins

Stuart Christie argues that E. M. Forster’s conative bodies—constituted by their material alliance with other bodies, in this case his Egyptian lover el’Adl, and the North African natural and built environs which surround them—make possible a new ethics of contact within the British Empire. Mixing material and textual encounters allows Forster to begin to re-make the colonizer-colonized relationship, demonstrating human imbrication in landscapes native and foreign, as well as the way in which bodies function as both barriers and bridges to the readability of othered spaces.