Cities as Protagonists: Spatial Justice and the Poetics of Resistance in Geetanjali Shree’s Our City That Year

Abstract This article examines Geetanjali Shree’s Our City That Year through Edward Soja’s spatial trialectics to argue that urban space in contemporary Indian fiction functions not as a passive backdrop but as a constitutive force shaping memory, violence, and resistance. Against the background of South Asian communal violence and necropolitical urban transformations, the study demonstrates how Shree’s narrative mobilizes Firstspace materialities, Secondspace ideologies, and Thirdspace insurgencies to reconfigure the city as both archive and battleground. Through architectural motifs, auditory saturations, symbolic inscriptions, and domestic interiors, the novel reveals how power inscribes itself into material and representational geographies. Yet, these closures are persistently unsettled by minor gestures – Shruti’s traversal of interstitial spaces, Hanif’s silent presence on the balcony, Daddu’s recitations of Urdu poetry, or the feline indifference to partitioned geographies – which expose fissures of Thirdspace possibility. By framing the city as a protagonist in its own right, the novel enacts a poetics of urban space that destabilizes hegemonic cartographies of exclusion and foregrounds resistant forms of inhabitation. In so doing, the article contends that Our City That Year performs spatial praxis by producing insurgent geographies that resist erasure and sustain radical openness. The study concludes that theorizing literary space is indispensable for understanding how Indian fiction articulates urban belonging, dislocation, and justice in the aftermath of communal trauma.