Coloniality, Epistemic Disobedience and the Imperial Self in Tennyson’s "Ulysses": A Decolonial Inquiry

Ulysses (1842) by Alfred Lord Tennyson, an iconic work of Victorian poetry, explores ambition, identity, and the quest for knowledge, though its engagement with imperial structures has been largely unexamined. This paper provides the first sustained decolonial reading of Ulysses grounded explicitly in decolonial theory, filling a significant gap in scholarship that has generally focused on the poem through existential, humanist, and postcolonial analyses without engaging its more complex involvement with the colonial matrix of power. Drawing on decolonial theory and close textual reading, the study reveals that the poem reinforces imperial modernity by idealizing heroic mobility, erasing subaltern subjectivity, and imperializing geography. Rather than embodying universal human striving, the text performs epistemic domination, ontological hierarchy, and spatial reordering. Foregrounding epistemic disobedience and other forms of spatial imagination, this article contributes to the decolonial critique of literature by showing how decolonial reading extends beyond postcolonial critique in unsettling dominant epistemological traditions. It promotes interpretive practices that decenter canonical frameworks and open them to different epistemic and spatial possibilities.