From Interpretative Disjunction to Dialectical Conception

A “Representation–Power–Ethics–Resistance” Framework for Spatial Justice and Its Application to Brick Lane

Abstract

This article proposes a four-dimensional “representation–power–ethics–resistance” framework to engage with the interpretative disjunction in literary spatial justice studies. The framework draws on widely recognised insights from Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, and Fredric Jameson as interconnected analytical prompts, seeking to transform theoretical tensions into a productive dialectical structure. As a flexible heuristic, it facilitates a dialogical movement across ideological decoding, political‑economic critique, ethical engagement with marginalised subjects, and utopian spatial resistance. Its reflexivity is brought into dialogue with Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, where the novel’s textual complexities challenge and refine the framework’s presuppositions. The analysis attempts to bring to light the interwoven mechanisms of racial, gendered, and capitalist power in immigrant spaces, while highlighting how the protagonist reconstructs spatial meaning and subjectivity through conditional practices understood as a form of internal spatial transformation. The article suggests that the framework may function less as a definitive model than as a dynamic analytical terrain, one that directs critical attention to specific configurations of spatial justice while remaining receptive to revision by textual particularities. In this capacity, it seeks to illuminate how literature opens cognitive and practical pathways towards imagining just spaces.