How place creates time: imagined architecture as an expression of identity in Ramona Wheeler’s Three Princes

This paper focuses on Ramona Wheeler’s novel Three Princes (2014), which presents us with an alternate 19th century CE, in which the Egyptian empire and Tawantinsuyu—spanning Europe, Africa and part of Asia, and most of South and Central America respectively—are the most influential stakeholders in international politics. Wheeler provides a characterisation of this alternate world by means of lavish descriptions of the surrounding natural and built environment. In this context, I explore how architecture plays a key role not only in the configuration of an imagined world, but also in the construction of the identity of the actors in Wheeler’s narrative. In particular, I rely on the theoretical framework of Orientalism, and further, on the ideas of ‘third space’ and ‘cultural hybridity’ developed by Homi Bhabha to determine to what extent imagined geographies and their architectural expressions perpetuate some dichotomies often encountered in Orientalist approaches to ancient cultures.