Decolonial Affect and the Politics of Feeling Otherwise: Emotional Sovereignty in Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends

Abstract

This research examines the politics of emotion in Kamila Shamsie's Best of Friends, adopting a decolonial affective approach showing how postcolonial individual inherit, internalize and navigate emotional codes influenced by colonial legacies. The work focuses on a friendship bond between Zahra and Maryam, analyzing the impact of colonial and patriarchal legacies on emotional expression and interpersonal relationships, highlighting the unequal distribution of feelings through inherited systems of power. This study introduces the concept of emotional sovereignty to shed light on the postcolonial subject's struggle to negotiate for survival through various affective strategies, particularly engaging with Frantz Fanon's decolonial psychology and Sara Ahmed's theory of affective economies. The research demonstrates how friendship emerges as a crucial affective site in the reproduction and subversion of colonial power through an intimate textual analysis. Asserting that to "feel otherwise" is a decolonial practice and reclamation of emotional agency, the study concludes that Best of Friends provides a sustained critique of emotional regulation under postcolonial conditions