Colonial Narrative

In AI-generated fiction, a circular default narrative which colludes with colonialist, orientalist and/or imperialist discourse and ideology in form and/or function
Zahra Rizvi 2026-09-18
DOI: 10.64773/600a-e405

Explication

The colonial narrative in AI-generated text is a circular default narrative of a protagonist moving/having moved to an ‘exotic’ or new ‘Other’ place characterised by a marked difference to their original location or ‘Home’, and after experiencing it, returning to the romanticised original location, whether spatially or symbolically. This corresponds to what Lorenzo Veracini (2007) calls the typical “colonial narrative” which “normally have a circular form… consisting of an outward movement followed by interaction with exotic and colonized ‘others’ in foreign surroundings, and by a final return to an original locale” (6). As showcased at the Colonialingualism Symposium, Aarhus University (Rizvi 2026), AI-generated narratives tend to favour the colonial narrative as well. 

The colonial narrative, with its circular, aesthetic, and narrative closure, reveals a deeper imperialist issue within AI-generated text, moving beyond mere surface level, representational bias. Undertaking a close reading of the gpt-stories dataset (Rettberg and Wigers 2025) reveals that the colonial narrative overwhelms the storytelling capacity of the generative model, even at the cost of narrative coherency. In RS_31, Milena is traveling from a romanticised home in Užice to an exoticised Belgrade to meet her brother, even though she meets him at the train station in Užice already. She bids him goodbye to illogically meet him again in Belgrade. 

The colonial narrative is not a new concept in literary and cultural production criticism. In Orientalism (1979), Edward Said describes the creation of the ‘Orient’ as a discursive practice that allows knowledge-making, history, science, and literature to feed into an encyclopaedic sweeping generalisation of the world into two halves – the Occident and the Orient – where the superiority of the former was dependent on the characterisation of the latter as inferior and submissive. Said calls this ‘Orientalism’ and outlines how it affects human history; “as a current of development, as a narrative strand, or as a dynamic force unfolding systematically and materially in time, place and space, human history-of the East or the West-is subordinated to an essentialist, idealist conception of Occident and Orient” (1979, 247). In Culture and Imperialism (1994), Said provides an example through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a text dependent on its two-visioned “circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aesthetically but also mentally unassailable” (24). 

Chinua Achebe recognises the importance of narrative in such a venture, that “man is a story-making animal. He rarely passes an opportunity to accompany his works and his experiences with matching stories. The heavy task of dispossessing others calls for such a story” (2000, 59). Said (1994) points to the novel as “a literary institution” (97), and AbdelRahman, in her reading of the same, comments that it is an institution “with its own conventions that might compel the writer to mold his narrative into certain forms that coincide both with the systematics of the disciplinary order and with the readers’ expectations of it” (2005, 184). Said helps outline how narratives “were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences” (1994, xiii). Haddour offers an in-depth analysis of colonial narrative in practice in Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (2000), from literature to literary theory, identifying the ways in which texts continue to be marked by colonial history and its symbolic memory.  

A popular site of colonial narrative in practice is algorithmic social media platforms, and studies of the same can offer insight into the concept of ‘colonial narrative’. Sean P. Smith (2018) showcases the popularity of colonial narrative in social media storytelling and consumption, revealing “three identifiable visual motifs that, like much of the travel writing produced before the late twentieth century, work to re-affirm colonial-era perceptions of the ‘other’” (2018, 188). These motifs are: first, the tropical exotic that “fixates on empty, dehistoricised scenes of ‘paradise’”; second, the promontory-witness that “scrubs the landscape of the tourist destination of any sign of human habitation but that of the tourist”; and finally, fantasised assimilation that “reflects the imbalances of power that allow the tourist to capriciously don and discard local-ness” (2018, 188–189). From social media, this narrative, already pushed by an algorithm designed for interaction in the form of likes, shares, comments and saves, “may be more widely broadcast and – crucially – imitated” (Smith 2018, 189).  

AI-generated text is one such large-scale production where the colonial narrative is both imitated and broadcasted, amplified by data colonialism and digital colonialism.

See Also

• Algorithmic Narrativity - The combination of the human ability to understand experience through narrative with the power of the computer to process and generate data that results in the development, modification, and distribution of narratives

Works Referenced

AbdelRahman, Fadwa. “Said and Achebe: Writers at the Crossroads of Culture / ﺳﻌﻴﺪ ﻭﺃﺗﺸﻴﺒﻲ: ﻛﺎﺗﺒﺎﻥ ﻓﻲ ﻣﻔﺘﺮﻕ ﻃﺮﻕ ﺍﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﺔ.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 25, 2005, pp. 177–92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4047456.  

Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. Oxford University Press. 2000. 

Rettberg, Jill Walker, and Hermann Wigers. 2025. “A Dataset of 1500-Word Stories Generated by Gpt-4o-Mini for 252 Nationalities.” DataverseNO. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18710/VM2K4O. 

Rizvi, Zahra. “Narrative Geographies of India and Norway in GPT Stories.” Paper presented at Social (In)justice, Indigeneity and Colonialingualism: Recognition, Resistance and Re-Existence” Winter Symposium. February 27, 2026. 

Said, Edward. Culture And Imperialism. Vintage Books. 1994. 

---. Orientalism. Vintage Books. 1979. 

Smith, Sean P. “Instagram Abroad: Performance, Consumption and Colonial Narrative in Tourism.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018, pp. 172–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2018.1461173. 

Veracini, Lorenzo. “Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation.” Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive), January 1, 2007. https://ro.uow.edu.au/articles/journal_contribution/Settler_colonialism_and_decolonisation/27713934/1.

Further Reading

Ahmad, Aijaz. “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said.” In Imperialism. Routledge. 2004. 

Kwet, Michael. “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class, vol. 60, no. 4, 2019, pp. 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172. 

Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.”’ Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647. 

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey.1986. 

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 215–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005. 

Ricaurte, Paola. “Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance.” Television & New Media, vol. 20, no. 4, 2019, pp. 350–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419831640.

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