1st Edition
Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah
This edited volume provides a wide- ranging introduction to the novelistic oeuvre of the prize- winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah. It addresses a gap in Gurnah scholarship by including chapters which discuss his earlier works that have not received the scholarly attention they deserve.
Drawing on a range of critical lenses including postcolonial theory, Indian Ocean studies, psychoanalytic theory, migration studies and gender studies, this book provides illuminating commentary on his novels. Attentive to the geographical and historical reach of the narratives, the chapters engage with recurring thematic concerns of departures and arrivals; of complex family relationships; and of precarious cosmopolitan hospitality in situations of changing power relations from the old Indian Ocean monsoon trading system to colonial and postcolonial contexts. The volume concludes with an author interview. It will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.
1. Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah
Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen
2. Reading Melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way
Jopi Nyman
3. From Black Britain to Black Internationalism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way
Emad Mirmotahari
4. Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge to Culture
David Callahan
5. Postmodern Materialism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Dottie: Intertextuality as Ideological Critique of Englishness
Simon Lewis
6. Yusuf’s Choice: East African Agency During the German Colonial Period in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel Paradise
Nina Berman
7. The Submerged History of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence
Maria Olaussen
8. Narrative Cartographies, ‘Beautiful Things’ and Littoral States in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
Meg Samuelson
9. ‘It Worked in a Different Way’: Male Same- Sex Desire in the Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah
Kate Houlden
10. Honour and Shame in the Construction of Difference in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels
Godwin Siundu
11. White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Charne Lavery
12. At the Margins: Silences in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence and The Last Gift
Kimani Kaigai
13. Locating Abdulrazak Gurnah: Margins, Mainstreams, Mobilities
Sally- Ann Murray
14. A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah
Tina Steiner
Biography
Tina Steiner, author of Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature (2009) and Convivial Worlds: Writing Relation from Africa (2021), teaches in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. She co-edits the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies.
Maria Olaussen is Professor of English at the University of Gothenburg. She has published widely on African literature and postcolonial studies. She is the editor of Africa Writing Europe: Oppositions, Entanglements, Juxtapositions (2009).
