• 1 “La littérature africaine en anglais, en français, ou en portugais, a beaucoup à dire à l’africanis (...)

African literature in English, French, or Portuguese has much to say to the Africanist, provided it is approached with an open attentiveness that takes into account […] the sociological and political diversity of writers and countries […]. Its reading must be undertaken with the tools of literary criticism and must never drift into documentary critique. Whatever value judgments – often revisable – one may pass on a given work, one must remember that the African writer, like any other artist who commits words to print, once he writes, stages an imaginary world: that of the society he expresses, but also modifies and complexifies. The text is never univocal; its functions are plural. It acts through the richness of its levels of meaning, the aesthetic pleasure and the emotion it generates, as much as through what it represents or the ideas it advances. The novel, poetry, and drama articulate the variety of cultures and forms of change, contemporary anxieties and modern myths: they reveal ways of “being African,” and at the same time, to a greater or lesser extent, they create them. (Bardolph 1995, 735: our translation)1

I recognise this sense of seeing oneself through the eyes of another culture, and one which is used to despising you. Most of what we read described the doings of Europeans in the world – explorers, scientists, historians, legions of Cortezes staring with eagle eyes across open seas. The histories we read, though they were delivered with authority, were too self-flattering to be true – and what we read as literature was clearly not meant for us, even if at times we figured in these stories in the way that I alluded to above. And before I could learn to read these texts and see what was there, I first had to learn to look at myself through different eyes, to imagine myself differently as a consumer of these narratives. (Gurnah 2022, 24)

In England, I gained a better understanding of how someone like me figured in some of their stories of themselves, both in their writing and in casual discourse; in the hilarity that greeted racist jokes on the TV and elsewhere; in the unforced hostility I met in everyday encounters in shops, in offices, on the bus. I could not do anything about that reception, but just as I learned to read with greater understanding, so a desire grew to write – in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us. (2022, 7–8)

3Reading and writing emerge as intertwined practices of identity formation and resistance, enabling the colonially marginalised subject – or “subaltern” (Guha 1982) – to perceive, critique, and reconfigure the hierarchies embedded in dominant narratives. These hierarchies, in turn, often take the form of the familiar “savage/civilised” dichotomy, reinforced in European discourse through the definition of “uncivilized,” from the Oxford English Dictionary, as “‘existing in the lowest stage of culture’” (qtd. in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 191). In Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Marianna Torgovnik argues that such terms as “primitive [,] savage, pre-Columbian, tribal, third world, underdeveloped, developing, archaic, traditional, exotic […], non-Western, and Other [,] all take the West as norm and define the rest as inferior, different, deviant, subordinate, and subordinateable” (1990, 21). In a similar vein, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe critiqued Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1977), observing how Africa is depicted as a foil against which the West establishes its supposed civilisational superiority, a point that resonates with one of Edward Said’s central arguments in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978). Gurnah’s reflections align with this critical frame: the asymmetry of power in representation shapes both the objects and subjects of imperial discourse, an argument that Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, develops in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2008). By learning to read “through different eyes” and writing in refusal of simplistic and reductive hierarchies, Gurnah has always engaged the “civilised/savage” binary that underpins Western epistemologies and self-definition. Western identity emerges through this structuring opposition, consolidating its claim to civilisation by projecting an imagined abyss of savagery onto colonised spaces – including Africa. Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, exposes this tension, not merely as a critique of imperial epistemology but as a site for imaginative reconstruction.

4Postcolonial theory provides a first and necessary framework for understanding Gurnah’s interventions. Said’s concept of “contrapuntal reading” (1994, 66) encourages us to trace the simultaneous presence of colonising and colonised voices, revealing the power relations that undergird literary texts. In Culture and Imperialism, he proposes to read canonical European works with an awareness of the imperial histories that made them possible, attending at once to the structures of domination they naturalise and to the resistant histories they suppress (1994, 66–67). Such a method visibilises what European narratives marginalise: the material and epistemic conditions of empire. Through this lens, Gurnah’s work may be understood as a deliberate engagement with the literary and social frameworks that construct (a colonised) “us” up against (a colonising) “them,” offering both a critique of Western epistemic authority and a model for imaginative self-fashioning within, against, and beyond imperial discourse. His novels return repeatedly to the asymmetries of power embedded in colonial historiography, but they also reflect on the labour required to “imagine [one]self differently” (Gurnah 2022, 24).

5Yet, if Said’s “contrapuntal” method exposes the imperial scaffolding of Western narratives, Gurnah’s Paradise goes further: it does not merely read back into (German and British) empire(s) but repositions the locus of enunciation itself. Here, the tools of decolonial theory prove equally useful. To take but one example, Walter D. Mignolo’s notion of “delinking” (2007) describes an epistemic shift away from the universalising claims of Western modernity and its “colonial matrix of power,” (455) advocating instead modes of thinking – or, epistemologies – grounded in non-Western geo-cultural locations. From this decolonial perspective, Paradise can be seen not only as a critique of imperial representation but as an act of epistemic reorientation: it narrates East Africa from within its own commercial, religious, and linguistic networks, rather than as a derivative appendage of Europe. The novel thus unsettles the Hegelian assumption that history radiates outward from the imperial centre. It relocates narrative authority in the Indian Ocean world, bringing to the fore Swahili, Islamic, and Indian mercantile networks that precede and exceed European intervention/invasion.

7If Said’s contrapuntal method traditionally involved recovering colonial histories in metropolitan texts – among which Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Said 1994, 19–30) – Paradise invites a reversal of perspective. The novel does not require empire to be read back into it; rather, it recentres East Africa as narrative origin and historical agent. A contrapuntal reading of Paradise would therefore situate it alongside the European adventure narratives and imperial archives that once made the region mere backdrop or, worse even, utter void, as shown in Heart of Darkness when Marlow recounts: “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there’” (Conrad 2016, 8) . In contrast to the metaphysical abstraction of Africa in much nineteenth-century fiction, Gurnah depicts dense commercial networks, multilingual exchanges, Islamic scholarship, and precolonial systems of hierarchy and bondage that precede and complicate European intervention. Empire appears not as the beginning of history, but as an intrusion into an already complex world.

8It is worth recalling that the other African authors recently to feature on the Agrégation syllabus were Nadine Gordimer in 2019, with her collection of short stories Jump (1990), and Ben Okri in 2013, with his novel The Famished Road (1991). The selection of Paradise therefore marks both a continuity and a shift: continuity in the recognition of African literatures within Anglophone studies, and a shift toward the Indian Ocean world and the late nineteenth-century moment of German colonial expansion in East Africa. Within Gurnah’s oeuvre, Paradise occupies a pivotal position. Set on the eve of colonial conquest, it traces the coming-of-age of Yusuf against the backdrop of caravan trade, bondage, and the gradual encroachment of European power. The novel’s layered intertextuality – its dialogue with Biblical, Qur’anic, and adventure narratives, as well as European and Swahili literatures – enacts precisely the “double vision” evoked in “Learning to Read.” Indeed, the novel may be said not only to invite Said’s “contrapuntal reading” but to perform it: imperial presence and local history unfold simultaneously, neither fully subsuming the other, generating a textured account of overlapping territories and intertwined temporalities.

10Placed as an epigraph to this volume, Bardolph’s words resonate with particular force. They also stand as a tribute to a pioneering figure in the development of African literary studies in France. At a moment when Paradise enters the Agrégation syllabus and participates in the ongoing reconfiguration of the canon, Bardolph’s insistence on methodological rigour and aesthetic attentiveness acquires renewed relevance. Her reminder that African literature must be read with the tools of literary criticism – never reduced to documentary evidence – speaks directly to the pedagogical and critical stakes we had in mind while writing this introduction to the special issue on Gurnah’s work. To read Gurnah in the spirit Bardolph advocates is to resist the temptation to treat Paradise as a transparent window onto East African history. Rather, it is to recognise the novel as a complex imaginative construction, one that stages, reshapes, and interrogates the social worlds it evokes. In this sense, Bardolph’s reflection not only frames our approach but also honours the intellectual genealogy that has made such readings possible within French academia. This special issue of Postcolonial Literatures and Arts is primarily devoted to Paradise, a novel that has already generated substantial critical work. Our aim, however, is not only to try and revisit a canonical text but also to contribute more broadly to Gurnah studies. Several contributions extend the scope to other works, including By the Sea (2001), Afterlives (2020), and Theft (2025), thereby situating Paradise within the wider arc of Gurnah’s evolving concerns.

11The volume follows the conference organised at the University of Lille in October 2025, which brought together scholars working on Gurnah’s oeuvre from a variety of methodological and geographical perspectives. If Gurnah teaches us that reading is an ethical and imaginative labour, then the essays collected here take up that injunction collectively. They propose various ways of reading Paradise – and, through these various perspectives, of rethinking the literary, historical, and pedagogical frameworks within which African and Indian Ocean literatures are taught today.

12The articles in this issue approach Paradise and the wider oeuvre of Abdulrazak Gurnah from three main angles. First, several contributions situate the novels within their historical contexts. Delphine Froment adopts a historian’s perspective to examine how various kinds of colonial encounters shaped the complex power relations depicted by Gurnah in Paradise. Similarly, Nina Berman and Rachel Muchira address the historical relevance of Gurnah’s fiction, reading Paradise and Afterlives through the lenses of James C. Scott’s “hidden transcripts” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” arguing that Gurnah’s novels restore subaltern East African perspectives, which were marginalised in both the German colonial archive and Swahili elite writings. The literary archives thus created complement colonial historiography and contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge about German East Africa. Kerry-Jane Wallart also brings to the fore the decolonial potential of Paradise, showing – through a decolonial ecocritical lens – how the novel stages extractivist practices in Africa and connects them with European colonialism. Wallart shows the entanglement between trade, slavery and environmental damage as common practices of exploitation. Her article also contrasts these practices with the sustainability of orality, a strategy deployed by the narration against confiscations of agency. In a related vein, Elodie Raimbault explores the implications of trade, analysing the way in which Gurnah’s “poetics of materiality” displaces and challenges the boundaries between humans and the non-human but also interrogates human supremacy over matter and bodies, thus participating in an ethical revaluation of the individual’s place and identity though a postcolonial lens. Jaine Chemmachery shifts the focus from materiality to the question of temporality. She reads temporality in Paradise as both chronological and phenomenological, showing how the novel incorporates, yet destabilises European conceptions of time, thereby complicating the coloniser/colonised binary. Complementing this approach, Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot analyses the representation of place in Paradise and By the Sea, arguing that it is both implacable and unplaceable or, as she coins it, “impleaceable” – an inherently unstable signifier that continually calls for interpretation.

13The second thematic strand of the special issue of Postcolonial Literatures and Arts turns to corporeality and/or affect, foregrounding the role of embodied experience and emotional registers in Gurnah’s work. Christine Lorre reads corporeality in Paradise as a site where affect and power converge: bodies in motion (on trains, in caravans…) register colonial transformation through sensation, vulnerability, and constrained mobility. The characters’ embodied perception – particularly Yusuf’s – reveals how affect emerges through physical experience and relational encounters, while grotesque and organic bodies expose the instability of the social order and the violence of empire at a visceral level. Ultimately, corporeality reveals a paradox: movement generates awareness and forms of minor agency, but not true emancipation under colonial domination. In a complementary perspective, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain focuses on storytelling in Paradise as a key medium through which characters interpret the world and negotiate identity. Stories – shaped by Islamic culture and oral exchange – circulate as performances and performative acts that inform, entertain, and structure power relations, while also shaping affective responses and social belonging. Through these staged interactions between teller(s) and listener(s), identities emerge as fluid, performative, and collectively constructed. Vanessa Guignery, in turn, explores the ambivalent role of laughter in Paradise, where it can both reinforce hierarchies by targeting vulnerable characters and create social bonds through shared humour. Drawing on the concept of utani, she shows laughter to be simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary, reflecting tensions between ethnic, social, and gender groups in East African society and revealing, beneath its apparent lightness, the persistence of inequality and fragile human connection. Similarly, Cédric Courtois argues that shame is a central, embodied affect in Paradise and Theft, shaping experiences of subordination and social exclusion. Through the cases of the respective two main characters, Yusuf and Badar, he shows how shame is internalised via language, hierarchy, and the gaze of others, functioning as a mechanism of (post-)colonial control tied to visibility and misrecognition. Drawing on phenomenology, he frames shame as lived through the body and relational experience, highlighting Gurnah’s “recalibration” of shame – he mentions the Kiswahili terms aibu and fedheha – as both oppressive and potentially transformative.

14The last two articles turn to the question of languages, focusing on Ida Hadjivayanis’s translation of some of Gurnah’s novels into Kiswahili. Nathalie Carré argues that this translation effectively brings Paradise “home,” and, through a comparative reading of the English and Kiswahili versions, she explores its implications for reception, circulation, and interpretation. Concluding this section, and the whole issue, Ida Hadjivayanis provides a first-hand account of her own practice as a translator, reflecting on the dynamics underlying her translation of Gurnah’s novels, particularly Paradise and Theft, translated respectively as Peponi (2022) and Dhulma (2025). Connecting the dots between theoretical reflection on translation and detailed examples from her practice, she provides a unique perspective on the process described by Carré as “bringing home” Gurnah’s novels. Together, these contributions provide valuable insight into the creative and cultural dynamics of translation.