Postcolonial Literatures and Arts

Connecting with the Non-Human: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Postcolonial Poetics of Materiality in Paradise.

Élodie Raimbault — 2026-05-05

Gurnah’s Paradise details the materiality of trade and the circulation of goods and men in East Africa before WWI. Despite strict colonial frameworks, the relationship between humans and the non-human challenges anthropomorphic structures of interpretation. Gurnah’s poetics of materiality displaces the novel from colonial tropes, as it reterritorializes human modes of relation to the material world. This postcolonial interrogation of human supremacy over matter and bodies participates in an ethical revaluation of the individual’s place and identity.

“Time cheats all of us like that:” Time as Writing Matter in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

Jaine Chemmachery — 2026-05-04

The object of this article is to delve into the issue of time in Paradise. There is a sense of chronological time in the novel, but there are also repetitive references to events, which may be read as an alternative to a conception of time as linear and teleological. Time in Gurnah’s novel is also conceived of as phenomenological and so eminently malleable, which can be articulated with current discussions on European colonization of time. Time in the novel also complicates the coloniser/colonized binary.

“Yusuf sighed heavily, shamed by his failure and dishonour:” Poetics and Politics of Shame in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) and Theft (2025)

Cédric Courtois — 2026-05-04

This article examines shame as an embodied, relational, and political force in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Theft. Drawing on phenomenology and postcolonial theory, it explores how shame structures subordination, visibility, and self-recognition, and argues that Gurnah’s fiction reconfigures shame decolonially.

Slavery and Extractivism: Reading Paradise through the Prism of Decolonial Ecology

Kerry-Jane Wallart — 2026-05-04

This article reads Paradise, by Zanzibari-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah, through the critical approach of decolonial ecocriticism. It focuses on descriptions of extractivist practices in East Africa and connects them with colonialism and its ramifications in the economy of plantations and globalized trade, as well as in the practice of slavery. Such a reading of the novel connects trade, slavery and environmental damage as linked practices of exploitation which a decolonial approach can “delink” (Mignolo 2007). This line of investigation leads to a new interpretation of the omnipresent orality in the novel, as it reveals the sustainability of spoken transmission, a strategy deployed by the narration against confiscations of agency through commodification of various orders.

“I like to fill gaps,” an Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga — 2026-05-04

The interview was led on April 12th, 2024 by Raphaël Thierry during the Festival Livres d’Ailleurs, in Nancy, France. It was transcripted by Marguerite Le Roux (Université d’Orléans)

Raphaël Thierry: It’s very emotional for me to have this opportunity of a discussion, about your journey into publishing and literature. This interview is in the continuity of a marvellous festival that has been held for the past three years. This is the third edition of Livres d’Ailleurs and it is bringing so much light on a diversity of literature and publishing, which is very much needed everywhere. And I will say, especially in France, in our context.

Tsitsi, I had the idea of a discussion that would be about your journey in literature, your relation with your publishers, with your translators, maybe; but also, some views on the evolving reception of your work since your debut. Because I think many things changed, there are many things to discuss. I would like to say again, thank you all, thank you fo...

Writing-back at the German and Kiswahili Archive: Hidden Transcripts and Critical Fabulations in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels Paradise and Afterlives

Nina Berman — 2026-05-04

This article reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Afterlives through the lenses of James C. Scott’s “hidden transcripts” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation.” It argues that Gurnah’s fiction performs epistemic repair by rendering visible subaltern East African perspectives marginalized in both the German colonial archive and Swahili elite writings. The novels thus function as literary archives that complicate colonial historiography and contribute to the decolonization of knowledge about German East Africa.

Cultural Crossroads, Transnational Narratives, and the Poetics of Displacement: Eman Quotah in Conversation with Ishak Berrebah

Ishak Berrebbah — 2026-05-04

In his Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, Steven Salaita explains that “Arab American literature is a new category relative to other ethnic American literary traditions. Americans of Arab origin have been producing literature for around a century, but it is only in the past few decades that ‘Arab American literature,’ as an institutional designation, has come into existence” (2011, 222). This interview engages with the work of Eman Quotah, focusing on her novel Bride of the Sea, a text that offers a nuanced exploration of mobility, belonging, and the affective dimensions of displacement. Situated within contemporary Arab and diasporic literary studies, the conversation examines how Quotah’s narrative negotiates questions of identity formation across shifting cultural, geographic, and linguistic spaces. Through its portrayal of characters shaped by migration, exile, and transnational movement, Bride of the Sea foregrounds the complexities of living between worlds and the...

“Laugh[ing] now before life knots you up:” the Poetics of Laughter in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

Vanessa Guignery — 2026-05-04

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise, characters are often shown laughing, even when facing ordeals and hardships. Drawing from the concept of utani in East Africa (usually translated as “joking relationship”) and from Western theories of laughter, this paper examines the various functions of laughter in the novel to try and determine whether it is used as a means of excluding the more vulnerable or as a tool of cohesion within a multiethnic, multilingual and transcultural society.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: A Reappraisal. Introduction.

Cédric Courtois and Mélanie Joseph-Vilain — 2026-05-04

This special issue on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s works brings together eleven academic articles. Each contribution engages with Paradise (1994), either as its primary focus or through comparative analyses alongside By the Sea (2001) and Theft (2025). The issue also features an article by a historian examining the historical context in which Paradise is set. Ranging from the centrality of materiality in Paradise to explorations of time and space, as well as affect – encompassing emotions such as laughter and shame – across Paradise and other works, these contributions offer original perspectives and methodologies. They also examine the stakes of translating Gurnah’s work into Kiswahili. Together, they deepen our understanding of Gurnah’s nuanced and complex novels.

Contextualising Paradise: East Africa on the Brink of the Twentieth Century

Delphine Froment — 2026-05-04

This article aims to situate the East African region in its historical context on the eve of the twentieth century, in order to provide a few historical and geographical landmarks for understanding Gurnah’s Paradise. It offers a descriptive overview of existing scholarship on East African history. It is also based on the author’s original research into the exploration and colonisation of Mount Kilimanjaro during the nineteenth century.