Transcultural Encounters: The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah

When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, this came as a surprise to many readers, not only in Germany. At the Institute of English and American Studies, however, Gurnah has been well known for many years, and his novels have featured in several seminars and lectures. Yet, we have not had a seminar focussing exclusively on his writings, which will be remedied in this class.

We will discuss five novels written between 1988 and 2020 and follow Gurnah’s unique mode of representing transcultural encounters both in colonial as well as contemporary East Africa and in Britain. Among the topics to be discussed will be Gurnah’s assessment of German and British colonialism and its legacies, the emergence of transcultural connections between Africa, Asia and the Arab world in East Africa during precolonial, colonial and postcolonial times, the role of cultural, religious and linguistic conviviality in Gurnah’s writings, his appraisal of the Black and British presence in contemporary Europe and his critique of authoritarian politics in contemporary Africa.