Abdulrazak Gurnah: Between East Africa and the Indian Ocean World

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, novelist and critic Abdulrazak Gurnah - winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 - is celebrated for his literary oeuvre that, according to the Nobel Prize committee, explores the "the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." European colonialism is indeed a major theme in Gurnah's work, but this assessment overlooks Gurnah's remarkable role as a chronicler of East Africa's complex historical relationship with the Indian Ocean world. In this course, we will read Gurnah's novels and essays alongside current scholarship on East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Zanzibar's connection to the Arabian Peninsula. Our aim is to grasp the nuances of slavery, racialization, language politics, and diaspora formation in the Indian Ocean context as imagined in the fiction of a major contemporary writer.