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.

This book discovers everyday forms of conviviality in fiction and life writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It focuses on ordinary moments of recognition, of hospitality, of humour and kindness in everyday life to illuminate the significance of repertoires of repair in a world broken by relations of power. Through close readings of specific capacities of living with difference, the book excavates ideas of world-making, personhood and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries from African perspectives. It highlights evanescent and more durable attempts at building solidarity across local and translocal settings by focussing on modes of address that invite reciprocity in contexts of injustice, which include Apartheid, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and xenophobia. Putting current research on conviviality in conversation with the literary texts, the book demonstrates how conviviality emerges as an enabling ethical practice, as critique and survival strategy and as embodied lived experience. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

Exploring the relationship between hermeneutics and the arts, including painting, music, and literature, this book builds on hermeneutics from a practical perspective, connecting this area of critical research with others to reveal how it is viewed from different perspectives. International and interdisciplinary in scope, this edited volume draws on the work of scholars and practitioners working across a variety of subject areas, themes and topics, including philosophy, literature, religious paintings, musical oeuvres, Chinese urbanscapes, Moroccan proverbs, and Ukrainian internet blogs. Focusing on the idea of hermeneutics as a discipline that can connect different areas of interest, the book offers an inside view into how the contributors 'interpret' it within their own academic remits, demonstrating its presence in qualitative academic interpretations and canonical contemporary research in humanities.

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 'There is a wonderful sardonic eloquence to this unnamed narrator's voice' Financial Times 'I don't think I've ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home' Independent on Sunday _____________________ He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined – the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life.

Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing examines contemporary cultural representations of transforming identities in the era of increasing global mobility. It pays particular attention to the ways in which cultural encounters are experienced affectively and discursively in migrant literature. Divided into three parts that deal with refugee writing and displacement, migration and memory, and new European identities, the volume develops current methodologies and shows how postcolonial studies can be applied to the study of cultural encounters. Writers studied include Simão Kikamba, Ishmael Beah, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Abu-Jaber, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Caryl Phillips, Jamal Mahjoub, and Monica Ali, and several refugee writers.

This book examines how selected works of fiction advocate for just memories and promote identities that accept ethical agency and that exercise power and control over their own lives and destinies, no matter how limited such control may be.

In this volume, Deckard analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.