Writing Back to Empire
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” and German Colonialism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Afterlives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21408166 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Florian Stadtler (0000-0002-2301-550X, University of Bristol), Florian C J Stadtler (University of Bristol, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 74 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 9-22 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0044-2305 • E-ISSN: 2196-4726 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/zaa-2025-2041 |
| OpenAlex | W7133498168 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
This article discusses the representation of the colonising German in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction in relation to dominant historical and contemporary discourses about German colonialism, which remain a polarised issue. Considering Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) as case studies, it focuses on Gurnah’s fictional representations of German colonialists in Deutsch-Ostafrika and analyses Germany’s sparse acknowledgment of this brutal history. Furthermore, it explores how Gurnah connects this history with wider historical circuits both in the Indian Ocean World, Britain, Europe, and Germany. The article argues that Gurnah’s approach in Afterlives unmasks a German refusal to fully confront this past in public discourse in spite of archival documentation. The article will engage with wider intertextual connections that reveal the complexities in creative and fictional representations of East Africa’s colonial encounter with Germany. Through these modalities it will be argued that Gurnah animates in his novels the concept of the postcolonial, not as a temporal designator or theoretical construction, but as a critical-conceptual stance and reading practice
Colonialism · German · German studies · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Reading (process) · Relation (database) · Representation (politics) · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Literature and Cultural Memory
Askari, colonial encounters, and postcolonial war commemoration in Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Reframing colonial amnesia
An Image of Africa
The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past
German Colonialism in East Africa and Its Aftermath in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Novels Paradise and Afterlives and in Contemporary German Literature
Yusuf's Choice
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |