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Description
This paper examines Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as a literary exploration of crisis in colonial and postcolonial East Africa, with particular attention to the material crisis of survival under imperial violence and the cultural crisis of remembering and narrating that violence in its aftermath. Set during German colonial rule and the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–1907), the novel represents how war, forced conscription, and displacement disrupt everyday life and destabilize entire communities. Colonialism emerges not as an isolated episode of conquest but as a system of prolonged crisis that normalizes instability and precarity. Equally central is the novel’s representation of cultural and memory crises. Gurnah emphasizes how colonial trauma resists full articulation, producing fragmented and silenced narratives. Testimonies of violence remain contested, revealing the gaps between official histories and lived experiences. By foregrounding erasure, absence, and the difficulty of transmission, Afterlives highlights how the afterlife of empire continues to unsettle identity and historical continuity. In bringing together these material and cultural dimensions, the paper argues that Gurnah redefines crisis as both a structural condition of empire and an enduring legacy that persists across generations. The novel points out that the impact of colonial violence cannot be confined to the past; it endures in the precariousness of survival, the fragility of cultural memory, and the unresolved struggle to narrate histories of suffering. Through this dual focus, the paper examines the ways in which Afterlives contributes to broader debates on crisis as the central condition of colonial and postcolonial experience.
| Keywords | colonial violence, crisis of survival, crisis of memory, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives |
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| ersoygumus@yahoo.com.tr |