Gurnah’s Paradise details the materiality of trade and the circulation of goods and men in East Africa before WWI. Despite strict colonial frameworks, the relationship between humans and the non-human challenges anthropomorphic structures of interpretation. Gurnah’s poetics of materiality displaces the novel from colonial tropes, as it reterritorializes human modes of relation to the material world. This postcolonial interrogation of human supremacy over matter and bodies participates in an ethical revaluation of the individual’s place and identity.
Élodie Raimbault (Thu,) studied this question.