Oceanic Cartographies of Displacement: Blue Humanities and Postcolonial Memory in Gurnah’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the oceanic dimensions of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels Paradise (1994) and By the Sea (2001) through the interpretive framework of the Blue Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that repositions water—and the ocean in particular—as a critical lens for literary and cultural analysis. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Steve Mentz, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Hester Blum, the paper argues that Gurnah’s fiction reconfigures postcolonial memory by foregrounding the Indian Ocean as a space of historical entanglement, displacement, and epistemological contestation. Rather than treating the sea as a passive backdrop, Gurnah inscribes it as an active archive—a medium through which colonial trade, forced migration, and cultural hybridity are narrated and interrogated. The analysis demonstrates how littoral consciousness in Gurnah’s work disrupts terrestrial models of nation and belonging, offering instead an amphibious poetics that complicates received narratives of African postcolonial identity. The paper contributes to emerging conversations at the intersection of oceanic criticism and postcolonial literary studies.