Borders of belonging: The Nobel Prize Abdulrazak Gurnah and the poetics of displacement
Houssine Dehbi , CAS -UM6P
January 8, 2026
UM6P Campus – Benguerir
This seminar presents a fundamental re-reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction, proposing that displacement operates not solely as a recurrent theme of exile and diaspora, but as the very aesthetic and epistemological foundation of his literary project. It argues that Gurnah’s work formally enacts the condition it describes, transforming displacement from a subject within the narrative to a principle of narration. The analysis meticulously traces how specific, interconnected narrative strategies, including non-linear temporalities, strategic fragmentation, recursive memories, and a persistent narrative hesitation, coalesce to produce a distinctive poetics of displacement. This poetics systematically undermines stable geographical, historical, and psychological coordinates, thereby refusing the coherence of monolithic identity or a singular, recoverable past.
In advancing this argument, the seminar directly confronts and complicates the dominant critical paradigms often imposed by the Western literary industry, which frequently seeks to assimilate postcolonial writing into reductive frameworks of authentic trauma or archetypal migrant suffering. Gurnah’s aesthetic of deliberate destabilization, it contends, performs a quiet but potent resistance against such essentialist readings and the market-driven desire for culturally legible “testimony.” Instead, his novels invite a reading practice that embraces ambiguity, unsettlement, and interpretive plurality as ethical and formal necessities.
Ultimately, by reframing displacement as a way of writing that demands a corresponding way of reading, this discussion reconfigures the very borders of belonging, memory, and history in Gurnah’s oeuvre. It concludes by extending this critique beyond textual analysis to interrogate the institutional structures that shape global literary reception. The seminar thus positions Gurnah’s work as a critical lens through which to examine the politics of categorization, the economies of major literary prizes, and the conditions under which world literature is curated, interpreted, and valorized in the contemporary academy and marketplace.
