Tina Steiner

In this chapter present three brief vignettes, extracted from larger narrative works by Jennifer Makumbi, Leila Aboulela and Noni Jabavu, to think about temporal dimensions of proximity. Commonly understood as primarily concerning spatial arrangements, i.e., nearness in place, I argue that proximity as a practice implies an understanding of temporality.

Food preparation, eating practices and various expressions of conviviality associated with food are not only shaped by social contexts, ideas of community and gendered divisions of labor; they are also generative of new ways of connecting people and foodstuffs in the crucible of migration. I explore the complex role of recipes and food in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s (2008) memoir The Settler’s Cookbook. A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food which intersperses recipes with an account of her childhood in Kampala, her family’s dispersion before Idi Amin’s expulsion orders and her migration to the UK. This paper argues that food as both material reality and as metaphor functions in this text to map the possibilities and limitations of individual and communal agency. It suggests that engaging with food, cooking and the composition of recipes needs to take into account not only representations which emphasize gendered realities of constraint but also attend to idiosyncratic expressions of the interior life of emotions and desires that testify to feminist explorations of agency, creativity and registers of pleasure and repair.

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Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu’s travelogue of his four-month-long trip to India to attend the 1949 World Pacifist Meeting contributes to the rich archive of thinking about the intellectual and political flows of influence between Africa and India. Existing scholarship on African-Asian encounters has focused prominently on the trajectory from Asia towards Africa and hence exhibits a tendency to minimize African agency. This article offers a brief reading of the English translation of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue E-Indiya nase East Africa (published in 1951 in isiXhosa) in order to reflect on his particular brand of transnationalism, which deeply informed his contribution to South African politics in the first half of the 20th century. A keen observer of the landscapes and waterscapes around him, Jabavu’s sense of embeddedness in local and translocal networks – rather than the space of the nation – contributes to an understanding of transnational historiography of southern African studies. The article focuses on selected passages to suggest that with historical hindsight, the travelogue offers much beyond Jabavu’s gradualism which has relegated him marginal in the dominant narrative of anti-apartheid nationalism. Jabavu engaged in the quixotic and often painstaking labour of developing alternative intellectual and political networks in the pursuit of equality. In these networks, ports function as significant literal and figurative sites of exit and entry.

Keywords: World Pacifist Meeting of 1949, D. D. T. Jabavu, travelogue, networks of solidarity, conferencing, India, Fort Hare, Gandhian politics of non-violent resistance

Literary narratives of Cairo imagine the complex social, economic and political life of its inhabitants as constituted by the spatial and temporal dimensions of contested urban spaces. This article investigates urban spatio-temporal cartography in the crime fiction of Parker Bilal, the pseudonym of the well-known Anglo-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the way in which his narratives portray crime in contemporary Cairo at the beginning of the 21st century. I argue that the first novel of Bilal’s/Mahjoub’s Makana series, Golden Scales (2012), presents contradictory and conflicting temporalities, with one strand of the narrative gesturing forward and with linear momentum towards the 2011 revolution and another narrative strand presenting the present, in David Scott’s term, as “ruined time”, resulting in a crisis of arrested teleology. This temporal paradox sheds light on an African metropolis as a contested space: it becomes the shifting ground of a society caught up in government repression, crime, revolution and the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Despite its revolutionary potential, the narrative renders the metropolis a space where the future becomes unimaginable.

In a trajectory similar to that of author Hawa J. Golakai, the protagonist and principal investigating journalist of the crime thrillers The Lazarus Effect and The Score, Voinjama “Vee” Johnson, leaves her native Liberia during the second civil war in the 1990s and eventually finds herself in Cape Town. As an African migrant woman investigator, Vee occupies in-between spaces, which sharpens her perception of South African society. Both novels defamiliarize the social landscape of the Western Cape by employing various narrative devices to foreground the unsettled and unsettling perspective of the parvenu. Through an analysis of the use of Liberian Pidgin as well as tones of irony, sarcasm and humour, this paper discusses Golakai’s unique contribution to South African/African crime writing and the way in which it gestures towards a transnational, boundary–crossing perspective that exposes reified structures of relation.

ABSTRACT
This article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel Black Mamba Boy and particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure hero and as representative of the young Somali men who fought for Mussolini and perished during the Second World War. The novel can be read as an adventure of Jama’s travels across eastern Africa on a quest to find his father and as a historical account of the impact of the war on the region. These two aims, overtly identified by Mohamed, result in narrative strands that put different emphases on the representation of chronotopic space-time; the former – what we could call the adventure tale – foregrounds space and the protagonist’s movement through space while the latter offers important commentary on the way in which this story’s particular historical past writes the colonial present, that is, it focuses more on time and its impact on the characters. Black Mamba Boy interweaves the adventure tale with the historical narrative to tell a fascinating story of migration, loss and survival.

Key words: Second World War in East Africa, Italian colonialism, Somali migration, adventure chronotope, historical narrative, Nadifa Mohamed

M.G. Vassanji’s prominent thematic concerns of movement, diaspora, memory, and the formation of migrant subjectivities can be traced and apprehended by paying close attention to the intersecting paths across the Indian Ocean, across railroad tracks into various East African territories and across the invisible lines of international air travel around the globe. The journeys of the characters in Vassanji’s narratives propel them into a world with shifting borders and regimes that become navigable and inhabitable, albeit with serious limitations at times, by particular modes of transport. These modes also come to stand for specific historical periods in Indian Ocean Africa, that is, the ship connects and thus produces Africa as the Western edge of the Indian Ocean World prior to and during the colonial era, the railway connects the littoral to the interior and brings thousands of Indians to East Africa, while the plane, particularly when airfares become more widely accessible in the 1960s, coincides with the establishment of the nation-state. This article investigates the representation of different modes of transport and the kinds of journeys and forms of belonging that they enable.
Keywords: East African literature, transport networks, Indian Ocean narratives, nostalgia

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Sim- ilarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narra- tive of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.
Keywords: Indian Ocean travel; Sheikh Yusuf; literary representations of Muslim diaspora in South Africa; Ishtiyaq Shukri; Achmat Dangor

Sophia Mustafa (1922–2005), Tanzanian novelist and political activist of South Asian origin, was highly critical of an identity politics that privileges ethnic identity over national affiliation. This article investigates her complex engagement with East African Asian subjectivities in her novel, In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2001). With a keen eye to capture communal identity in the early part of the twentieth century, her fiction provides a ‘critical ethnography’ that interrogates minority identity construction within and beyond East African colonies and the emerging independent nation-state. Mustafa’s portrayal of East African Asian community life in careful detail while occupying a political position critical of some aspects of this life, makes her narrative a fascinating testing ground for interrogating nationalism and the status of minorities within state structures. In the journeys of her characters across East Africa and to India, narrow definitions of belonging are contrasted with more cosmopolitan conceptions of movement and travel.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction offers an opportunity to engage with the heterogeneity of East African coastal regions and their place within the Indian Ocean World, which Gurnah traces through an imaginary geography of transregional/transnational movements and encounters. This article offers a reading of Gurnah’s fiction and in particular his latest novel, Desertion (2005), through the lens of theories of relation as formulated by Martin Buber and Édouard Glissant in order to highlight the importance of encounters across various boundaries. I argue that Gurnah’s fiction, against the backdrop of colonial and nationalist ways of mapping, seeks to re-define “Africa” through glimpses of relational spaces that escape the dystopic politics of exclusion and violence caused by nationalism and notions of ethnicity.

This article investigates the function of different languages in African fictional texts by focusing on the kinds of social relationships expressed by narratives that tell their stories bilingually, or even multilingually. I argue that the layers of different languages within a text invite translation, both literally and figuratively. Alongside the postcolonial reading, which interprets the juxtapositions of different languages by stressing the contestatory function of re-placing language, the reading advanced by this article explores such devices as forms of cultural
translation. Cultural translation, it is argued, can account for the counterdiscursive reading that analyses relations of power; it can also account for a reading that foregrounds less hierarchical forms of address and thus expresses the quest for alternative subjectivities and relationships. The latter, the article suggests
by adapting Judith Butler’s theory of an ethics of opacity, is gestured towards in narratives whenever the limits of intelligibility or translatability are exposed.

Egyptian‐Sudanese author, Leila Aboulela, has written a collection of short stories, Coloured Lights (2001), and two novels, The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2005), which engage with the subtleties of Muslim African immigrant experience in Britain. This article draws on the first two texts to present an inquiry into the role of religion, more specifically Islam, in literary migrant identity politics. I argue that Aboulela critiques Orientalist and Islamist discourses in her fiction through strategic nostalgia, where past memory becomes a lens through which her characters read their new environment in Britain. However, her fiction also attests to the limitations of such nostalgia and instead turns to religion as a site of translocal identity formation, which offers her characters the possibility of resisting the hegemonic pressures of assimilating into a secular present in Britain or of romanticising a particular past in the Sudan.

... It is said that the seventh caliph of the abbasid dynasty, al Mamun, was visited one night in his sleep by aristotle the Greek. ... In this novel the two main characters, latif Mahmud and Saleh Omar, are both exiles who cannot return, for different reasons, to Zanzibar, their home. ...

This article argues that Shukri's novel functions as a complex critique of representations of Islam by linking the history of colonisation at the Cape to current hostility towards Muslims in Britain. The reductive inscriptions of cultural difference are defined as “Culture Talk”, against which Shukri's narrative sets meaningful personal encounters. These encounters, which bridge the gap which objectifies the Other, extend beyond the narrative to include the reader of cross‐cultural literature. A close reading of The Silent Minaret traces both the devastating effects of the power of representation as well as Shukri's alternative vision of new relationships that open up pockets of connection.

This edited volume provides a wide- ranging introduction to the novelistic oeuvre of the prize- winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah. It addresses a gap in Gurnah scholarship by including chapters which discuss his earlier works that have not received the scholarly attention they deserve.

Drawing on a range of critical lenses including postcolonial theory, Indian Ocean studies, psychoanalytic theory, migration studies and gender studies, this book provides illuminating commentary on his novels. Attentive to the geographical and historical reach of the narratives, the chapters engage with recurring thematic concerns of departures and arrivals; of complex family relationships; and of precarious cosmopolitan hospitality in situations of changing power relations from the old Indian Ocean monsoon trading system to colonial and postcolonial contexts. The volume concludes with an author interview. It will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Abdulrazak Gurnah – Tina Steiner and Maria Olaussen

2. Reading Melancholia in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way – Jopi Nyman

3. From Black Britain to Black Internationalism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way –Emad Mirmotahari

4. Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge to Culture – David Callahan

5. Postmodern Materialism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Dottie: Intertextuality as Ideological Critique of Englishness – Simon Lewis

6. Yusuf’s Choice: East African Agency During the German Colonial Period in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novel Paradise – Nina Berman

7. The Submerged History of the Indian Ocean in Admiring Silence – Maria Olaussen

8. Narrative Cartographies, ‘Beautiful Things’ and Littoral States in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea – Meg Samuelson

9. ‘It Worked in a Different Way’: Male Same- Sex Desire in the Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah – Kate Houlden

10. Honour and Shame in the Construction of Difference in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Novels – Godwin Siundu

11. White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space – Charne Lavery

12. At the Margins: Silences in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence and The Last Gift – Kimani Kaigai

13. Locating Abdulrazak Gurnah: Margins, Mainstreams, Mobilities – Sally- Ann Murray

14. A Conversation with Abdulrazak Gurnah – Tina Steiner

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia; 6. New Zealand & Pacific; 7 Southeast Asia.

Section 1 is by Margaret Daymond, Grace Musila, Tina Steiner and Madhu Krishnan; section 2 is by Michael Griffiths and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Paul Sharrad; section 4 is by Giselle Rampaul and Geraldine Skeete; section 5 is by Mridula Nath Chakraborty and Ira Raja; section 6 is by Dougal McNeill; section 7 is by Weihsin Gui.