Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines the representation of exile and fragmented identity in By the Sea and Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah through a postcolonial theoretical framework. Drawing upon the concepts of hybridity and ambivalence articulated by Homi K. Bhabha, and exile and displacement as theorized by Edward Said, the study argues that Gurnah's protagonists inhabit liminal spaces that destabilize fixed notions of national, cultural, and personal identity. While existing criticism often emphasizes themes of migration and nostalgia in Gurnah's fiction, this paper contends that his narratives move beyond victimhood to foreground exile as a site of psychological negotiation and resistant self-fashioning. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates how silence, memory, and narrative fragmentation function as strategies through which displaced subjects reconstruct agency within hostile metropolitan spaces. Ultimately, the paper suggests that Gurnah reconfigures exile not merely as loss but as a transformative condition that generates new modes of belonging. By situating Gurnah's fiction within contemporary postcolonial discourse, this study contributes to ongoing debates on diaspora, identity, and narrative resistance in twenty-first-century Anglophone literature.
Author: Bisma Masood
Institution: Desh Bhagat University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7160704073