Paper long abstract:

African history has been narrated from different perspectives, including portraying a homogeneous, peaceful and harmonious Africa in pre-colonial times, exploring the effects of colonialism on the psyche and socio-political, and radically challenging colonial powers and their indigenous accomplices for the contemporary throes and woes of the continent. These perspectives have been sustained by a commitment to respond to inaccurate knowledge produced about Africa. However, African writers of the twenty-first century are faced with new challenges that require contemporary representation of African history, which necessitate fraying older narratives in African literature. This is not only to reflect new experiences of migration, biracialism, and miscegenation, but also to connect these experiences with the complexities of the present.

This paper maps a category in contemporary African writing that rejects the reduction of humanity into simple racialised groups by constructing the stories of the past with its fragmented and complicated strands to create narratives that speak to the present. It illustrates this point by examining Abdul Razak Gurnah’s Desertion as a novel in which an interior landscape is underlined in order to reveal how (dis)located subjects negotiate their identities and transform themselves within and outside the multi-racial coastal region of East Africa. The paper concludes that rather than attest to a harmonious African past, the novel is successful because it reconceptualises displacement and identities in twenty-first century Africa.