Liquid Objects: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Material Ecologies of Water

Liquid Objects: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Material Ecologies of Water offers a consistent reading of Gurnah’s work as oceanic constellations that stretch ourdualistic assumptions of human and nonhuman matter. The book attempts to make better sense of these worlds in motion by closely observing the flow of four objects—namely map, breath, border, and bone. Each object moves us on a journey into Gurnah’s Indian Ocean worlds and attune us to the multiplicity of flows that exceed the familiar framework of interpreting them. Keyvan Allahyari shows that Gurnah’s capacious imagination resists our habitual handles of inquiry, and that reading itself always migrates across currents of matter and memory that we can only hope to partially grasp. This book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of literature, culture studies, Indian Ocean studies, and African studies.