“It Began with Naming Things”: Mzungus and Other European Colonizers in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s <italic>Afterlives</italic>.

To trouble internalist narratives of Europe, it is necessary to consider the “external” vectors that went into its making. This paper reads Abdulrazak Gurnah’s <italic>Afterlives</italic> (2020) as representing a telling instance of such decentering, which warrants particular attention due to the mass mainstream visibility guaranteed by the author’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. It takes the novel’s tracing of German colonialism as particularly instructive, because German colonial ventures have long remained in the peripheral vision of examinations of European colonialism more broadly, in anglophone postcolonial studies and literary representation. This prompts the article’s intervention in making this other European colonialism its focus. Via an examination of two facets of the novel’s engagement of knowledge-making – naming and recording – I argue that it enacts subversive interruptions of colonial epistemologies. The narrative’s delineating of the journeys of two characters from the colonial “periphery” of East Africa to the colonial “centre” of Germany sees these external Others becoming internal Others on European soil, and requires readers to think German colonialism with what came after. I propose, finally, that in (re)naming and (re)reading archives against the grain, the novel configures ambivalent alternatives to eurocentric knowledge-making, delineating the contours of what colonial archives excise, and gesturing toward what literary fiction can do to sketch flickering presences into some of those absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]