Reframing colonial amnesia: German colonialism and multilingual memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Cultural memory of German colonialism is too often described as overshadowed, absent, or forgotten, with references to factors such as the short period of German colonialism, its abrupt end, and the relative lack of postcolonial immigration to Germany. This article reframes established understandings of German colonial memory and colonial amnesia by engaging with representations of German colonialism in the anglophone novel Afterlives (2020) by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I argue that Afterlives provokes a rereading of German cultural memory of colonialism by demonstrating its transnational and multilingual entanglements. My reading of the novel specifically addresses the spatial, temporal, and textual layers of its representation of colonial memory and the roles that archives and intertextuality play in its rereading of the colonial past. In doing so, I illustrate how Gurnah's text insists on the various layers, entanglements, and intertexts between German colonial memory and anglophone postcolonial texts.