A MARXIST CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION IN GURNAH’S AFTERLIVES

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) offers a constant literary engagement with the material realities of colonial East Africa foregrounding the economic structures that shaped African lives under German imperial rule. While existing scholarship on the novel has largely emphasized themes of trauma, memory, displacement and identity, comparatively little attention has been paid to its critique of colonial capitalism and class-based exploitation. This article addresses that gap by examining Afterlives through a Marxist critical framework, focusing on economic subjugation as a central mechanism of colonial domination. Drawing on key Marxist concepts such as class hierarchy, labor exploitation, surplus value and alienation, this study employs qualitative textual analysis to investigate how colonial economic systems reduce African subjects to a deprived laboring class. The analysis demonstrates that colonial authority in the novel operates not only through military violence and racial ideology but also through systematic economic control, enforced labor and the extraction of material resources. Gurnah’s narrative exposes the ways colonial capitalism restructures social relations, produces enduring poverty and internalizes economic dependency among colonized populations. By situating Afterlives within broader Marxist and postcolonial debates on capitalism and empire, this article argues that economic exploitation constitutes the foundational logic of colonial power in the novel. The study contributes to Gurnah scholarship by offering a materialist reading that foregrounds class struggle and economic injustice, thereby expanding critical understanding of the novel’s political and historical significance.