Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is, probably, the most ambitious novel in the 21st-century African literature. By tracing the fate of two insignificant figures, it reflects on the history of the modern nation-state movement in Zanzibar from a broad historical perspective and touches upon a series of major issues, such as the collapse of the Indo-Arabian commer cial empire due to the Western colonialization, the impact upon Tanzania’s path of moderniza tion from the socialist East Germany, and the way in which England changes its relationship with its former colonies through the ethical spirit of cosmopolitanism. With an analysis of how, both in Gurnah’s writings and the studies of him in the West, the discourse of cosmopol itanism has become a mainstream paradigm for understanding the modern history of Africa, this article argues that Gurnah’s By the Sea is not just a simple piece of literature, but rather an all-out attempt to take part in recounting the history of Zanzibar in the wake of democratiza tion during the 1990s. Also, the article contends that Gurnah is changing the direction of Af rican literary writing, from a mode of postcolonialism to that of post-civilization or, perhaps, post-empire.
