Coloniality of Gender

Abstract

This article examines Abdulrazak Gurnah’s (Nobel Laureate 2021) novel Dottie, which portrays the precarious lives of non-white British women as they negotiate socioeconomic vulnerabilities within the 20th-century anti-immigration milieu. It shows Gurnah delineating empathetic networks of vulnerability, affirming a close correspondence between familial, social, and institutional systems that reproduce colonial and racial subjugation in postcolonial Britain. Employing a theoretical framework of the coloniality of gender and intersectionality, it analyses this subjugation as structural violence perpetuated by socioeconomic disadvantage and racial ostracisation, and manifesting in gradually piling allostatic load and consequent weathering. Dottie’s narrative is explored through her resilient negotiation of intersectional violence, allostatic load, and weathering, ultimately ensuing posttraumatic growth. In doing so, it highlights Gurnah’s emphasis on networks of care, empathy, and hope, rather than yielding to structures of coloniality, including toxic racial solidarity, as countermeasures to the socioeconomic marginalisation of racial minorities.