Coloniality of Vulnerability: Gendered Vulnerability, Orphanhood, and Neocolonial Intrusion in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft

Abstract

This article examines Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft (2025) through the framework of the ‘coloniality of vulnerability’, which it theorizes as a system that actively produces vulnerability as a primary stage of control, and then justifies paternalistic intervention. It argues that in delineating gendered precarity, orphanhood and neocolonial intrusion, the novel reveals vulnerability not as a natural universal condition but as structurally manufactured and unequally distributed. By analyzing Raya and Fauzia’s entrapment in patriarchal marriage and reproductive norms, Badar’s subjection to saviourism and the neocolonial capitalist nexus embodied by the Tamarind Hotel, the article shows how Gurnah’s craft renders vulnerability as politically instrumentalized. Finally, by contrasting Karim’s wounding response with Badar’s caring one to Nasra’s primal/infant vulnerability, the article explicates the novel’s advocacy for relations of care against the destructive power relations that constitute the coloniality of vulnerability.