Silence as a spatial practice: accented epistemology and relational dwelling in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence

This article examines Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) by reconceptualising silence as a spatial practice through which migrant subjectivity is produced and negotiated, rather than as absence or trauma. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and Homi Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space, and adopting an accented epistemological perspective attentive to the politics of intelligibility (Khosravi, 2024), the article challenges linear interpretations that frame the narrator’s trajectory as a movement from marginalisation to hybrid reconciliation. Instead, it contends that the novel enacts a continual reconfiguration of spatial memory across Britain and Zanzibar, demonstrating how belonging is mediated through institutional routines, domestic rituals, bureaucratic procedures, and material infrastructures. By situating key sites, including the hospital, the Willoughby household, the immigration hall, and the domestic interior, within Lefebvre’s spatial trialectics, the article shows that margins are not pre-existing territories but are produced through everyday spatial ordering. Through the interaction of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, silence circulates across institutional, ideological, and lived dimensions of dwelling, thereby destabilising the coherence of national and racial legibility. Silence is articulated as an accented mode of enunciation that interrupts demands for transparency and exposes the epistemic conditions under which racial and national identities become intelligible. Within this framework, the Third Space is conceptualised not as a final refuge but as the ongoing condition of relational dwelling, a negotiated terrain in which identity remains provisional and spatial memory is continually reworked. Rather than presenting hybridity as a resolution, Admiring Silence frames dwelling as a practice, an ongoing engagement with entangled geographies of empire and nation-state. Through its poetics of silence, the novel reimagines diasporic subjectivity as sustained negotiation across unstable spatial formations rather than as synthesis.