Il ritratto digitale della literary celebrity: Abdulrazak Gurnah nel sito dell’Università del Kent

Abstract

This article aims to explore Abdulrazak Gurnah’s digital portrait as it emerges from the webpage that the University of Kent dedicated to him after the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. By drawing on Celebrity Studies and Media Studies, the analysis focuses on an example of Digital Humanities that intersects the phenomenon of the literary celebrities, problematising the conception of celebrity through its hybridisation with the literary world and the universities. Thus, Gurnah’s webpage acts as a case study to explore the figure of the literary celebrity with academic traits. The first section examines the status of the literary celebrities within the Celebrity Studies and the aspects in which Gurnah’s image dovetails or diverges from the canonical definitions of celebrity. The second section is concerned with the analysis of the author’s webpage which, through the visual and aural spheres, gives back a portrait of the postcolonial intellectual who, as literary celebrity, fosters the humanities and the world of universities.