Travel and the Framing of Multiplicities in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room

Abstract

Postcolonial forms of countertravel writing are sites through which previously marginalised subjects such as women and queer others produce agency. This article examines Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room as a countertravel narrative that imagines journeys as a negotiation of fractures within the self. I utilise the idea of travel to locate crossings and or contemplation of boundaries both physical and metaphysical. Galgut’s In a Strange Room explores geospatiality, race, sexuality and narratology as sites of journeys to locate multiplicity as an inherent quality of the self. Galgut fashions ‘queer travel’ and ‘queer narratology’ as producing allowances for confronting anxieties within the self and the self’s relation with others. The narrative demonstrates that in constantly confronting the fractures of ‘being-out-of-place’ subjects redefine the fluid sense of being-in-place and in the world.