• Literary Cosmopolitanisms in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City

    Author(s):
    Katherine Hallemeier (see profile)
    Date:
    2014
    Group(s):
    CLCS 20th- and 21st-Century, CLCS Global Anglophone, CLCS Global South, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone, LLC African since 1990
    Subject(s):
    English literature, English-speaking countries, Cosmopolitanism, African literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Global anglophone literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6222R57X
    Abstract:
    This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers and refugees. The texts, however, suggest the parochialism of the protagonists’ cosmopolitan sensibilities by introducing characters who possess creative resilience and language skills that the protagonists lack. Cole’s texts thus foreground the limits of a literary cosmopolitanism that privileges Anglophone fiction published in New York and London and gesture toward alternative literary cosmopolitanisms notable for their linguistic and geographical diversity, if not their glamour. Although Farouq and the “yahoo boys” aspire to membership in an elite cosmopolitan culture, their lives are non-spectacular and relatively immobile. Cole’s texts value a cosmopolitan literariness that neither hails from the intellectual cosmopolitan elite nor takes the dispossessed cosmopolitan migrant for its subject.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1353/ari.2013.0023
    Publisher:
    Johns Hopkins University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2014-4-27
    Journal:
    ariel: A Review of International English Literature
    Volume:
    44
    Issue:
    2-3
    Page Range:
    239 - 250
    ISSN:
    1920-1222
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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