Building Cosmopolitan Futures: Global Fragility in the Fiction of David Mitchell

Cosmopolitanism without a World? David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

“…What we are offered by way of consolation is the promise of freedom embodied in the protagonist's 'manifesto' of alternative 'Catechisms' (363, 364), the subversion of this last term representing an additional comment on the impossibility of an opposition emerging from anywhere other than the disciplinary apparatus of the existing hegemonic order. Shaw (2015: 113) argues that Cloud Atlas identifies an answer to the 'neoliberal corprocracy' that plays host to Sonmi~451's living nightmare in the fabricant's 'treatise on freedom', which 'suggests the role that cultural texts can play in promoting cosmopolitan ethics'. Yet, like the comments that conclude Ewing's 'Pacific Journal'-and Cloud Atlas as a whole-it is unclear whether this treatise ramifies within the world of the novel.…”