Flights of Memory: Teju Cole's &lt;em&gt;Open City&lt;/em&gt; and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

Vermeulen, Pieter

doi:10.2979/jmodelite.37.1.40

Cited by 78 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This is not to say that contemporary migrant fiction does not also engage socioeconomic realities on a thematic level: figuring contemporary patterns of migration, interrogating the celebration of mobility in the name of cosmopolitanism, and addressing the promises of upward mobility that often underwrite global movement, contemporary migrant fiction is invariably about different forms of mobility. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere, 30 while Teju Cole's Open City marshalls all these thematic concerns and appears to present itself as an exemplary sophisticated and melancholy migrant novel, which is how it has overwhelmingly been received, it subtly declines cosmopolitan agendas on the levels of affect and potentiality; indeed, its concern with different forms of mobility is cut across by an unruly and intractable affective dynamic that cannot be synchronised with the other movements it traces.…”

Section: Affect and Potentiality: Teju Colementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

Vermeulen

2015

Textual Practice

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Pieter VermeulenReading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction How can we read contemporary fiction in the age of its real subsumption under capital? How can we avoid explaining it as just one more commodity? This presentation explores these questions by returning to the proximity between neoliberalism and biopolitics in Foucault's 1978Foucault's -1979 lectures, and by describing the tension between contemporary literature and neoliberal biopolitics as a relation of reciprocal saturation: while the market has colonised all but the most marginal fields of culture, the market has in its turn adopted markedly literary strategies, of which the mobilisation of affect and the manipulation of potentiality are the two most important. Neither a form of surface reading nor of interpretation, the reading alongside the market that I propose reads for contemporary fiction's engagement with affect and potentiality, in order to trace the minimal difference between its textual performance and its biopolitical solicitation. I illustrate this approach through a brief reading of Teju Cole's Open City and a more extensive discussion of Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears.

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Section: Affect and Potentiality: Teju Colementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

Vermeulen

2015

Textual Practice

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“…Cole's novel has also been analysed from the perspective of cosmopolitanism, but many of these readings frequently adopt a critical approach to cosmopolitanism by exposing its limitations (see, e.g. Hallemeier, 2014;Krishnan, 2015;and Vermeulen 2013). In comparison, Afropolitanism, as represented by its advocates, comes across more often as a concept of empowerment and a celebration of identity.…”

Section: 'Beautiful Black People': Selasi's Affluent Afropolitanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmopolitanism’s new clothes? The limits of the concept of Afropolitanism

Toivanen

2017

European Journal of English Studies

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ANNA-LEENA TOIVANEN COSMOPOLITANISM'S NEW CLOTHES? THE LIMITS OF THE CONCEPT OF AFROPOLITANISM Despite all the attention it has received, Afropolitanism remains undertheorised. Afropolitanism, inspired by the concept of cosmopolitanism, includes an explicit link to the African continent, which may result in promoting racialised and territorialised biases. It is also often conceived as an identity position, which tends to result, first, in unfruitful debates on who qualifies as 'Afropolitan' and, secondly, in generating critical interest in a mere handful of 'Afropolitan' star authors. This article argues that, instead of introducing a 'new' concept, it would be more useful to continue to revisit the concept of cosmopolitanism in order to explore its potentials in the analysis of African literatures.

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“…Comprising a mobile interior monologue unfolding seemingly spontaneously as its German-Nigerian hero embarks upon leisurely, if perhaps somewhat compulsive, itineraries across New York City (and later also Brussels), the novel is steeped in the quotidian uneventfulness of metropolitan life while at the same time revealing America's first city as a transcultural, 'worldly' palimpsest of both indigenous and imported tragedy, moving beyond the exceptional terror of 9/11 to encompass Native American genocide and the legacy of slavery via the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War Two to ongoing domestic repercussions from the Iraq War. As demonstrated by critical responses from Pieter Vermeulen (2013) and Katherine Hallemeier (2013), the novel courts a cosmopolitan reading, yet curiously it does so not by signposting a course of convivial harmony but by transporting us into largely uncharted territory, illustrating just how successfully the world continues to resist coming together. Throughout, the novel's title rings deeply ironic: New York City -"this strangest of islands [...] that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished" (Open City: 54)is not 'open' but inward-looking to a degree of acute self-encapsulating paranoia.…”

Section: Belatedly Reconnecting With the Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary American Literature as World Literature: Cruel Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopoetics, and the Search for a Worldlier American Novel

Schoene¹

2017

Anglia

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With reference to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), the first two parts of the article attempt a reappraisal of contemporary American literature’s world-literary potential by problematizing cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization in close relation to 9/11, the ideal of American multiculture and non-American assertions of alterity. Introducing Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Mitchum Huehls’ After Critique (2016), the third part then shifts its focus onto the crisis of the neoliberal condition as lived in America today. Rather than insisting merely on thematic and demographic reprioritization, Berlant and Huehls are shown to strike at the very core of the literary and the human, exposing the ‘cruelty’ of both the novel and cosmopolitanism as residual expressions of a now anachronistic and ultimately harmful optimism regarding national cohesion and global understanding. The article concludes its search for a worldlier, more cosmopoetic American novel with an analysis of George Saunders’ short story collection Tenth of December (2013).

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Flights of Memory: Teju Cole's <em>Open City</em> and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

Cited by 78 publications

References 7 publications

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

Cosmopolitanism’s new clothes? The limits of the concept of Afropolitanism

Contemporary American Literature as World Literature: Cruel Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopoetics, and the Search for a Worldlier American Novel

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