The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature 9781138502048, 9780429030666

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The Limits of Cosmopolitanism

This book examines the limits of cosmopolitanism in contemporary literature. In a world in which engagement with strangers is no longer optional, and in which the ubiquitous demands of globalization clash with resurgent localist and nationalist sentiments, cosmopolitanism is no longer merely a horizon-broadening aspiration but a compulsory order of things to which we are all conscripted. Focusing on literary texts from such diverse locales as England, Algeria, Sweden, former Yugoslavia, and the Sudan, the essays in this collection interrogate the tensions and impasses in our prison house of cosmopolitanism. Aleksandar Stević is an Assistant Professor of English at Qatar University and has previously taught at the University of Belgrade; Hampshire College; and King’s College, Cambridge. His essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-­century fiction have appeared in such venues as Comparative Literature Studies, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Modern Literature. He is a contributor to A History of Modern French Literature (Princeton UP, 2017) and a translator of several books from English into Serbo-Croatian, including, most recently, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Philip Tsang is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He specializes in twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. He is completing a book manuscript titled “The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature,” which explores the paradoxes of communal imagination in the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Twentieth-Century Literature, and The Henry James Review.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era Susan Brantly Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil Edited by Vinicius de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film Secret Messages and Buried Treasure Steven F. Walker Narrating Death The Limit of Literature Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900 Blood Relations Abigail Lee Six The Limits of Cosmopolitanism Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature Edited by Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang

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The Limits of Cosmopolitanism Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature Edited by Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-50204-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03066-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Introduction

1

A leksandar S tevi ć and P hilip T sang

Part I

Cosmopolitan Hegemons

11

1 Cosmopolis Besieged: The Exilic Reunion of Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor

13

V ladimir Z ori ć

2 Building Bridges: Constructing a Comparative Sufi Cosmopolitanism in Rock and Roll Jihad

33

M ukti L akhi M angharam

3 Sunjeev Sahota’s Fictions of Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality

53

A na C ristina M endes

4 Stuck Between England and Egypt: Sudanese Cosmopolitanism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

70

S uha K udsieh

Part II

Subjects of Displacement

85

5 Unbelonging: Caryl Phillips and the Ethics of Disaffiliation

87

A leksandar S tevi ć

6 Why Is the Patient “English”?: Disidentification in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction P hilip T sang

105

vi Contents 7 Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga: The Limits of Nation-Building and Cosmopolitanism as Interpretive Models for the Clandestine Immigrant

123

M ary A nne L e w is C usato

Part III

Circulated Objects

141

8 Cosmopolitanism and Orality in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc.

143

K atherine H allemeier

9 Animated Plastic and Material Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

159

J ungha K im

10 Paying Attention to a World in Crisis: Cosmopolitanism in Climate Fiction

173

Paul T enngart

List of Contributors Index

191 195

Introduction Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang

These are complicated times for cosmopolitan scholarship. Propelled by the seemingly unstoppable march of globalization and technological change, the practical reality of cosmopolitanism is engulfing our world. This has, in turn, prompted a renaissance of academic discussion around cosmopolitanism across the humanities and social sciences. There have been attempts to revive the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment legacy; radical critiques of cosmopolitanism’s complicity with the logic of global capitalism; and new conceptions of non-Western, pluralist modes of cosmopolitan thought. The title of this collection, The Limits of Cosmopolitanism, does not mean to challenge the richness and usefulness of cosmopolitan scholarship. Rather, our premise is that cosmopolitanism, as concept and as experience, can be more productively studied through its limits. Cosmopolitanism seeks to transcend certain limits—the limits of narrower communities in the name of an encounter with the world as a whole. At the same time, that encounter is always conditioned on and even defined by geographical, historical, and cultural limits. We believe that an inquiry into some of those limits can enrich our understanding of the theoretical nuances and empirical vicissitudes of cosmopolitanism. The essays in this collection investigate the multiple limits of cosmopolitanism as they manifest themselves in contemporary world literature. We approach literary texts as active performances and theorizations of cosmopolitanism. What interests us is how the literary works in question—mostly written in the past forty years and set in such diverse locales as Sudan, former Yugoslavia, Sweden, and Pakistan—interpret and engage the mandatory and omnipresent conditions of cosmopolitanism.

The Prison-House of Cosmopolitanism If we understand it as a political and ethical stance, cosmopolitanism seems to be in retreat. This is apparent not only in the isolationist policies of the US government but also in the multiple crises that afflict the European Union. Across the continent, fears about the cultural and demographic impact of mass immigration have resulted in the unprecedented electoral success of various far-right political parties, including France’s National

2  Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang Front, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party of Austria, Alternative for Germany, and, most recently, Italy’s Lega Nord. At the same time, Central and Eastern European nations are seeking to reassert their self-understanding as political communities rooted in common ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage. Countries of the Visegrád Group—Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—are determined to protect their cultural and ethnic homogeneity, and to avoid what their electorates seem to perceive as the failed multicultural experiment in Western Europe. For an increasingly large share of Europeans, the appropriate answer to the cultural and economic challenges of globalization is to reassert the significance of the nation-state, understood as a political entity whose primary function is to protect the rights and interests of its legal citizens. One might argue, however, that much of this resurgence in ethnonationalism has been reactive and that it merely exposes the fragility of the very institutions and forms of life it is meant to protect. As Ulrich Beck observed in the early years of this century, These are introverted forms of nationalism which oppose the ‘invasion’ of the global world by turning inwards… Their novelty consists in the fact that they involve usually conscious resistance to the cosmopolitanization of their lifeworlds, to globalization and globalizers who are perceived as threatening the local form of life of the ‘natives’. (Beck 2006, 4) For Beck, a structural change has fundamentally altered the status of cosmopolitanism. As traditionally theorized, cosmopolitanism is a disruptive stance which entails the rejection—for better or for worse—of some narrower and seemingly more natural loyalty. As James Ingram suggests, “it would not occur to anyone to advocate cosmopolitanism except in response to some narrower claim—that of a tribe, polis, community, or state” (Ingram 2013, 48). Because such narrower claims are pervasive, a fundamental feature of cosmopolitanism is its utopian dimension: its raison d’être is precisely that in practice the world is not one polity. Diogenes the Cynic’s self-­declaration as a citizen of the world is scandalous precisely because it is counterintuitive, nearly an oxymoron: the world does not by itself confer citizenship. A cosmopolitan is therefore a disruptive figure always opposed to the conventional ways in which individuals and institutions manage social relations. However, a key part of the cosmopolitan equation has shifted in recent decades. “Along with money and goods, cultural artifacts, values, ideas, and lifestyles were finding borders increasingly porous, allowing the eclectic experience once restricted to imperial capitals and entrepôts to reach more and more of the world’s population,” writes Ingram (64). Of course, cosmopolitan detachment still is (or at least appears to be) the privilege of elites who feel—to use Timothy Brennan’s much-publicized phrase—“at home in the world” (Brennan 1997). This is a long-standing anti-cosmopolitan argument. For such thinkers as Johann Gottfried von Herder and George

Introduction  3 Eliot, cosmopolitanism was a matter of willful unmooring, a choice to interact with other cultures and take from them while forsaking one’s own. Nowadays, however, such arguments have become more difficult to make as the ratio of local to global in our lives has changed. One no longer has to overcome the limitations of the local to engage with the far-off stranger: the stranger is already here. While we may not all subscribe to the values of cosmopolitanism—as amply demonstrated by the recent triumphs of xenophobic political agendas—we are, in practical terms, increasingly citizens of the world: for many of us, interaction with those with whom we share little in terms of origin, culture, and language is a daily affair. In other words, as a doctrine and an ethical attitude, cosmopolitanism has always proceeded from the assumption that reality is not cosmopolitan. However, we now live in something akin to a prison-house of cosmopolitanism: no longer a choice or an aspiration, but a limiting condition, a compulsory order of things to which we are all conscripted.

Theorizing Cosmopolitanism How do we think about cosmopolitanism when it is no longer a utopian possibility that lies beyond the limiting horizon of a national culture but a limiting condition in its own right? What Beck terms the “cosmopolitanization” of the world has complicated the relationship between the actual and the aspirational. For a long time, to write about cosmopolitanism was mainly to debate its political or ethical advantages and disadvantages over other ideological positions (as in Martha Nussbaum’s important essay on cosmopolitanism and patriotism) or to question its historical articulations (such as the Kantian project of perpetual peace). To speak of cosmopolitanism now is increasingly to speak about the world as it is and to attend to various justifications and critiques of its present condition. The omnipresence of cosmopolitanism, along with the complex dynamic of celebration and radical questioning, has led to a theoretical recalibration, which is particularly evident in the numerous attempts over the last two decades to move away from the European traditions of Stoicism and Kantianism to explore multiple, alternative, and non-Western models of cosmopolitanism. Unlike “old” cosmopolitanism, whose ethical principles are often deemed elitist and impractical, the multiple strands of “new” cosmopolitanism emphasize the embeddedness of transnational practices. As Srinivas Aravamudan puts it, “Such a newly cautious cosmopolitanism attempts to rebuild and pluralize cosmopolitanism from below. Its theorists thereby describe the new cosmopolitanisms as ‘discrepant,’ ‘vernacular,’ and ‘actually existing’ in place of the older forms, which were preformed, normative, and universalistic” (Aravamudan 2006, 12). The 2002 collection Cosmopolitanism exemplifies this paradigm shift. In the introduction titled “Cosmopolitanisms,” Sheldon Pollock and his coeditors argue for a pluralistic approach that accommodates a “diversity of universals” (Pollock et al. 2002, 7). They call for an archival or

4  Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang descriptive method: “Let’s simply look at the world across time and space and see how people have thought and acted beyond the local” (10). Privileging observation over judgment, cosmopolitanism in the plural is neither evaluative nor normative. This collection contains Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital,” which proposes an influential thesis: the Marxist view of history is Eurocentric because it assumes that all societies, including non-Western ones, must undergo the same teleology of capitalism. At the center of Chakrabarty’s argument is a critique of the Marxist category of “abstract labor.” As Marx famously argued in Capital, heterogeneous practices and products are transformed into homogeneous exchange-values in capitalist societies. Yet Chakrabarty argues that Marx also makes room for another kind of history, one that consists of nonabstract, embedded activities that do not contribute to capitalist production. Chakrabarty’s main task is to differentiate the singular history posited by capital (History 1) from noncapitalist pasts (History 2s), which Marx hints at but does not fully explore. For Chakrabarty, History 1 fails to account for “historical difference” because abstract labor is by definition indifferent to particularity (82). It is only by attending to History 2s that we can appreciate the diversity of human practices and social formations. However, one might ask, how is difference perceived, recognized, and articulated? What are the mediating factors and apparatuses through which one differentiates History 1 from History 2s? What are the material and epistemological conditions that make History 2s visible to scholars (and tourists)? Chakrabarty is curiously silent on these questions. Instead, as the title of his essay suggests, he upholds “belonging” as the common denominator for History 2s: The idea of History 2 allows us to make room, in Marx’s own analytic of capital, for the politics of human belonging and diversity. It gives us a ground on which to situate our thoughts about multiple ways of being human and their relationship to the global logic of capital. (Chakrabarty 2002, 102) The phrase “human belonging” demands more scrutiny here. With Heidegger as his main frame of reference, Chakrabarty uses “being” and “belonging” interchangeably: both terms denote a multiplicity of practices and possibilities. He develops this line of thought more fully in his book Provincializing Europe, in which he contrasts the Marxist “analytic social science” with the Heideggerian “hermeneutic tradition.” While the former excels at ideology critique, the latter “produces a loving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversity of human life-worlds. It produces what may be called ‘affective histories’” (Chakrabarty 2008, 18). Yet Chakrabarty’s affirmation of diversity is susceptible to many of the same criticisms leveled at “old” cosmopolitanism. How does one cultivate

Introduction  5 “a loving grasp of detail”? Who gets to celebrate “the diversity of human life-worlds”? Why do some individuals produce “affective histories” of cultural pasts while others feel ashamed of the same pasts? By positing “belonging” as a shared attribute of humanity, Chakrabarty in effect introduces another level of abstraction. He is not alone in that regard. In the name of diversity, his fellow contributors to Cosmopolitanism seem to have divested the titular term of any concrete meaning: “Cosmopolitanism is infinite ways of being” (Pollock et al., 12). But then, how do those infinite ways of being come to be recognized as cosmopolitan? Like Chakrabarty, Craig Calhoun emphasizes the centrality of belonging in cosmopolitan thought. He argues that liberal cosmopolitanism is itself “a special sort of belonging,” despite its claim to be otherwise. In his trenchant critique of “extreme cosmopolitanism” (with Martha Nussbaum as his main target), Calhoun directs attention from normative ethics to questions of social position and cultural tradition. Cosmopolitanism is “neither a freedom from culture nor a matter of pure individual choice, but a cultural position constructed on particular social bases and a choice made possible by both that culture and those bases” (Calhoun 2003, 544). A fuller account of cosmopolitanism would thus require us to consider solidarity or “groupness” (549). This approach anticipates Kwame Anthony Appiah’s model of “rooted” or “partial” cosmopolitanism, developed in The Ethics of Identity (2005) and Cosmopolitanism (2006). Appiah synthesizes old and new theories of cosmopolitanism by arguing that cultural attachments and allegiances may not conflict with ethical obligations to distant strangers. One can be a patriot as well as a citizen of the world. Since many contributors to the present volume engage with Appiah’s work, it is not necessary to rehearse his arguments here. What we want to highlight is that critical skepticism about normative cosmopolitanism often leads to an investment in belonging and embeddedness. Yet this dichotomy of universalist detachment and particularistic attachment occludes their mutual contingency on highly specific historical and material conditions. Cultural embeddedness is not a given: what we take to be local or communal often entails varying degrees of ­abstraction and displacement. Can we really speak of cosmopolitanism in strictly descriptive terms without appealing to some normative ground? In their recent essay collection Cosmopolitanisms, Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta (2017) suggest that we cannot: there is the question of how much of the concept’s old normative sense is preserved or transformed by these empirical particulars. What is it exactly that makes them interesting, makes them valuable? To put this another way: can we really separate the new from the old, the plural from the singular? (2)

6  Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang Robbins’s and Horta’s insights help explain why, despite the increasing emphasis on plurality and diversity, it is difficult to give up the “old” normative model. However, if normativity is in some way inescapable, it is not without its problems. This becomes particularly apparent when we look at how the concept of cosmopolitanism has been deployed in literary studies since 2000. Cyrus R. K. Patell, for instance, understands cosmopolitanism primarily as the appropriate attitude toward cultural difference, “a structure of thought, a perspective that embraces difference and promotes the bridging of cultural gaps” (Patell 2015, 8). Literature is a tool for advancing this perspective. As he argues, “One question that those of us who work in literary and cultural studies, rather than analytical philosophy, might ask then is, what role might literature play in the service of practical cosmopolitanism?” (7, emphasis added). Although not everyone shares Patell’s idealism, some level of investment in a “good” cosmopolitanism is central to recent accounts of modern and contemporary literature. While he describes cosmopolitanism as something yet to be defined (2), Berthold Schoene nonetheless has a clear idea what cosmopolitanism ought (and ought not) to be: Cosmopolitans must stay alert to their own positionality as well as the complex enmeshment of other people’s historical legacy, economic capital, and ensuing degree of cosmopolitan competence and ambition. Any unilateral declaration or pursuit of cosmopolitanism, however well-intentioned, is no cosmopolitanism at all. (Schoene 2009, 5) Like Patell, Schoene is interested in how literature pursues cosmopolitan aspirations. As he writes, “there are creative practices, such as literature, whose reconfiguration of the world constitutes at the same time a critique of contemporary politics and, potentially at least, a nurturing of global conviviality” (26). These versions of normative cosmopolitanism often come with the valorization of certain aesthetic practices. For Schoene, what is at stake is the “cosmopolitan novel,” with its commitment to “the representation of worldwide human living and global community” (17). For Rebecca Walkowitz, it is “critical cosmopolitanism,” which she locates in modernist writings across the twentieth century (Walkowitz 2006, 2). Finally, Mariano Siskind argues that for Latin American intellectuals, “opening to the world permitted an escape from nationalist cultural formations and established a symbolic horizon for the realization of the translocal aesthetic potential of literature and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivation” (Siskind 2014, 3). Each of these accounts endorses a version of cosmopolitanism, which it then goes on to trace through a particular literary archive. Both the descriptive effort of diversifying the concept of cosmopolitanism and the normative impulse to explore how literary works embody

Introduction  7 cosmopolitan values come with significant drawbacks. Our project in this collection therefore faces a dual challenge: how do we take into account the transformation of cosmopolitanism into a practical reality without losing sight of its normative aspects, and how do we speak of cosmopolitanism in contemporary literature without merely tracing a certain version of cosmopolitan commitment through a predefined literary archive?

The Question of Limits The essays in this collection turn to contemporary literary fiction as the main site of analysis. The current production and circulation of fiction on the global scale harbors a paradox: the fact that literature remains one of the most language- and culture-specific art forms also means that it can acutely register the tensions and impasses in the prison-house of cosmopolitanism. Of all literary forms, the genre of the “global novel” has been the most hotly debated in recent years. Tim Parks criticizes what he calls the “dull new global novel” (Parks 2010) for sacrificing local flavors and cultural textures. Nowadays, one widely accepted benchmark for literary greatness is the number of languages a work has been translated into. To strive for “international comprehension,” writers often have to make a deliberate effort to keep the prose simple and accessible, and to employ highly recognizable “literary” devices. While Parks laments the irreversible trend of globalism, others have defended it. Adam Kirsch suggests that the global novel is “cannier, more self-reflexive and creatively resourceful, than its critics are willing to grant” (Kirsch 2017). For him, what makes a novel “global” is not the internationalism of its settings or characters but its capacity for tackling the problems that define the global present we all share. Despite their provincial locales, Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish novels and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are global because of their power to stimulate the readers’ “empathetic imagination.” We are interested not only in how literary texts reflect or represent various experiences of cosmopolitanism but also, more importantly, in how they encode those experiences as limits. In other words, as we celebrate contemporary writers’ nuanced and insightful depictions of transnational realities, we also recognize that writing for the world is as liberating as it is constraining. Some writers are more subjected to the pressures of going international than others. The case studies in this volume investigate how specific historical circumstances shape and challenge literary articulations of cosmopolitanism. The texts we analyze are variously confident about cosmopolitanism and apprehensive about it, interested in the opportunities it provides and concerned about its failures, invested in certain versions of cosmopolitanism but hostile toward others. In some texts world citizenship is an aspiration; in others it is a problem and a paradox. Notwithstanding the diversity of our approaches, we share an effort to attend to the complex interplay of cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political stance, a practice, and a historical condition.

8  Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang The question of limits is a recurring motif in this volume. We interrogate the limits of cosmopolitanism in the literal sense of the failure or breakdown of cosmopolitan aspirations. We trace the murky boundary between the normative and the actual. We delineate the historical conditions which enable and limit the construction of transnational identities. We study the complex relationship between cosmopolitan stances and hegemonic forces of global capitalism. And we ponder the limitations inherent in materialist critiques of cosmopolitanism. The first group of essays, “Cosmopolitan Hegemons,” sheds light on the master tropes and dominant frames that have governed cosmopolitanism in theory and in practice. Some of the central questions include: how and why are these tropes, from positive ones like conviviality to negative ones like siege, enabling? What ideological and aesthetic limits do they impose? Are alternative modes of cosmopolitanism possible, or do they simply replicate the workings of hegemonic cosmopolitanism? The second group, “Subjects of Displacement,” explores an important rubric in actually existing cosmopolitanism. Experiences of immigration, exile, expatriation, and repatriation have received extensive attention in cosmopolitan studies because they accentuate the paradoxes and tensions in identity construction, national belonging, and cultural assimilation. The authors in this group ask: when and how can displacement, both forced and voluntary, be recuperated as cosmopolitan? What is at stake in that recuperation? To what extent and in what ways can distinct histories of displacement intersect? What do the narratives of those who successfully crossed borders imply about the untold stories of those who did not? The third group, “Circulated Objects,” turns to the mobility of objects in global networks of commerce and exchange. Resisting the anthropocentric impulses in cosmopolitan studies, the three essays ask: how do the properties of an object as well as its differences from other objects get transformed in the process of circulation? How do different routes and scales of circulation—from atmospheric circulation to the circulation of commodities—reshape our concept of the planetary? What possibilities of connection and affiliation are opened up and foreclosed? The authors in the group share the premise that global circulation is the most stringent of all limiting conditions in our age.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton. Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2006. Guru English. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. ­Cambridge: Polity Press.

Introduction  9 Brennan, Timothy. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2003. “‘Belonging’ in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary.” Ethnicities 3, no. 4: 531–68. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. “Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 82–110. ———. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ingram, James D. 2013. Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kirsch, Adam. 2017. “In Defence of the Global Novel.” Financial Times, April 7, 2017. Accessed December 30, 2018. www.ft.com/content/553d6288-1958-11e79c35-0dd2cb31823a. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” In For Love of Country? edited by Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon, 3–20. Parks, Tim. 2010. “The Dull New Global Novel.” New York Review Blog, February 9, 2010. Accessed December 30, 2018. www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/ feb/09/the-dull-new-global-novel/. Patell, Cyrus L. K. 2015. Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollock, Sheldon, et al. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–14. Robbins, Bruce, and Paulo Lemos Horta, eds., 2017. Cosmopolitanisms. New York: New York University Press. Schoene, Berthold. 2009. Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part I

Cosmopolitan Hegemons

1 Cosmopolis Besieged The Exilic Reunion of Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor Vladimir Zorić

Much like cosmopolitanism, sieges are predicated upon the existence of certain limits—in space, in military power, in knowledge—and they ostensibly seek to transcend those limits, by conquest or by counterattack. To be sure, cultural competence and linguistic practice have predisposed us to consider each siege as a fundamentally unequal, i.e., anticosmopolitan affair: the position of the besieger is associated with strength and that of the besieged with weakness, which needs to be compensated by ramparts. Yet again, cosmopolitanism has also been associated with hegemony, when its outlook is actively imposed on others, and with withdrawal, when it is nourished and defended as a personal belief system. In practice, however, these limits are often blurred. Up-to-date fortification systems integrate offensive components and even very credible acts of withdrawal have hegemonic implications. This essay will explore the rhetoric of siege in three fields of discourse: in theoretical approaches to cosmopolitanism, in the literary (self-)representations of disengaged intellectuals, and in the conditions of actual siege warfare. The siege will appear successively as a master trope of cosmopolitanism, as a spatial practice of cosmopolitan writers, and as an opportune practical context for political mythopoeia. In all of these realms, the state of siege will emerge as an ambiguous phenomenon: at the same time, a product of imagination and a springboard for that imagination; a defensive act and simultaneously a disciplinarian measure. While most of my literary and political examples will be drawn from the former Yugoslav area, the argument will aim to shed light on a much wider problem which is the interaction between cosmopolitan discourses and siege technologies.

Diogenes’ Syndrome: Siege as a Master Trope of Cosmopolitanism The most significant practical challenge facing any theory of cosmopolitanism is transition between any of a gamut of abstract moral positions of Weltoffenheit and a set of formal political provisions aimed at implementing those positions legally, institutionally, and culturally. What is less obvious is that this difficult transition is necessarily spatial: it is mediated through

14  Vladimir Zorić different conceptualizations of space, which are informed by antagonistic habituses and practices. From Diogenes of Sinope, who envisioned a global polity from a barrel, to Montaigne, who relished in somnambulistic journeys through the Greco-Roman tradition from the tower of his Aquitaine castle, to the Occupy movement, which aimed to carve a global polity within a contained urban area, cosmopolitanism has been simultaneously the schematic imagining of a non-hegemonic space and a self-indulgent individual pose within that space. Unsurprisingly, it is the city that takes on the role of the ultimate touchstone of cosmopolitanism: before turning into a global space, the cosmopolis comes across as a polis, etymologically, metaphorically, and practically. To extend the aforementioned urbanistic analogy, cosmopolitanism can emerge intra muros, extra muros, or both. To begin with, cosmopolitanism is often seen as a precarious in-between space immanent to both national and globalist discourses. Thus, for instance, Ulrich Beck, the emphatic proponent of cosmopolitanism, sees global citizenship as essentially an interstitial phenomenon, as something already there―“immigrant in reality”―that complements and completes national empathies by forming transnational networks (Beck 2004, 9). Differently from these networked interstices, cosmopolitanism may elsewhere be conceptualized as a position of exteriority or at least as predicated upon a constant engagement with exteriority. For Walter D. Mignolo, cosmopolitanism arises from Europe’s encounter with the unabsorbed other: “exteriority is indeed the borderland seen from the perspective of those ‘to be included’ […] critical cosmopolitanism comprises projects located in the exteriority and issuing forth from colonial difference” (Mignolo 2000, 724). Finally, cosmopolitanism may well be visualized as internal and external at the same time, a wider entity which includes but also transcends any particularist affiliation. In her seminal essay, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Martha Nussbaum replaces the metaphors of niches and borders with concentric circles: The first one is drawn around the self; the next takes in one’s immediate family; then follows the extended family; then, in order, one’s neighbors or local group, one’s fellow city dwellers, one’s fellow countrymen […] Outside all these circles is the largest one, that of humanity as a whole. (Nussbaum 1994) Nussbaum posits two fundamental poles, the individual and the universal, with a range of possible affiliations: the innermost circle, the self, is central to all wider groups and it is at the same time developed within those groups. The multifarious spatial forms associated with cosmopolitanism have been traversed by equally heterogeneous prototypes of the cosmopolitan mind-set. The role models of cosmopolitanism, or cognates thereof, have been variously recognized in the flâneur, who is intra muros; in the exile,

Cosmopolis Besieged  15 who refers to the extra muros; and in the traveler, who negotiates and reconciles those categories. From a liminal observation point in the arcade, a flâneur observes the mechanical flow of the otherwise amorphous crowd on the street. Another avatar, the exile, evinces a different itinerary: s/he reaches a liberal metropolis from a political and economic backwater and effectively surrenders to its class mechanism, accepting the necessity to become a nobody before becoming a somebody. The traveler engages with metropolitan crowds as part of an underlying class contract: the affinity and capacity for travel are predicated upon prior membership in the urban elite and cultural competence for processing diversity and abstracting from it. Thus, in the realm of spatial templates, which broadly reflect the developments on the geopolitical map, cosmopolitanism has been theorized as a niche, as a border zone and as a series of concentric circles; in the realm of spatial practices, which are largely played out on the class map, cosmopolitans have acted, or masqueraded, as flâneurs, exiles, and travelers. Nevertheless, one distinct spatial form has largely escaped the attention of the theorists of cosmopolitanism despite offering considerable heuristic benefits to their schemes: the siege of the city as a trope for the ongoing, constitutive crisis of cosmopolis. It takes cosmopolis back to the early medieval function of the city as an enclosure; at the same time, it also stokes cosmopolitanism’s apocalyptic pathos: the devastation of the cities and the demise of traditional humanism, both at the hands of technology. For one thing, siege brings together, amplifies and transforms several spatial templates of cosmopolitanism. If Nussbaum’s scheme of concentric circles amalgamates the notions of the niche and the border, siege takes us a step further in that it epitomizes those concentric circles and turns the ­metaphor on its head. Schematically, patriotism is surrounded by cosmopolitanism; empirically, the arrangement is often precisely the opposite, that is, cosmopolitanism is surrounded and actively threatened by patriotic ventures. Thomas Mann showed that the mechanism can work both ways, with several rings of siege and defense: while in his lecture “Germany and ­Germans,” he challenges the entire German culture for “a self-­centred defence against anything that could constrict the folk egoism,” in his novel Doctor Faustus the siege is laid by that very particularism against the cosmopolitan individualism, embodied by the narrator Serenus Zeitblom (Mann 1975, 7; 1986, 710). For another thing, the denizen of a besieged city merges several visages of the cosmopolitan mind-set. S/he has something of a flâneur, in that s/he can use the ramparts as an elevated observation point, and of the exile, in that s/he concedes to a form of internal displacement during the siege and expulsion following the conquest; the besieged and besiegers are also travelers, seeking the target of the siege or a relief from it. Bringing together different spatial templates and spatial practices, siege provides a more comprehensive and at the same time a more poignant cognitive model for understanding the internal tensions of cosmopolitanism.

16  Vladimir Zorić Nevertheless, any association of the state of siege with cosmopolitanism is bound to meet a major objection. Besieged cosmopolis may be challenged as contradiction in adjecto. A relentless siege, until one of the warring sides yields, goes against the main pragmatic tenet of cosmopolitanism which, in Kant’s famous formulation, is a long-term, collaborative arrangement for the preservation of peace (Kant 1917). In metaphorical terms, foreclosure is often self-inflicted, and perpetuated, without a military siege as apparent in Camus’s allegorical representation of Franco’s regime as a plague in the uniform of a lieutenant: “He does not reign, he lays siege. His palace is an army barrack, his pavilion a tribunal” (Camus 2006, 322). If every siege projects some form of “siege mentality”―an induced constriction of political space, moral outlook and cultural horizon―should it not be seen as the precise antipode of, rather than a suitable context for, the cosmopolitan Weltoffenheit? Irrespective of whether, in empirical terms, the city is a theatre of an actual war, or a site of a metaphorical siege, the anti-cosmopolitan credentials of siege mentality loom large at the more theoretical level, that of political philosophy. In the first instance, the state of siege is the ultimate citadel of an embattled nation-state as it allows for constitutional liberties and international treaties to be suspended in order to protect a particular local polity. In the well-known formulation of the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, the foundational function of any sovereign nation-­state is the entitlement to declare a state of exception on its territory, whereby the entire legal system is temporarily shut down. One could argue that if the state of siege is an exception by sovereignty (usually referred to as sovereign exception), the cosmopolis is precisely the opposite, an exception from sovereignty (Schmitt 2005). More recently, siege mentality has been associated not with capsular nation-states but with the excrescences of globalization, an international collusion for totalitarian management of the public spheres in multiple nation-states. According to the theorist of architecture Paul ­Virilio, the global war against terrorism has engendered an insidious and prolonged state of siege, whereby images of terror are disseminated worldwide and turn into the very source of terror, “the collective hallucination of a single image […] designed to sow panic while pretending to quell it” (Virilio 2005, 86–87). Differently from the media siege of the global village, cosmopolis can plausibly be described as the individual’s openness and competence for multiple images. All these arguments indicate that correlation between the state of siege and the cosmopolitan state should be approached with caution. Yet again, the evidence from different periods of military history indicates that some form of cosmopolitan alignment was requisite for a serious, consequential siege. In their dual function as financial centers and as fortified garrisons, city fortresses were repositories of economic capital and technological know-how and their conquest or defense required a degree of coordination and competence usually beyond the reach of any

Cosmopolis Besieged  17 individual sovereign state. This supra-sovereign realm of siege engineers and practitioners involved mobility: technological solutions and the requisite expertise to run this technology routinely changed hands, often across the opposed camps as the most capable engineers were lured by overbidding in salary (Purton 2009, 359). The supra-sovereign network also included collaboration: craftsmen across different trades joined forces in order to design a ballistic machine and so did soldiery of different nations in order to conduct a multinational campaign against a designated enemy (Duffy 1979, 40–41). Finally, the supra-sovereign sphere included transnationality: some of the most successful commanders, and very often troops, were political and religious converts (Henderson 1964; Schmitt 2009). To give but one example, the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453 were facilitated by a Hungarian who had initially served in the city but switched sides to construct, with the help of several trades, a formidable cannon, a piece of artillery that had recently spread from Italy, which was deployed to prepare the final assault of the janissaries, converts into Islam from the Christian lands, which were for their part assisted by Christian vassal troops (Runciman 1965). Nevertheless, regardless of the number of historical instances of siege adduced, we remain in the realm of empirical cues. The historical coincidence of the sundry siege technologies and cosmopolitan collaborative frameworks would be analytically irrelevant if it failed to alert us to a deeper, structural correlation between the two phenomena. A broadly cosmopolitan framework is a condition of possibility of historical siege but, used as a metaphor, siege can in its own turn inform us about the balance of power in cosmopolitan platforms. In his book Radical Cosmopolitics, James D. ­I ngram sees all traditional forms of cosmopolitanism as suspended between withdrawal and hegemony: either it is equally compatible (or incompatible) with everything―all laws, ways of life, and systems of belief―in which case it is at most a personal ethos; or it is identified with one of them, in which case it can easily become an aggressive chauvinism, justifying its supremacy over all others. (Ingram 2013, 30) Illustrating the stark contrast between the two pragmatic modes of cosmopolitanism, Ingram refers to Cynics and Stoics: whereas in the earlier generation the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope withdraws from the political arena and turns a barrel into a private cosmopolis, in the next generation the Emperor Marcus Aurelius seeks to implement and spread the cosmopolis within the expanding Roman Empire. Since the barrel is, much like city walls, a circular structure designed to protect and contain, and given that the empire is expanded by conquests of cities, the opposition between withdrawal and capture can be rephrased with reference to siege. On the

18  Vladimir Zorić one side, in the case of withdrawal, one builds fortifications around one’s own ethos and braces oneself for a siege; in the case of aggression, on the other side, one lays siege to other positions that need to be assimilated. Thus, not only does siege provide a favorable setting for collaboration, but it also emerges as a master trope of cosmopolitanism in that it reflects its fundamental ethicopolitical conundrum. In this essay, however, I am not going to discuss whether the integrity of cosmopolis is better preserved in a self-isolating thrust against the world or in the push for its hegemonic capture; what interests me more is mutual transfers between those attitudes. The push for domination and the personal ethos of withdrawal are not mutually exclusive pathways of cosmopolitan ethos. In effect, they partly overlap: the ethos of withdrawal may well be accompanied by a push for imaginary domination within own, self-proclaimed polity, even when the territory of that polity is limited to private premises and the subjects to personal belongings. A constituent part of that motion is what one can venture to call the political correlate of Diogenes’ syndrome: a tendency to enforce personal states of siege as a complement to a real state of siege or as a surrogate thereof. The epitomic example of a cosmopolitan’s self-imposed state of siege is Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-fé [Die Blendung, 1931–1932]. In many respects, the hero of Canetti’s novel, a middle-aged Viennese sinologist Dr. Kien, is a role model of cosmopolitanism: his erudite scholarship commands a unanimous admiration, he is said to be fluent in more than a dozen of oriental languages―several Western languages being self-implied―and to be familiar with all literary traditions of the world. However, for all his cosmopolitan credentials, Dr. Kien is also a peculiarly withdrawn, asexual man, who lives in his head and has very little empathy with other human ­beings—­a fault compensated by grotesque patronization—and is often given to meanest forms of misanthropy. The only flame in Dr. Kien’s recluse life is his private library, a painstakingly constructed cosmopolis of some 10,000 volumes, which he perceives in terms of both a citadel and a temple. A masterpiece of conceit, the library occupies the topmost floor of a townhouse, is securely locked with three locks, the walls of its compartments are fully packed with books and no piece of furniture other than ladders is suffered to obstruct the view. The fortress-like nature of the library is reinforced by the lack of windows, which had been closed to stop any distraction from the street and to make space for further bookshelves; the outlandish space is illuminated, like a temple, by custom-made ceiling windows which shed light equally on every single volume. The only item ever allowed to leave the library and be exposed to the dangers of the street is a notebook which Kien takes with him to note down instances of human stupidity and to gloss on them with appropriate quotations (Canetti 2007, 22). Down to the minutest details, thus, Dr. Kien’s flat is an impregnable cosmopolitan fortress, “a rich, well-ordered library which is closed from all sides and in which there is no superfluous piece of furniture, no superfluous

Cosmopolis Besieged  19 person to distract him from serious thoughts” (Canetti 2007, 22). The novel’s plot effectively follows the siege and conquest of the fortress by a motley crew of halfwits, instructed by his estranged housewife, who cheat Dr. Kien out of his flat and mishandle the books. The hero’s revenge―­ setting fire to the library and burning himself in the process―is a reference to the Inquisition’s auto-da-fés and a disturbing premonition of the Nazi Bücherverbrennung rituals and concentration camps. The circle is closed: cosmopolitan’s withdrawal turns into a desire for domination and eventually into annihilation.

Vicarious Fortresses: Imaginary Siege of Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor By a curious irony, Vienna would become the scene of some very real gestures of imaginary withdrawal. The cosmopolitan recluse of Canetti’s novel was reinvented by Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor, two Serbian intellectuals who lived in Belgrade but chose to settle in Vienna at different points in the twentieth century. Lifelong friends, Bogdanović and Dor articulated their views and spatial practices in a dialogue and developed both cosmopolitan and persecutory imagination to an unprecedented scale. Their biographies come to merge in a conspicuous intertwinement against the backdrop of wars and ideological conflicts which are so complex that any detailed exposition of their itineraries would take up the entire essay. Instead, I will provide key biographical cues and then proceed to explore their besieged private spaces as they emerge in Bogdanović’s essay “The Green Box” and in Dor’s novella Vienna, July 1999.1 It will become apparent that an imaginary state of siege, which they evoked in their prose, actually helped them transform their living spaces into symbolic fortresses which bear resemblances to the library of Canetti’s Dr. Kien. Bogdan Bogdanović, an established architect of war memorials and subsequently the mayor of Belgrade, was born in 1922 to an affluent family of Milan Bogdanović, an influential leftist intellectual and literary critic. Inspired by surrealism, Bogdan got involved with the clandestine Communist youth, initially for vague aesthetic reasons but later on, with a conservative drift in Yugoslavia and the threat of the Third Reich, became a staunch supporter, eventually joining the partisan guerrilla movement where he got seriously wounded. In the postwar period, Bogdanović enrolled on a course of architecture and after obtaining his degree he devoted himself, under the auspices of Communist party, to war cemeteries and memorials whose symbolism and scale earned him the reputation as one of the principal creators of the Yugoslav discourse of war memory. In addition to his work as an architect, Bogdanović’s engagement in the Communist Party enabled him to garner an array of functions within nomenklatura and cultural institutions: he held the chair in urbanism and acted as the Dean at the Faculty of Architecture; he was a member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences for

20  Vladimir Zorić two years―until he resigned; and the mayor of Belgrade in a four-year mandate, from 1982 to 1986. The reversal of fortunes came in the late 1980s. The rise of the nationalist elite, led by Slobodan Milošević, undermined Bogdanović’s position within the party and in late 1987 Bogdanović writes a lengthy open letter to the new leader with a provocative title, “The Linguistic Traps of Stalinism.” A curious mixture of surrealist patchwork and pseudoacademic mystification with a provocative title, the letter claimed that Milošević’s ostentatious pseudo-epical language concealed regressive, pre-urban atavism (Bogdanović 1988). In the years to come, and especially after the outbreak of the war, an orchestrated campaign in state-controlled media led to grassroots harassment and verbal abuse. At that point, Bogdanović started to contemplate exile and Milo Dor was quick to offer him help and accommodation in Vienna which he eventually accepted. Bogdanović’s school friend Milo Dor trod a thornier path. Born as ­M ilutin Doroslavac to Serbian parents in Budapest in 1923, he grew up in a sanguine middle-class family that was prepared to seize opportunities wherever they arose. Following the father’s appointments as a medical doctor, the family moved to Banat, northern Serbia, and then to Belgrade, the booming capital of Yugoslavia, where they established a family business revolving around the bourgeois cultivation of body aesthetics: the father ran a plastic surgery clinic and in the adjacent room the mother tended a beauty salon. Like Bogdanović, Dor joined the Communist party for spurious reasons―a juvenile blend of surrealism, Trotskyism, and seditious anti-­ parochialism―but gradually became committed in a deeper way. After the German occupation of Belgrade, Dor remains in the city to organize the underground resistance and after a few months, in early 1942, he gets arrested and handed over to the police forces of the Quisling regime of Milan Nedić. At their hands, he undergoes torture and mutilation but avoids death camps by being ransomed by his parents. The utterly unheroic way in which he had his life saved, while his comrades perished, will continue to haunt him unto his old age. After a period spent in a youth internment camp in central Serbia, he was transferred to Vienna where he worked as a laborer until the end of the war, in financial penury. After the collapse of the Third Reich, he mastered German with striking ease and started to fashion himself as an Austrian writer of Serbian descent, which concealed deeper hesitations. On the one hand, he aimed to prove to his host milieu that as an Austrian he could be more cosmopolitan than any nostalgic follower of the Habsburg myth. On the other hand, he dearly wanted to show that he is important to Austria precisely as a Serb, with a critical insight into the raggedy South Slav periphery of the former empire (Dor 1988). Before getting to the point where they believed that the only outlet for the beleaguered cosmopolitanism is withdrawal into an own state of siege, both Bogdanović and Dor pursued universalist ideals in more inclusive ways. For Bogdanović, the primary form of cosmopolis was the necropolis, a commemorative cemetery for victims of anti-cosmopolitan (totalitarian) terror.

Cosmopolis Besieged  21 From his first commissions, Bogdanović started developing the visual image of grave as a quintessential locus, the meeting point of forces of nature and cosmos. From his early work, the Holocaust Memorial at the New Sephardic Cemetery in Belgrade, to his magnum opus, the Jasenovac memorial to the victims of the Ustashe concentration camp, to the cemetery at Vukovar, grave becomes an abyss: it is a ravine of nature and the same time a cradle of new life, a city with roofs turned upside down and at the same time a flower spreading its petals skywards. His underlying surrealist outlook prompted him to look for such “primordial matrices of imagination” and his political instinct taught him that universal symbols are the best way to avoid the inculcation of the memorials with national and religious symbolism associated with particular Yugoslav nations. Quite characteristically, thus, the aesthetic peak of his cosmopolitan pathos was also the grounds of his political pact with the regime. Bogdanović’s second construal of cosmopolis was much less bent on universalism and rather rested on exclusivist assumptions which Renate Lachmann defined as “fundamentalist urbanism” (Lachmann 2007, 108). In Bogdanović’s view, necropolises would not necessarily be preferable to living metropolises were it not for the fact that the latter were contaminated by the parallel processes of uncontrolled inward migration and architectonic anomy: What we have is a soon to be visible and even now discernible world of bloated, febrile cities, an irrevocably polluted urban magma, sporadically restored, yet in a constant state of dissolution, a world squeezed into a suit of grey cement armour. (Bogdanović 1995, 44) In 1976, in response to what he saw as the terminal crisis of the city, Bogdanović institutes an independent school of architecture in village Mali Popović, far from Belgrade, where he gives lectures and tutorials in the anthropology of architecture to the selected few. In Nietzsche’s mythopoeia, Zarathustra leaves his mountain cave and descends into a city to teach the crowd on the square a lesson about the advent of the Übermensch; Bogdanović’s Urbsmensch must leave the city to save his all-important urban self and teach the denizens from afar. Dor, too, sought to instill a hefty dose of cosmopolitan universalism into his autobiographically inspired works. In a surrealist homage to Lautreamont’s The Songs of Maldoror he changed his Slavic name Milutin Doroslavac to Milo Dor which would remain his nom de plume. He also invented a suitable focalizer, a cash-strapped immigrant writer Mladen Raikow, who beside being his fictional double, also had something of a geographical wayfarer (with knowledge of both Serbia and Austria), of a historical poltergeist (an embarrassing witness of the century), and of a social picaro (leaping up and down the social ladder). The epitome of an unassuming yet

22  Vladimir Zorić versatile Weltoffenheit, Raikow, in his poems, also nourishes an oneiric, sublime vision of cosmopolis as a “white city,” a purified version of both the sunlit Belgrade and the snow-covered Vienna: for Mladen, this city was not made of walls and stones inundated with light but of a brotherhood of all men, a somewhat naïve utopia, which one could approach only within a small area and only for a brief moment. (Dor 1979, 545) Dor’s third (and last) vision of cosmopolitanism was pitched between that of the exiled man and that of a transcendental white city: it was the image of the multinational empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, whose luminous example Yugoslavia appropriated, even as it disowned it (Dor 2004, 12). Bogdanović and Dor started their itineraries from similar ideological positions, the radically egalitarian leftist doctrine, which led them to similar forms of engagement during World War II, and eventually made them recognize the physical and moral toll of their rebellion. It is, therefore, curious that when they eventually parted ways they also developed completely opposite models of cosmopolitanism. While Bogdanović envisioned a highly selective cosmopolis of enlightened city dwellers, who retained the right to fend off all non-urban elements, Dor contemplated the widest possible realm where all humans, with all their credos, whims, foibles, and follies, would be eligible and even necessary. Both the exclusivist and inclusivist extremes of cosmopolis proved utopian: they emerged as high-flown metaphysical constructs (Bogdanović’s city of the dead and Dor’s white city) or as merely marginal, self-limiting practices (Bogdanović’s village school of architecture and Dor’s picaresque hero). The outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars made their mirage of a cosmopolis irrelevant and put Bogdanović and Dor on the same path again: their response to the looming moral crisis was foreclosure and the spatial template that best suited that response was the state of siege. Two major contextual factors contributed to this inward turn. The first of them concerns the cultural memory of actual sieges and fortresses. The southwest part of the Central European basin between Belgrade and ­Vienna―the amplitudes of Bogdanović’s and Dor’s life journeys and cultural outlooks―has seen some momentous changes in siege technologies over the last four centuries. In the early modern period, the Austrian and the Ottoman defense infrastructure produced a string of fortified cities which the earlier saw as the rampart of Christianity (antemurale Christianitatis) and the latter as the bulwark of Islam (Jelavich 1983). In the late nineteenth century, with the Ottoman authority in decline and the open-field warfare on the rise, much of this siege infrastructure was abandoned as outdated or, as in the case of Vienna and Belgrade, dismantled to enable the burgs to connect to suburbs. However, the 1990s brought a dramatic revival of

Cosmopolis Besieged  23 the suppressed legacy of siege warfare. A number of unfortified towns and protected zones―Vukovar, Sarajevo, Bihać, Srebrenica, Goražde―were caught in one or another form of siege with long-range artillery, snipers, and blockade, which turned civilians into hostages of both the besieger and the besieged army. Thus, the technologies of war evolved from the traditional siege warfare to the dismantling of fortifications to the return of the siege in the 1990s. This contributed to the emergence of a new trope: the vicarious fortress, the ambiguous symbol of ideological dogmatism and of existential insecurity. The second contributing factor concerns the parallel rise of imaginary siege as a topos in modern Serbian and Austrian literature. In the wake of the conservative drift after 1968, both cultures experienced a partial shift from the enlightened ambulatory type of cosmopolitan, who crosses borders and bypasses the siege lines, to a stationary type of cosmopolitan, who seizes the state of siege as a cognitive model and a behavioral pattern, even when there is none at hand. In his treatise Philosophy of the Small Town [Filosofija palanke, 1969], Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinović has recourse to the Ottoman field fortress, palanka, as a conceptual model that explains the nation’s hallucination of a siege, the state of being armed against the encroachment of history (Konstantinović 2004). Elsewhere, it is the cosmopolitan who withdraws: salient examples include Borislav Pekić’s novel Houses of Belgrade [Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana, 1970], about a real estate magnate in the interwar Belgrade, who gets beaten by Communist sympathizers on the eve of the German assault on Belgrade, and withdraws in impotent protest into one of his houses in the vicinity of the fortress of Belgrade and Svetlana Velmar Janković’s novel Dungeon [Lagum, 1990], which transforms the underground escape corridors under the Belgrade fortress into a sinister symbol of both German and Communist repression (Pekić 1978; Velmar-Janković 1996). In the wake of the Waldheim affair, which shook both the foundations of Austria as the nation-state and the credentials of the United Nations as the world’s closest match of a cosmopolitan government, haunting intimations of siege emerge in Vienna. 2 In Thomas Bernhard’s late play Heroes Square [Heldenplatz, 1988], during a funeral dinner for a dissentient academic, the widow is haunted by auditory hallucinations of the Nazi battle cry from the adjacent central square, the site of a demolished inner wall of Vienna and Hitler’s speech following the Anschluss of 1938 (Bernhard 2010, 127–32). In the last months of his residence in Belgrade, Bogdanović withdrew to his Belgrade flat and set out to transform it, by force of imagination, into a city, a besieged one but still a city. His essay “The Green Box,” written in his Viennese exile, reveals in a condensed form the vast semiotic push to create and sustain the state of siege separating private and public space. He hearkens to what he thinks is the sound of the soldiers’ boots which reminds him of the marching of German soldiers during the occupation of Belgrade. By that time, however, his plot becomes more focused and he

24  Vladimir Zorić discerns persecutors all around: the spies, all sent directly by Milošević, are peering at his windows from a nearby bar; on the walls in the lobby of his hall of residence, sinister arrows are painted leading right to the door of his flat. There is no shortage of real face-to-face drama either: one evening, ruffians tried to force their way into Bogdanović’s flat but were prevented by a bulky wardrobe which he and his wife pushed against the door at the very last moment. The fiasco of this last attempt was accompanied by a sardonic scoff: obviously, these fellows were not from the city, they only tried the middle door, the one with my surname on it, but overlooked the fact that there were two side doors to my flat which we wouldn’t have been able to defend. (Bogdanović 2001, 9) In the old flats in the center of Belgrade, the side doors were a class feature; they were made specifically for cleaners, nannies, and other house assistants who were recruited mostly from the countryside or from the province; the family members and their guests would use the main door. The thugs were bound to botch their mission because, having assumedly just arrived from the countryside, they did not have an opportunity to wake up to the structures of the city and the urban way of life. Much like Goths, who in the late Antiquity were often compelled to give up sieges of big cities because they did not have technological skills (Purton 2009, 10), Milošević’s scions lacked the requisite cultural skills to break into Bogdanović’s flat (see also Vujović 2000, 125–30). Bogdanović’s response to this state of emergency is no less interesting: he wastes no time applying his skills as an architect to make the flat as comfortable and as secure as possible. Like Canetti’s Dr. Kien, he stacks heavy folios (mostly encyclopedias and monographs in art history) on the windows to obstruct the view from the outside. The balcony, overgrown with foliage of a plant, is used as the watchtower. Within the flat, the mirrors are placed all around facing each other to enable the illusion of width through. The expansion of living space is boosted by new appellations for the old rooms: “when we called each other in semi-darkness we would respond like explorers in a foreign land: ‘Here I am, in the south corridor’ or ‘in the north room’ ‘or in the eastern, morning box of the library’” (Bogdanović 2001, 9). Clearly, this stratagem of scaling up the flat to a larger-than-life size is aimed to establish the enclosed private space as both urbs, the walled city, and orbis, the self-contained universe. Bogdanović’s key contrivance, the Green Box, had preceded the war by a number of years and nevertheless it would acquire special significance in the new circumstances. Initially, he had garnered a few sheets of washing powder cardboard, shaped them into a box with a long slot on the top, and pasted various green papers all over the object. The Green Box was entrusted

Cosmopolis Besieged  25 with a special task: it was to receive the best of his ­harvest―sketches, undeveloped plans, lapidary thoughts, and even dreams; in a word, all those ideas that were too good to be tainted by reality―and it was never to be reopened. The box was gradually filled with contents and on the eve of the war Bogdanović felt confident enough about his invention to show it to his students in class and even flaunt it in live TV shows as an applied artwork. Unlike Dr. Kien’s notebook of stupidities, Bogdanović’s box was a deeply ambiguous entity marked with a cluster of surrealist associations: it bore the features of children’s saving box, the mailbox, the ballot box, and the magical box. After the outbreak of Yugoslav Wars, the much-coveted object found its honorary place in the besieged flat and became the backstop of all defense measures (Bogdanović 2001, 5–12). In the mid-1990s, Milo Dor undertook to translate into German Bogdanović’s autobiographical essays, which featured a number of nostalgic anecdotes and personal reminiscences about their shared youth in Belgrade; the first in the series was “The Green Box.” Significantly enough, at about the same time, Dor starts to work on his own siege narrative, a dystopian novella entitled Vienna, July 1999. Bogdanović’s volume and Dor’s novella were published in German in the same year, 1997, and with the same publisher, Paul Zsolnay Verlag (Bogdanović 1997; Dor 1997). The essential analogies between the two works could not have escaped their largely homogenous readership: Vienna, July 1999 is a Central ­European replica of the totalitarian state in Orwell’s 1984 and at the same time a curious exercise in narrative paranoia, the continual construal of persecutors even when there are no obvious candidates in supply. Dor’s novella is based on the nightmarish millenarianist speculation about the imminent return of Nazism as the Beast. However, the geographical foci of the process are displaced and there are also some changes to the distribution of dramatis personae. This time around, Germany emerges as a paragon of liberal democracy and Austria becomes the hotbed of new totalitarianism. The movement is spurred by a sinister far-right leader named Karl ­Haselgruber, an obvious fictional correlate of the then leader of the ­Austrian Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, who pledges to create a Third Republic. The political landscape of Austria is about to be thoroughly transformed with immigrants bearing the brunt of the new measures: legal discrimination, cancellations of residence permits, and expulsions. The narrator is Dor’s alter ego Mladen Raikow, an elderly, dignified writer, whom a movement’s pamphlet labels as “a Serbo-cosmopolitan gadfly on the healthy body of the people” (Dor 1997, 7). Differently from Bogdanović, who confines himself to the precious space of his flat, this gadfly occasionally ventures out of his Viennese home to visit in precarious anonymity different sites of the one-time multinational city. He spends some time in the vicinity of a large football stadium which hosts a mass rally of the movement and catches a few hideously sensual impressions of the event: the ever-present smell of frankfurter sausages and beer, heat, the

26  Vladimir Zorić blue uniforms of the party members, the sounds of the Radetzky March and, in an interesting shift in stereotype, the clapping of Latin-like sandals replacing Germanic boots. Moving into the eerily empty downtown, he dines at an Italian restaurant, Trattoria Palermo, and talks to the owner, an innocuous Albanian immigrant who is utterly frightened by Haselgruber’s xenophobic discourse. Reaching the front door of his flat, the narrator notices that thugs have sprayed a hate message on it: “Foreigners out!” (Dor 1997, 33). In the past, repainting the door would have been sorted out by the hausmeister―a post historically held by Czechs; Hungarians; or, as of lately, Yugoslavs―but the last hausmeister has already been expelled from the country, and the narrator is left to his own devices. The persecution narrative reaches its climax when two women, refugees from war-torn Bosnia, come to ask him for shelter. Under new circumstances, when the narrator himself is followed, no such patronage is possible and he suffers to see them arrested and led away by police. Thereupon, the narrator and his wife decide to leave Vienna for good and settle in Germany, not unlike Bogdanović and his wife, who leave Belgrade to settle in Vienna. Just like Bogdanović’s apartment in Belgrade, the narrator’s flat in ­Vienna appears to be under an undeclared state of siege. The narrator suspects that Haselgruber’s front has a particular interest in that flat and that bugs have been planted in all rooms so he adjusts his movements and speech accordingly. For instance, whenever he wants to talk to his wife about things political, he resorts to a typical spy novel trick: they go to the bathroom and turn on the shower to stifle their words. Elsewhere, he enforces a strikingly simple arrangement of space which is organized between two poles, or more precisely two planes: the vertical plane of his TV set, whence Haselgruber’s frightening propaganda infiltrates his private space, and the horizontal plane of his writing desk, which provides with an opportunity for a literary humanist riposte. The writing desk proves to be the last backstop of his precarious position in Vienna: in a dream, he sees a young activist of Haselgruber’s movement, whom he previously glimpsed at the rally, standing by his desk with his legs spread in a stereotypical SA pose and observing over the narrator’s shoulders. Annoyed by the importunate visitor, the narrator stands up and addresses him with a sentence that would make Bogdanović nod his head in approval: “Young man, I am an older Austrian than you and your look-alikes […] Three hundred years ago, my ancestors fought for the House of Austria while your ancestors still climbed the trees” (Dor 1997, 52). Like Bogdanović’s comment on rural thugs, Dor’s reference to the Austrian Military Frontier, where Serb and Croat settlers from the Ottoman territory acted as the striking fist (­Rothenberg, 1960, 1966), is aimed to degrade the intruder and show him his actual place in the cosmopolis. Thus, the close reading of Bogdanović’s and Dor’s siege narratives has shown strikingly similar and highly elaborate spatial forms which hark back to Canetti’s Dr. Kien. Just like for Canetti’s hero, for Bogdanović and Dor, the siege of cosmopolis is laid in multiple concentric rings: against

Cosmopolis Besieged  27 their cities (Belgrade and Vienna), against their private spaces (library and flat), and against their precious objects (the Green Box and the writing desk). Equally homogenous is the political context of their withdrawal. Whereas Dr. Kien’s “head without world” seems to presage the Third Reich as a “world without head,” Bogdanović and Dor build on actual memories of the German capture of Belgrade to project a neo-Nazi siege. However, is this state of exception still within the spectrum of cosmopolitanism? Rather than overcoming the binary opposition between the old resident and the newcomer, Bogdanović and Dor appear to be all too ready to switch sides and reclaim supremacy on the strength of chronological priority: denizens of the cosmopolis are those who came first. Their sit-in is both an act of withdrawal worthy of Diogenes and an Alexandrine attempt at domination, albeit within a redefined restricted world.

Relief Army: Siege Imagination in Sarajevo 1992–1996 Notwithstanding the apparent structural analogy and the biographical connection between the two acts of cosmopolitan withdrawal, it makes sense to ask why such self-limiting spatial practices should matter in the first place. For all its topical interest, this case study involves peculiarly convoluted texts which emerged on the margins of their authors’ public oeuvre and charted possibilities which, since their publication, have not been followed up either by those authors or by their audiences. One way to play down the relevance of Bogdanović’s and Dor’s siege narratives would be to suggest that they are part of a private pursuit of ageing intellectuals and, ultimately, outgrowths of their persecutory imagination. They could appear if not downright paranoid, then certainly grotesquely self-indulgent and hopelessly divorced from their immediate political context. Alternatively, one could suggest that the penchant for siege imagination―piling up obstacles in the enemy’s way―is ubiquitous. The two narratives could, then, be connected to a proclivity so vague and universal that it would cease to matter in any individual context. Neither of the two arguments would do justice to the subtle way in which Bogdanović and Dor respond to the siege technologies of the late modern period. Central to this war-ridden landscape was the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) (Vujović 2000, 131–41), which coincided with their persecutory narratives and generated in them, like in much of the intellectual elite of the West, something of a bystander’s guilt complex, which in their case was aggravated by their connection with Serbia. The broad consensus on moral and political priority of Sarajevo as the archetype of victimized city was established at the high cost of side-lining even more brutal transgressions in smaller towns and in particular in the countryside of Bosnia. Also side-lined was the fact that Bogdanović’s memorial cemeteries were damaged in warfare outside Sarajevo (during the siege of Vukovar as well as in Mostar). At any rate, the sustained concern about Sarajevo resulted not only in civic activism (open letters and petitions of solidarity) but also in an

28  Vladimir Zorić inner ethical urge to keep vigil and empathize with its citizens (Bogdanović 1995, 69–73; Dor 1996). The patterns of persecutory imagination revealed in Bogdanović’s and Dor’s texts are apparently borne out by the actual ­civilian experience in the besieged city. The siege of Sarajevo defied the logic of the medieval and early modern warfare to which it has often been incorrectly related: the civilian population, which in the past would have been bluntly evicted to save up on foodstuffs and combustibles, remained trapped in the city. Much like in Bogdanović’s and Dor’s dystopia, in the absence of fortifications it is the houses and skyscrapers in the vicinity of the frontline that take on the role of bastions which bear the brunt of systematic shelling, “floor by floor, window by window, apartment by apartment, wall by wall” (Dizdarević 1993, 87). Sorties are not merely agonizing, as in Bogdanović and Dor, but actually perilous since “if you want to get from Point A to Point B you have to pass through an open space clearly visible to a skilful sniper” (Hemon 2000, 119). The rows of books are not just symbolic ramparts of the embattled cosmopolitan mind but quite literally shock absorbers that plug broken windows and other openings in external walls: “when a shell falls, books act like a net, trapping the shrapnel between them” (Mehmedinović 1998, 75). The treasure chests of Bogdanović’s and Dor’s imagination are reflected in the inner areas of the individual flats which are least exposed to shelling and hence used to store all fragile items and precious belongings: “Bathrooms, which somehow often happen to be in the center, are storage for paintings” (Prstojević et al. 1994). Furthermore, in the late modern period, the siege of a city is usually a rallying call for cosmopolitan alignment of the kind that bears resemblances to the hegemonic withdrawal of Bogdanović and Dor. The relentless sniping and shelling of Sarajevo from the surrounding hills, punctuated by massacres on the streets, attracted global media attention and elicited a sustained relief action by various engaged intellectuals from the West, from journalists to artists to philosophers. Unlike traditional sieges, where a relief army was expected to fight its way from the outside, this cosmopolitan force was transported to the besieged city to work its way from within. They set up their respective headquarters in different safe areas in downtown, the most important of which was the well-appointed Holiday Inn hotel, and were typically entitled to transport in armed personnel carriers, thus benefitting from a level of security and convenience unattainable to the civilian population of Sarajevo (Donia 2006, 287). While the routes of exit for ordinary citizens were complicated, costly, and dangerous, Sarajevo’s international guests could arrange departures as they liked; some of them used the privilege to visit Sarajevo for spells as short as twenty-four hours. Within those citadels of international presence, a peculiar siege-buster discourse emerged which styled Sarajevo as an ideal cosmopolis, the role model for the entire Europe, and the besieging forces of the Bosnian Serbs as an aggregate of all barbarity, from the Huns to the Nazis. Bogdanović’s

Cosmopolis Besieged  29 theory of the ritual murder of the city was cited with approval in Bernard-­ Henri Lévy’s documentary feature Bosna!, a philosophical reportage from the besieged city (Lévy 1994). As he was braving sniper fire in Sarajevo, and editing his footage in France, there was little doubt for Lévy that the siege of this city actually represented a siege of the entire Europe whose fortress could only be saved by a NATO military intervention. In another example of shuttle cosmopolitanism, in July 1993, Susan Sontag traveled to Sarajevo to direct Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. While she admittedly relied on local actors and spectators for an immediate theatrical experience, she set her sights on a global political audience: Beckett’s tragic dupes Vladimir and Estragon turn political and start to speak on behalf of the people of Sarajevo who vainly wait for NATO to intervene and protect their bastion of European values (Sontag 1993). However, by this Eurocentric shift to an imagined siege of the outside area, Lévy’s and Sontag’s cosmopolitanism contributed to Bosnia’s insidious “siege within,” a complex pyramid of political, economic, and discursive power in the city itself which effectively excluded the ordinary citizens whom it set out to protect and empower (Andreas 2008, ix). The siege narratives of Bogdanović and Dor are, thus, not idiosyncratic nor for that matter vaguely universal but rather part of a specific interaction between the expanding cosmopolitan discourse and the evolving siege technologies. In the eighteenth century, under enlightened absolutism, philosophers challenged the endemic wars in Europe by formulating theories of perpetual peace as “a surrogate mode of political practice, a virtual form of global citizenship” (Ingram 2013, 37). In the late twentieth century, the time of an unprincipled peace in Europe, the imagining of a perpetual war, in the form of a siege, provided disenfranchised intellectuals with a space for action which the formal political sphere had denied them. The besieged cosmopolis thus became a pervasive trope of the cosmopolitan discourse and a sign of recognition for the intellectuals who borrowed from, and built upon, each other’s articulations of that trope. Semiotically, and strategically too, this siege imagination has worked in two directions. On the one hand, as in the case of Bogdanović and Dor, it has been the imaginary siege, that is, a withdrawal into a private space as the last, personal citadel of an embattled cosmopolis. On the other hand, as in Lévy, the siege itself has been a springboard for political imagination, that is, the appropriation of a besieged public space as the rampart of a global cosmopolis. Either way, the siege imagination affects a hegemonic withdrawal: some entities were excluded from cosmopolis, some others were never allowed in the first place, and those which remained were subjected to a neat order, determined by closure. Exposing oneself to a siege, imagined or real, is, thus, inextricably linked to asserting one’s power. Yet sieges are not only about stationary cosmopolitans, who sympathize from afar by locking themselves in, nor for that matter about ambulatory cosmopolitans, who come in and then leave. Sieges are also, and primarily

30  Vladimir Zorić so, about resident population who lived in the city before the war, who stay in the city during the siege, and who hope to survive to live in it afterwards. For that population, the ultimate horizon of cosmopolitanism would certainly be to get beyond the siege rather than embrace it. At a basic level, cosmopolitanism can mean something as simple as being able to leave the cosmopolis: for the scholar and poet Izet Sarajlić, who stayed in Sarajevo during the siege, a quintessential cosmopolitan wish is to get on a train (which does not operate) and reach the first suburban station (held by the besieging forces) (Sarajlić 1995, 35). At a deeper level, however, cosmopolitanism entails not only mobility in space but also the mobility of mind, the capacity to transcend the siege in thought, speech, and deed. On 25 August 1992, shells hit the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, destroying much of the building and setting on fire the library’s holdings of 1.5 million volumes (Riedlmayer 1995, 7). The gaping walls and burning wood threw into relief the sheer inadequacy of the notion―so dear to Bogdanović and Dor―of the library as a humanist fortress or even as a physical shock absorber. As the building continued to burn over the entire day, a human chain was formed to try and save those volumes which had not yet been engulfed by fire; the rescue operation claimed the life of a librarian, Aida Buturović, who was hit by a sniper (Riedlmayer 1995, 7). Subsequently, press photographers reported on a cellist, Vedran Smajlović, who sat in his evening tailcoat on a piece of collapsed masonry amidst the smoldering ruins and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. As the wind scattered ashes of books and manuscripts over the city, the sharp, plaintive sounds of the solitary cello rose above the ruins into the open air: a paradoxical, apocalyptic Weltoffenheit emerged which eluded not only the actual siege lines but also the tropology of siege and even the fetters of language itself. This essay has argued that within the broad spectrum of tropes of cosmopolitanism, it is the siege that puts into view its intrinsic limits in the most transparent way. Not only is cosmopolitanism etymologically derived from the idea of the city (polis)—an entity vulnerable to sieges—it also displays in its theory and practice certain siege strategies such as hegemonic expansion over the set limits or withdrawal into self-enclosed space behind the set limits. What is more, certain acts of hegemonic expansion occasionally appear under the guise of a resentful withdrawal, not unlike counteraction in the siege technology. All of the theories, literary texts, and practices discussed in this essay have one thing in common: they perform the siege—and its concomitant limits—as the master trope of cosmopolitanism.

Notes 1 All translations from these texts are mine. 2 In 1986, a journalist’s investigation revealed that Austrian politician Kurt Waldheim had lied about his past during World War II: rather than being discharged from Wehrmacht early in the war, he had continued his service in a senior role and had been implicated in crimes against civilian populations in

Cosmopolis Besieged  31 Greece (Thessaloniki) and Yugoslavia (Kosovska Mitrovica, Sarajevo). In the meantime, Waldheim had served as the General Secretary of the UN (1972– 1976) and became the president-elect of Austria (1986). The Waldheim affair sensitized the public opinion to Austria’s role in the Third Reich and generated a keen and critical memory discourse in Austrian literature.

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2 Building Bridges Constructing a Comparative Sufi Cosmopolitanism in Rock and Roll Jihad Mukti Lakhi Mangharam How far is it possible to really understand and assess cultural values other than our own? This is a question that has long dogged the political, economic, and social pursuit of a cosmopolitanism characterized by a belief in a common humanity. Cosmopolitanism has been defined in various, often conflicting ways—from the hegemonic cultural and ideological project accompanying economic globalization (Brennan 1997) to the strategies through which the nation-state may be held accountable to universal rights and norms (Robbins and Cheah 1998) to a set of marginal projects toward planetary conviviality (Mignolo 2000). In the more positive characterizations reflected in the last two definitions, cosmopolitanism usually articulates a common human sociality across the globe that should be privileged over parochial forms of self-identification including religion, class, nationality, and ethnicity. In considering the conceivability of truly cross-cultural comprehension and dialogue, I refer to this idea of a common human sociality in light of the word “cosmopolitanism’s” most basic conceptual meaning and lexical origins. The word, derived from Ancient Greek, means “citizen of the cosmos,” a paradoxical formulation because a citizen, or polite-s, belongs to a particular polis, a city to which he or she owes loyalty. The “cosmos,” meanwhile, refers to the world. Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signaled, then, a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged first to one community among many. Instead, cosmopolitanism reflected an identification with the world positioned from within, but also transcending, the bounds of a local community. As Anthony Appiah elaborates, this means recognizing that one has obligations to others beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. It also means that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which translates into taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance (Appiah 2006, xv). Such a perspective counters anthropological cultural relativisms that dismiss cosmopolitanism on the grounds that it is impossible to comprehend and evaluate cultural values other than our own.

34  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam In what follows, I consider the basis of such culturally relativist worldviews as well as their limitations. I highlight the need for cosmopolitanism as a tool against the limits on planetary conviviality posed by the national, ethnic, and religious boundaries of ethnocentric nationalisms and parochialisms. In the process, I distinguish between a hegemonic cosmopolitanism of the privileged and emancipatory cosmopolitanisms that enable cross-cultural comprehension and dialogue. I flesh out this crucial distinction between different kinds of cosmopolitanism through a case study of Sufi philosophy, music, and poetry in South Asia. I interpret these literary texts as active performative theorizations of an emancipatory “comparative cosmopolitanism,” a term that refers to discourses that articulate translatable claims of universal belonging from within their own unique, culturally particular ontologies and epistemes. I argue that such comparative cosmopolitanisms have the potential to foster genuine cross-cultural respect and understanding. Finally, I locate the grounded Sufi cosmopolitanism that emerges in the context of wider discussions of the uses of local universalisms.

Against Cultural Relativism Anthony Appiah identifies the basis of culturally relativist worldviews as a sharp philosophical distinction, inhering in a rationalist Enlightenment tradition, between facts and values. Facts are objectively and scientifically observable—right or wrong—while values are inherently subjective and cannot be judged according to the criteria of right or wrong because these concepts only make sense relative to particular customs, conventions, and cultures. Such an argument, of course, is logically flawed in its oversight of the ways that “facts” are themselves shaped by contexts. Moreover, if we entertain this argument, how do we decide which values should be upheld or given preference when two value systems come into conflict or express irreconcilable worldviews? Rightly believing cultural relativism to be untenable, Akeel Bilgrami suggests an answer in reference to religious worldviews, stating that in a religiously plural society, all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the fundamental rights and ideals that a polity seeks to achieve, in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first. (Bilgrami 2014, 12) In other words, Bilgrami gives precedence to collective political values and constitutional commitments over religious principles if the latter contradict the former. If two religious worldviews come into conflict with each other, the one that should be upheld is that which gels with a socially agreed upon

Building Bridges  35 and upheld lexicon of rights and ideals. Part of the logic behind this reasoning, I think, is fundamentally cosmopolitan for it strives toward the creation of a shared vocabulary of values so that people can imagine themselves as simultaneously part of the local—a particular religion—and of a larger community of humans—through enshrined rights and ideals. This means respecting and making sense of particular traditions, ways of thinking, and practices except when those are inconsistent with that kind of simultaneity. What does one do, however, when the majoritarian consensus of “rights” and “ideals” that Bilgrami refers to itself turns racist or chauvinistic, pitting itself against a particular ethnicity or religion, as Trump’s privileged supporters of neoliberal “freedom” have done through white supremacist ideologies? Such events clearly deny the logic of cosmopolitanism—an attempt to identify oneself with communities other than one’s own—even as they embezzle the primary vehicle through which cosmopolitanism can affect political change—democratic social consensus. Such misappropriations testify to the truth of James Ingram’s assertion that cosmopolitan modes of being and thinking tend to correspond to a very particular location, typically one quite near the top. It might be said that one most easily sees the world as one from above, and especially from a great height. The claim to take a universal perspective is a privilege that is more available to an elite (Ingram 2016, 70). Tim Brennan adds that a cosmopolitan focus on identifications beyond the nation-state too often functions as the ideological justification for the violence of economic globalization; cosmopolitanism is misguided because the nation-state remains the linchpin of any attempt to counter the workings of transnational capitalism (317). While these concerns are undoubtedly well founded, the nation-state also remains the greatest agent of exclusionary violence against its own citizens as well as those outside its boundaries. We cannot, then, abandon the project of cosmopolitanism—an attempt to strive toward common norms and mutual translatability that can hold nation-states to account, especially as right-wing movements take hold all across the globe while using anti-minoritarian and white supremacist arguments to do so. A retreat from cosmopolitanism in this context can only mean a recourse to a patriotic civic nationalism, which, as Max Compton points out, by its very nature entails the alienation of certain groupings of humanity from others, whether along lines of race or citizenship: an “us versus them” structuring of reality (Compton 2016). Resistance to the current international wave of ethno-nationalisms can only be fought back by an international alliance of those who define one’s allegiance in universalizing terms to all human beings.

Finding an Emancipatory Comparative Cosmopolitanism: Modi Versus Salman Ahmad How, then, do you prevent a cosmopolitanism from above, a cosmopolitanism of the privileged while preserving and making space for emancipatory

36  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam cosmopolitanisms that enable cross-cultural comprehension and dialogue? I suggest, along with Ingram and Mignolo, that cosmopolitanisms are more likely to be emancipatory rather than hegemonic when they are enunciated from peripheral positions within a process of contestation. If what predictably corrupts cosmopolitanism is its structural affinity with seeing and acting on the world from above, the remedy, as Ingram would also agree, is to tie it to seeing and acting in the world from below (72). Cosmopolitanisms must, in other words, be conceived, as Mignolo specifies, from the exterior, “the borderland seen from the perspective of those to be included” (Mignolo 2000, 742–44). The solution is to reimagine cosmopolitanism not on the model of a “project” or “design,” but as a process and practice of contestation, a politics waged against the very forms of domination and false universals that seek to co-opt it. The second and related way in which cosmopolitanism needs to be disconnected from top-down hegemonic approaches to universality is through a critical project that makes space for comparative cosmopolitanisms rooted in peripheral spaces. The rest of this section clarifies what distinguishes a hegemonic cosmopolitanism from a contestatory, peripheral, and comparative cosmopolitanism through an exploration of Sufism in South Asia. This is a spiritual and philosophical tradition that was recently appropriated by India’s right-wing Hindu Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but which also remains the mode of belief and embodied practice through which countless ordinary people conceptualize themselves as belonging to a larger world of fellow humans. Broadly, Sufism is a branch of Islamic thought and practice in which closeness to the divine, said to live within all human beings, is achieved by embracing with love at each moment the content of one’s consciousness (one’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings) as gifts of God or, more precisely, as manifestations of God. Within this spiritual understanding of the self, death is not the only pathway to the divine, for the ethical cultivation of one’s practices, thoughts, and feelings while alive are themselves pathways to Allah. The self’s resulting intimacy with the divine is the very purpose of creation. What does this spiritual tradition have to do with cosmopolitanism? If the divine exists in all, then all human beings are equal, part of a universal community. Love toward these other divine humans is a primary way to access the divine. Moreover, since all humans contain the same divine spark, all practices and paths through which that divine self is manifested are equally valid, for they are all vehicles of the same divinity. This is a non-authoritarian pluralist tradition, then, that celebrates diversity as equal manifestations of a divine unity. Unfortunately, Sufism’s inherent pluralism has also lent it to appropriation by hegemonic top-down versions of cosmopolitanism that are actually right-wing nationalisms in disguise, such as Narendra Modi’s speech at the 2016 World Sufi Forum. In order to clarify what distinguishes the two varieties of cosmopolitanism from

Building Bridges  37 each other, I contrast this speech with the embodied and contestatory Sufism of the Pakistani-­A merican singer Salman Ahmad, the lead vocalist of the ­Pakistani rock band, Junoon.

Modi’s Hegemonic Sufi “Cosmopolitanism” The first meeting of the World Sufi Forum was organized by the All India Ulama and Mashaikh Board (AIUMB) initiative to bring together over 200 Indian and international spiritually inclined scholars, luminaries, and visionaries of all faiths and traditions. It was held in New Delhi, India from 17 to 20 March 2016 with Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri of Pakistan and Narendra Modi as keynote speakers. Both noted that they were there to promote the Sufism of love and peace as part of the fight against Islamic terrorism. At first, nothing about PM Modi’s speech seems objectionable. It contains a moving tribute to a cosmopolitan stream of thought in India that stands for unity in diversity. Modi praises the “message of Sufism” as the belief that “the World is one Family” for Sufism preaches “the oneness of humanity, of all of Almighty’s creations… That all are creations of God; and, that if we love God, we must also love all his creations.” Modi describes this message as “one of the greatest contributions of Islam to this world” because it promotes a spirit of “openness and enquiry, engagement and accommodation, and respect for diversity” (Modi 2016). He elaborates this message through the sayings of Sufi saints such as Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, who stated that, “every people has its own path of truth, beliefs and focus of reverence.” Modi stresses that “these words reflect the divine message that there is no compulsion in religion; And also that to every people we have appointed ways of worship which they observe” (Modi 2016). What gives this away as a top-down cosmopolitanism and, even more so, as a hegemonic appropriation of a pluralist minority tradition toward elite, cynical ends? Modi’s account of connecting with a universal humanity that has various equally valid manifestations is articulated with the nation-state, rather than individual and diverse communities, at its center. Modi begins his speech by welcoming the key Sufi thinkers who are attending by name and nation of origin. He thus establishes their presence in terms of their capacities as representatives from states including Egypt, Iraq, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, rather than as the articulators of miscellaneous Sufi practices and ways of thinking. The use of the nation-state as the main point of reference itself does not mean that such a Sufism necessarily stands in for a hegemonic top-down cosmopolitanism. What does, however, indicate such an appropriation is that the presence of this collection of Sufi guests and nation-states is subtly, almost unnoticeably, filtered through a nationalist story of India as an imagined Hindu community. Modi describes India as a land that “became”

38  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam “a principal center of Islamic civilization (Modi 2016)” because of its supposedly innate love of pluralism: Sufism became the face of Islam in India, even as it remained deeply rooted in the Holy Quran, and Hadis… Sufism blossomed in India’s openness and pluralism. It engaged with her spiritual tradition, and, it helped shape a distinct Islamic heritage of India. (Modi 2016) Thus, Modi suggests that there is a “spiritual tradition” that existed in I­ ndia before Islam, and when Islam arrived, its principal “face” could only be Sufism for only Sufi Islam was compatible with an originally Indian Hindu spirituality. In line with this narrative of an original Indian and pluralistic Hinduism embracing and developing Sufism, Modi points out that Sufism “is in harmony with the soul of the Bhakti saint’s saying in the Hindu tradition, ‘Into the bosom of the one great sea, Flow streams that come from hills on every side’” (Modi 2016). Such an interpretation of Sufism’s compatibility with an “original” Hindu Bhakti heritage overlooks the ways that both developed in conjunction with one another and drew on many of the same sources. This co-constitution is why the great medieval poet, Kabir remains a contested center of both nirguna bhakti and Sufi communities. Moreover, such an account of an originally Hindu Indian landscape ignores that, while Islam “came” to India, it is also true that Hinduism in its current form arrived during a later historical moment when compared to the land’s original adivasi, or tribal inhabitants. The nationalist Hinduism espoused by Modi and his followers is largely a syncretic construction of nineteenth-­ century colonialism rather than an “authentic” precolonial essence, as he posits. As scholars such as Richard King have convincingly shown, the humiliations of British colonialism forced many upper-caste Hindu nationalists to seek flattering self-definitions in the past. Ironically, they used European scholarship on India’s Sanskritic heritage to construct a Vedic, text-based, and upper-caste religiosity as the “true” Hinduism and identity of the nation. Though barely spoken in India, Sanskrit, the “language of the gods,” seemed to sum up the range of virtues that exalted India above inferior, even barbaric, civilizations (King 1999, 101). The inconveniently substantial non-Sanskritic and folk traditions of India—those followed by a majority of Indians and described by scholars such as Wendy Doniger—were deemed un-Hindu (­Doniger 2009). The rising tide of persecutions and lynchings of Muslims and lower castes caught eating beef can be traced to Hindutva’s representation of upper-caste religiosity as the only valid form of religion. Modi elevates his revisionary account of an originary, already consolidated tolerant and pluralistic Hinduism to a historical fact because it allows him to portray India as a repository of diverse but compatible religious traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Sufism that are nevertheless defined in relation to the supposed mother religion— Hinduism. In the same paragraph of his speech, Modi refers to the “infinite

Building Bridges  39 humanism” of Rumi’s words “Contain all human faces in your own, without any judgment of them”; to the biblical sermon “that calls us to do good, seek peace and pursue it”; to Kabir’s “observation that a river and its waves are one”; to Sikhisms’s prayer “may everyone in the world prosper and be in peace”; and to the colonial Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda’s appeal “for people of all religions to hold the banner of harmony, not of dispute.” Rounding off this list, he also affirms the “enduring message of Ahimsa of Lord Buddha” and Mahavira of Jainism. Significantly, Modi then consolidates this endless stream of references to diversity with an invocation of the Hindu prayer, “Om Shanti; Shanti; Shanti: Peace, Peace, Peace; Peace within and in the world” (Modi 2016). The ending of this paean to India’s inherent multiplicity thus consolidates Hinduism’s place as the repository of these various traditions, positing it as the universal through which these diverse traditions should be understood rather than as a specific religious stream that runs alongside the rest within a complex religious landscape. Here, I am not contesting the precolonial existence of religious pluralism in India, which Bilgrami also invokes when he points to alternative potential sources for comparative secularisms. Rather, I am trying to outline the spurious historical narrative within which such examples are placed, and the way in which this narrative serves exclusionary, nondemocratic ends. In this case, Hindu nationalism’s account of India’s innate pluralism as one that is built on a Hindu base allows Modi to differentiate “good Muslims” from “bad Muslims.” For only Muslims who are possessed with the “spirit of Sufism, the love for their country and the pride in their nation,” are the truly Indian or “good” Muslims who “reflect the timeless culture of peace, diversity and equality of faith of our land; They are steeped in the democratic tradition of India, confident of their place in the country and invested in the future of their nation” (Modi 2016). This separation of “good Muslims” from “bad Muslims” is also indicated within Modi’s vague reference to the Indian partition, which led to the formation of the Muslim majority nation-state of Pakistan, and in which millions of Muslims and Hindus died in horrific communal violence. Modi refers to these fraught instances of Indian communal history as nothing more than a moment “at the dawn of independence when some chose to go away” (Modi 2016). The “some,” then, are transformed from victims who were forced to flee for their lives from a land their families had lived in for generations, into the bad Pakistani Muslims who “chose” not to buy into India’s supposedly healthy pluralism. In contrast, other presumably “good Muslims rejected the idea of division on the basis of religion” (Modi 2016). This historical narrative, which lays blame for communal violence solely on a certain kind of Muslim, conceptualizes India’s most significant religious minority in binaristic and simplistic terms. And it naturalizes this binary by relying on the idea of a unitary, timeless Hinduism that is the pluralistic, inclusive, and democratic center of the Indian nation-state. The implications of such a narrative become clear as Modi’s speech progresses, for such a story of the nation-state grounds the underlying ideology of the “Other” that fuels much of the anti-Muslim violence in India.1 As

40  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot points out about the deadly 2002 communal riots, “the aim here was not only to loot and destroy private property, even if such events also took place, but indeed to murder and run off those perceived as intruders” (Jaffrelot 2010, 389). This concept of “intruders” or “outsiders” lies at the heart of Hindutva: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s right-wing ideology that ideally aims to bring an end to the secular state of India by establishing Hindu hegemony. As Chetan Bhatt has shown, this variety of Hindu nationalism is based on the nineteenth-­century ideal of one nation, one people, and one culture, derived from European Romantic and Enlightenment rationalist ideas of archaic primordialism, evolution, organicism, vitalism, racial purity, and then later on German fascism (Bhatt 2001). Hindu nationalists perceive India first and foremost as Hindustan, the natural homeland of the Hindus, the country’s original inhabitants. While Hindus have lived in the subcontinent since times immemorial, India’s Muslims are regarded as the descendants of foreign invaders or, at best, Hindus that once converted to Islam. Reflecting these ideals, one of the leading ideologues of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, wrote a pamphlet in 1923 titled “Who is a Hindu?”/“Essentials of Hindutva,” where he defines a citizen as any Hindu or person who lives in the Indian subcontinent. Savarkar states that a Hindu considers the land from the Himalayas or the Indus to the Indian Ocean as his fatherland (pitrubhumi) and holy land (punyabhumi), which means that only followers of Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism can be true citizens. Since all the other faiths in India—Zoroastrian, Christianity, Islam, and J­ udaism—have their holy lands outside of the Indian subcontinent, their followers cannot be seen as true citizens (Savarkar 1969, 113). Modi’s cabinet has reflected these opinions on many occasions.2 As is apparent in Modi’s speech at the Sufi Forum, this ideology has not been replaced, but rather made more subtle and therefore arguably more insidious in his role as Prime Minster. A contextualization of the subtext of Modi’s words makes it easier to pick up on his foreign policy agenda within the speech, for his version of the “true, good Islam,” which he characterizes as “a spiritual quest that traces its origin from the Holy Prophet and the fundamental values of Islam, and which literally means peace” (Modi 2016), is allegedly not one that Pakistan practices. In a barely veiled attack on this enemy nation, Modi notes that when the spiritual love of Sufism, not the violent force of terrorism, flows across the border, this region will be the paradise on earth that Amir Khusrau spoke about. Let me paraphrase what I have said before: Terrorism divides and destroys us. Indeed, when terrorism and extremism have become the most destructive force of our times, the message of Sufism has global relevance. (Modi 2016) Such an account of terroristic bad Pakistani Muslims serves to bolster and even justify India’s brutal policies in Kashmir. 3

Building Bridges  41

Salman Ahmad’s Embodied Sufi Cosmopolitanism In contrast to chauvinistic, nation-state-centered, top-down cosmopolitanisms, I consider the Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad’s autobiography, Rock and Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution (2010), which covers his time as the lead singer of the band Junoon (Passion). I argue that Ahmad constructs a rooted cosmopolitanism that critiques Pakistani and Indian nationalisms to ultimately foreclose a nationalist basis for identity, instead focusing on a much smaller unit of identification, the Sufi notion of “self.” Ahmad’s embodied Sufism is built on a carefully cultivated process of self-transformation aimed at uniting with the divinity within the self so that it may connect with the divinity within others. Ahmad conveys this message through the musical genre of Sufi Rock, which ties rock music to the millennia old qawaali style of Sufi singing. This fusion has propelled Ahmad into a world renowned rock star with over thirty million record sales, fans including Bono and Al Gore, and the title of UNAids Goodwill Ambassador. As the title, which conspicuously identifies Ahmad as Muslim, suggests, his autobiography is a documentation of this Sufi journey for a Western audience. In particular, the term “rock and roll jihad” is a recuperation of the word “jihad” in the wake of its appropriation as Islam’s true essence by both terrorists and the Euro-American media. By contrast, in the context of Ahmad’s memoir, “jihad” refers to an older semantic content to do with the spiritual struggle against sin within oneself. For Ahmad, this is a struggle based in Sufi music and poetry as it embodies and then reaches beyond its local contexts into the wider world. In the process, “jihad” serves to refute extremist Islamic uses of the term as well as Western stereotyping and hatred of Muslims in the wake of September 11. Ahmad’s music performs a Sufi cosmopolitanism in both its form and content. In terms of its form, Ahmad’s music showcases local and traditional folk instruments including “sitar, bhangra drum and dhol grooves” from “all four Pakistani provinces” and couples them with a medley of “hard rock guitar riffs (Ahmad 2010, 126).” Together, these diverse elements meld into a bigger sound, one populated not just by desi tradition but also by funk, rock, reggae, and blues. On stage we married the music of Bob Marley or Howlin’ Wolf with galloping six, seven, and eight beat table and dholak grooves. (Ahmad 2010, 155) Ahmad’s cultural fusion here is inspired by the Sufi qawaali maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who sings taans—high, melismatic vocal flourishes—on top of a modal bed of synths. Ahmad notes that “something clicked when I heard that blissful union of sounds. Nusrat’s voice and the synthesizers sounded natural and beautiful together” (Ahmad 2010, 126). For Ahmad, such fusion is an expression of God’s love of diversity. Importantly, this

42  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam cosmopolitan fusion, despite being posited as marrying the reified categories of “East and West,” does not represent an abstracted, generalizing move away from the local. Rather, it amplifies the content and form of the regional and the local in its reaching outwards into the world so that it is precisely “devotional Sufi love poetry and the intense, trance, raga based choruses that opened doors to new spaces” (Ahmad 2010, 127). Ahmad’s reaching out from the local to achieve a cosmopolitan fusion of musical forms is itself tied to the influence of his Pakistani childhood and high schooling in Tappan, New York. In this sense, Ahmad’s life is a lived cosmopolitanism of the privileged kind; his transnational ties are a result of his upbringing within a relatively wealthy Pakistani professional household that allowed his parents to move to the United States while maintaining ties to Pakistan. However, Ahmad’s cosmopolitanism is also peripheral, marginal, and contestatory in its content because it resists the pull and grip of hegemonic collectivities. Instead, it is an embodied spiritual practice rooted in an entity that serves as a counterpoint to the exclusionary patriotisms of the Indian and Pakistani nation-states—the self. Ahmad writes, Sufism focuses one’s attention on knowing God through knowing oneself. Using music, poetry, dance, and meditation, Sufis tune out the interference of the ego and merge with the divine. Sufis believe that in order to love God you have to love His people as well. The Sufi poet Bulleh Shah said: You can destroy the mosque, tear down the temple, break all that can be broken. But never break anyone’s heart, because that’s where God lives. (Ahmad 2010, 19) This is a practice, then, of connecting the self with the divine, but doing so necessarily involves placing the self in relation to “His people,” who also contain the same divinity within their hearts. In order to articulate this quest to connect with the divinity within the self that also lives within others, Ahmad reads and incorporates the writings of Sufi poets including Muhammed Iqbal, Bulleh Shah, and Rumi. In particular, Ahmad focuses on Iqbal’s concept of “khudi” or “self” as a foundational text that provides a philosophical basis for what the “self” that contains divinity actually is. Iqbal was a poet philosopher of British India, whose Asrar-i-Khudi or The Secrets of the Self was published in Persian in 1915. Iqbal’s use of the term “Khudi,” or the “self,” is synonymous with the word “Rooh,” or the divine spark that is present in every human being. Within the khudi lies the blueprint of the universe—all the treasure of wisdom and information about every atom of the universe. Even as the self contains such a divine spark, however, actively realizing this divinity requires having to make a great journey of self-transformation that ends in an ideal state, which Iqbal symbolizes through the “Shaheen” or falcon. While Iqbal was inspired by Rumi,4 here he rejects Rumi’s conception of Sufism as requiring the dissolution of an illusionary self into the divine. Iqbal’s khudi is not just an illusion of the mind but a real entity that needs to be cultivated in order to

Building Bridges  43 connect with the Divine. The journey toward the Divine involves developing this self into a unique individual in service of Allah, for “God himself is the individual: He is the most unique individual” (Iqbal 1920, xx). The goal, thus, is not to become absorbed “in a universal divine soul as the final aim and salvation but self-affirmation through becoming more and more individual, more and more unique…” until one is able to absorb divinity into oneself. This quest for uniqueness follows the prophet’s injunction: “takhallaqu bi-akhlaq Allah, ‘Create in yourselves the attributes of God,’ the most unique individual” (Iqbal 1920, xx). The individual who comes nearest to God in uniqueness is the completest person, ultimately being able to embody God, or the divinity of the universe, within themselves. Such a conception of khudi involves a cosmopolitan reaching out to others beyond oneself because it theorizes the divine universe as “an association of unique individuals … in the course of formation.”5 To absorb this divine universe into oneself one must reach out in love to the other unique individuals who compose it. Love or “ishq” is an important concept in Iqbal for strengthening the self. From Love, the Self acquires vitality and radiance. By love, khudi is made more lasting. Such love is an intrinsic value, a categorical imperative. Iqbal’s conception of the self and the self’s relationship to others is central to Salman Ahmad’s own account of self-transformation. One of Iqbal’s most famous poems speaks of this process: Khudi Ko Kar Buland Itna Ke Har Taqdeer Se Pehle Khuda Bande Se Khud Puche, Bata Teri Raza Kya Hai

Raise yourself so high that Before realizing any destiny for you, The divine has to ask you: Tell me, “What do you desire?”

Issi Roz-o-Shab Mein Ulajh Kar Na Reh Ja Ke Tere Zaman-o-Makan Aur Bhi Hain

Don’t get tangled up in these days and nights For other times and spaces await you

Qanaat Na Kar Alam-e-Rang-o-Bu Par Don’t be satisfied with this world of smells and colors For other flower beds and homes await Chaman Aur Bhi Ashiyan Aur Bhi you Hain Beyond the stars, lie even more worlds Sitaron Se Agay Jahan Aur Bhi Hain And even more trials of love, faith and Abhi Ishq Ke Imtihan Aur Bhi Hain desire. Tu Shaheen Hai, Parwaz Hai Kaam Tera Tere Samne Asman Aur Bhi Hain

You are the falcon, your work is to soar

Tu Shaheen Hai, Basera Kar Paharon Ki Chatanon Mein (Iqbal, “Baal-i-jibreel”)

You are the falcon, Make your home on the edge of mountain peaks (translation mine)

In front of you lie even more skies.

44  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam Ahmad borrows many of Iqbal’s phrases here for one of Junoon’s songs on self-transformation, for this poem enjoins khudi, or the self, to reach a plane so elevated—“raise yourself so high”—that the self can absorb the divine universe. The khudi is both the beginning and end of this journey. In the beginning, it is the khudi who embarks on a limitless journey of self-transformation “to the edge of mountain peaks” so as to come face to face with the divine spark within. The self here is buoyant, unbounded, and tireless. In his other work, Iqbal emphasizes the idea that the “Shahin” builds no nest, for the journey of self-transformation is not about safety or ease but thrusting the self outwards into the universe in order to compose it from individuality. Once the self has come face to face with the divine spark within, it is asked by this divine spark what God can do to aid the self’s journey toward achieving a loving absorption of the divine universe it has encountered. Iqbal’s language reflects this simultaneous movement of expansion and absorption. The self’s expansion into the universe is captured through metaphors such as “the edge of mountain peaks,” through the repeated refrain of “even more,” and the vocabulary of boundlessness, including words such as “beyond” and “soar.” The self’s eventual absorption of the universe, meanwhile, is suggested by the description of this journey as the satisfaction of the self’s desires and the realizing of one’s destiny. Salman Ahmad quotes a Quranic chapter on what it means to reach out to, absorb, and thereby compose the divine universe through a process of self-transformation. In this story, the angel Gabriel urges Mohammed to “think, reflect, reason, and inquire,” for “ignorance is humanity’s greatest poverty … knowledge brings people – irrespective of gender, age, race, or religion – into the highest rank of human accomplishment” (Ahmad 2010, 178). This kind of inquiry, rather than religious ritual and the following of precepts, is the path toward realizing one’s divinity. This is also the message of another South Asian Sufi poet, Bulleh Shah (1680–1757), whose words Ahmad incorporates into his musical oeuvre. Ahmad writes, While still a student at a madrassah, Bulleh Shah asked his religious teacher a profound question: what was the point of washing one’s hands and feet before prayers if the heart wasn’t clean? The cleric frowned at Shah and refused to answer. In the teacher’s mind the young Bulleh was treading very close to blasphemy. But the future poet wanted a reply. Instead of waiting for one, he found his own answer. He grew his hair long, started dressing in flamboyant garb, picked up the iktara (a one stringed folk instrument) and began singing poetry. (Ahmad 2010, 179) Bulleh discovers his own unique way of cleansing his heart—the receptacle of the self—so as to connect with his khudi or divine spark. In this story, Bulleh’s “long hair,” “flamboyant garb,” iktara, and poetry serve

Building Bridges  45 as performative vehicles toward self-transformation, a process reflected in Bulleh’s poem “Ki janan mein kaun” or “who am I”: Na main momin vich maseetaan Na main vich kufar diyan reetaan Na main paakaan vich paleetaan Na main moosa na firown

I am not a believer in a mosque, Nor am I an infidel’s false rituals and rites I am not pure amongst the impure I am not Moses, nor a Pharoah

Bulleya Ki jaana main Kaun?

Bulleh, Who knows who I am?

Avval aakhir aap nu jaana Na koi dooja hor pehchaana Maethon hor na koi siyaana Bulla! ooh khadda hai kaun? Bulleya Ki jaana main Kaun

First and last I know only my self I do not recognize any other There is no one wiser than me Bulleh! who stands there?

(Bulleh Shah, “Bulla Ki Jana Main Kaun”)

(“Bulleh, Who knows who I am?” translation mine)

Ahmad cites this poem as one of his greatest inspirations because it captures the Sufi notion that “without inner struggle and self-knowledge, joy and enlightenment would always remain elusive” (Ahmad 2010, 179). Like Bulleya, Ahmad rejects versions of Islam that deny khudi’s process of unique self-inquiry and self-transformation, including the idea that rituals, precepts, and religious injunctions such as visiting the mosque are the only way to God. Instead, the journey to embodying divinity involves putting the “self” front and center until it reaches the divinity within and connects to the universe through that divinity. For Ahmad, this journey of self-transformation is precisely about realizing and celebrating the particular and unique attributes of oneself, and of defining the local through one’s embodied particularity rather than through the nationalist religious homogeneity that is increasingly the mark of mainstream politics in India and Pakistan. This is made clear in Ahmad’s reactions to the constant questioning he faces from fellow Pakistanis about whether his music and adaptations of Quranic and Sufi poems are blasphemous: When I was out at night in restaurants, people would come to our table and interrogate me. “Do you consider yourself to be a good Muslim?” they would ask … ‘do you pray five times a day?’ ‘Do you fast?’ Do you give charity? Have you gone on the hajj? Do you believe that there’s no god but Allah and that Muhammed is his prophet?’… I lost my appetite entirely when less friendly kids and adults insisted to me that Islam outright forbids music. Every Pakistani grows up with Allah and Rasool, and religion is a part of daily life, present at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My own life is no different. [Such questions] were the eerie flipside of the Sufi message of love, self discovery and compassion we’d been

46  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam promoting in Junoon’s songs…. If they wanted to find God through a fog of fear, well, fine. I wasn’t about to become a robot for anyone. The Sufi spirit in me wasn’t going to judge them for taking their path, but by the same token I needed to be left alone to follow mine. (Ahmad 2010, 172) If the goal of self-transformation is to realize the most unique of individual selves, and indeed to recognize that the divine universe is itself an association of unique individuals who one needs to reach out to in order to absorb its divinity, robotically following authoritarian injunctions represents the “eerie flipside of the Sufi message.” In response to a Pakistani schoolteacher who is angry with Junoon for leading her students to sing Iqbal’s poetry in an “irreverent” manner, Ahmad notes that, she was just displaying an attitude typical of many conservative Pakistanis: don’t question convention. Accept the Party line. Put ritual worship above true understanding and knowledge. In her mind it was okay for the students not to get Iqbal’s message as long as they were obedient. It was the scholastic equivalent of the scripture chanting kids in madrassahs, parroting Arabic verses they didn’t understand at all. The teacher saw a funeral for our traditions. I saw a new and beautiful celebration of them. (Ahmad 2010, 176) Ahmad critiques such dogmatic versions of Islam that, in a quest to engender collectivities, do not make space for peripheral, unique, and local modes of embodied religiosity. In their refusal of other paths, they leave no space for the particular, for the realization of uniqueness. Thus, the collectivities they do engender end up being hegemonic. By contrast, the Sufi cosmopolitan journey of khudi is one that involves living simultaneously in the particular and universal, of realizing uniqueness through absorption in the particular while reaching outwards to other locales, particulars, and unique individuals. This is how one realizes a divine universal human community made up of other divine souls. For Ahmad, this spiritual process of self-transformation translates directly into a worldly cosmopolitanism that rejects the role of the “nation” as one’s primary unit of identification. While both Hindu and Pakistani nationalisms see the nation-state as an imagined community made up of members of the same religious heritage, and define this notion as one’s primary mode of association, Ahmad does the opposite. His embodied Sufism begins with the self as the unique entity through which existing communities can be reached and new ones built across national boundaries. Ahmad notes that this conception of community is the rationale behind Junoon’s visits to India and also the rationale behind his condemnation of Pakistan’s rigid definers of national identity—“the self-appointed custodians of public morality, the mullahs.” In his detraction from Pakistani nationalism,

Building Bridges  47 Ahmad denounces the false, curated histories represented as Pakistan’s true Islamic heritage. He recalls how his singing of a poem by one of Pakistan’s greatest poets in our song ‘Khudi’ pissed off the government once again. Hearing the national poet’s verses being sung by a rock musician was more than Nawaz Sharif could take. Sharif banned not just our mystical love inspired songs but incredibly all pop music form the airwaves. [They refused to see that] we were promoting ­Pakistan’s authentic Sufi heritage – the antithesis of the Wahabbism that had been grafted onto the country by Sharif’s mentor, General Zia. Ahmad’s words point to the irony of the way the military dictators of ­Pakistan portray genuine strands of cultural heritage as false and replace these inclusive notions of the self with exclusionary stories of national identity. Ahmad connects the Sufi “poetry of self-discovery, love, freedom, and tolerance” not just to the creation of a sanctuary for those “Muslims chained by blind ritualism and a fear mongering clergy” but also to the formation of “a cultural and spiritual bridge among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs living in the subcontinent” (Ahmad 2010, 179). Indeed, Ahmad’s songs can be read as a rejection of the idea of India and Pakistan as separate and culturally incompatible nations. In this sense, Ahmad’s version of Sufism is ironically opposed to Iqbal’s, even though Iqbal’s notion of khudi underlies much of Ahmad’s work. For Iqbal himself first proposed the idea of Pakistan in his address to the Muslim League at Allahabad in 1930. Iqbal’s idea gave concrete form to two distinct nations in South Asia based on religion (Islam and Hinduism) and with different historical backgrounds, social customs, cultures, and social mores. In contrast, Ahmad points to how Bulleh Shah’s shrine is visited by thousands of “ecstatic followers from diverse backgrounds, to pray and celebrate his universal message of love,” thereby confirming Ahmad’s cosmopolitan belief that “one can’t divide people, places, or God into boxes and categories. All are one in the eyes of God” (Ahmad 2010, 180). Ahmad’s autobiographical memoir reinforces this cosmopolitan message when he invokes Iqbal’s poem Saqinama (The Wine Pourer): zamāne ke andāz badle ga.e nayā raag hai saaz badle ga.e ḳhirad ko ġhulāmī se āzād kar javānoñ ko pīroñ kā ustād kar pilā de mujhe vo mai-e-parda-soz ki aatī nahīñ fasl-e-gul roz roz vo mai jis se raushan zamīr-e-hayāt vo mai jis se hai masti-e-kā.enāt (Iqbal, “Saqi-nama”)

The thoughts of the times have changed New is the melody, for the instruments have changed. Free your reason from its slavery, Let the young teach the old. Feed me the wine that tears the reasonshrouding veil, For this season of flowers will not last. The wine that illuminates life and soul The wine that intoxicates the universe whole (translation mine).

48  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam In much Sufi imagery, the wine pourer is God, and the wine “that intoxicates the universe whole” is the heady love that connects the self with the divinity of the universe. The poem draws on this notion of the world as a tavern and the Saqi or wine pourer as God, who pours many wines so that each person may drink a different one: “New is the melody” reflects this spiritual diversity, which has the potential to “make wisdom free” so that the “young” may “guide the old.” The divinely provided wines the young drink represent this diversity, possessing the potential to intoxicate the whole world with divinity. Ahmad borrows lines from this poem for ­Junoon’s Song “Zamanay ke Andaaz” or “Ways of the World,” for the poem allows him to construct a cosmopolitanism rooted in multiple, unique particulars that together compose the universal horizon of the world. Ahmad’s cosmopolitanism begins with the personal notion of “self” but also extends into the political realm. For it subverts those national collectivities that rely on curated and exclusionary notions of identity to pit some peoples against others. Having critiqued what he views as Pakistani nationalism’s perversion of Islam, Ahmad turns to India, disparaging the Indian government’s underground nuclear tests, in response to which Pakistan also exploded five nuclear devices. Ahmad notes that the manifestation of this animosity near the Indian city of Ajmer Sharif was particularly ironic and pitiful given that Ajmer is home to the dargah of the famous thirteenth century Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisty. Throughout the year, hundreds of thousands of Muslim devotees – As well as many Sikhs and Hindus who believe in the healing powers of the Khwaja – flock to Ajmer to offer prayers of peace, harmony, and redemption. The highest form of devotion, according to the saint, was ‘to redress the misery of those in distress and to fulfill the needs of the helpless and to feed the hungry.’ The Khwaja would have been shocked to see how his descendants had chosen to define progress and modernity. (Ahmad 2010, 167) Ahmad simultaneously attacks both Indian and Pakistani nationalism for violating the “khudi’s” quest for connecting with the divinity within other people. He suggests that contra these nationalisms, India and Pakistan should not be seen as opposed nation-states for they have many positive cultural and historical symbols in common that reinforce the Sufi message of love.

Ahmad’s Sufi Cosmopolitanism as a Liberating Local Universalism In contrast to ascendant South Asian nationalisms—both Indian and Pakistani—­Ahmad’s comparative cosmopolitanism is local and embodied,

Building Bridges  49 reaching out into the world and to others in a way that prizes the particular as the highest goal of the self. Ahmad posits this journey of love as a vehicle toward the ultimate end—the absorption of a divine universality into oneself through a process of reaching out to the world. I have explored Ahmad’s khudi as an example of the ways that various overlooked and marginalized locales contain epistemological as well as ontological universalisms that can resist top-down hegemonic cosmopolitanisms and right-wing nationalisms. I describe the liberating potential of other such universalisms in my book, Literatures of Liberation, which argues that inclusive universalizing concepts such as “freedom” and “equality” need to be conceptually enlarged by other comparable “contextual universalisms” from a variety of cultural contexts. Contextual universalisms are those translatable yet distinct cultural discourses in the global south that insist on relating diverse people by gesturing toward an always-growing community of beings to which everyone can belong. These locally embedded models of inclusion work with post-Enlightenment universalisms, representing and enabling shared, mutually comprehensible syncretic values and conversations. Take, for instance, the universalism touted by the medieval Indian poet Kabir (circa 1398–1448), who described the category “all of creation” as containing the same essence of divinity, regardless of caste or social status, and then made a claim for lower-caste equality on this basis. In the postcolonial present, Kabir’s ideas are invoked by low-caste activist-poets in verses that also speak of a post-Enlightenment Marxist idea of working-class liberation. Similarly, the precolonial South African universalism of ubuntu, or “a person is a person through other people,” spoke of a universal community of “persons” in order to support communal discourses of reciprocal exchange and the noncapitalist economies that underpinned them. And in the postcolonial present, the concept continues to sustain nonracist and noncapitalist modes of being in conjunction with a post-Enlightenment notion of the commons (Mangharam 2017). Like Ahmad’s, these universalisms effectively launch a simultaneous identification with the local and the universal human as part of a contestatory project of democratic politics. Mignolo makes a similar point about the emancipatory potential of local universalisms when he points out that the term democracy may be linguistically tied to one signifier of Greek-Euro origin, but conceptually it is tied to many compatible non-European viewpoints. In this schema, expressions such as “democracy” are conceived as “connectors” rather than full-fledged words with specific European historical content. ­M ignolo provides the example of the Zapatistas who have used the word “democracy,” although it has different meaning for them than it has for the Mexican government. “Democracy” for the Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of Mayan social organization based on reciprocity and communal values. The ­Mexican government doesn’t have sole possession of the correct interpretation of democracy. For the Zapatistas, “democracy” becomes a

50  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam connector through which liberal concepts of democracy and indigenous concepts of reciprocity and community social organization for the common good may be highlighted (­M ignolo 2000, 742). Bilgrami carries this idea of exploring local models of inclusion even further when he notes that Euro-American secularism may be an unnecessary policy for many societies adopt because it is the product of particular historical circumstances of religious warfare in early modern European societies. The right-wing Hindu nationalism currently ascendant in India, in Bilgrami’s opinion, arises precisely because of the colonial imposition and adoption of this problematic lineage of secularism, for such a secularism is based on a naming and categorization of religious difference as a central definer of identity (Bilgrami 2014, 25–29). Instead, Bilgrami advocates turning to India’s own long legacy of religious pluralism and corresponding absence of political absolutism in order to achieve democratic and cosmopolitan ideals. In other words, Bilgrami points to the existence of a rich cultural tradition concerned with transcending parochial constraints and identities that arises outside hegemonic, top-down, and nation-state-­ centered models of democratic societies. Mangharam, Mignolo, and Bilgrami each imply the existence of local, yet translatable universalisms. Because these particular universalizing concepts are cognate to, and comprehensible in relation to, better known ­European universalisms, they have the potential to construct a common ground of understanding across cultures and boundaries. Ahmad’s universalizing Sufism carries this gesture toward cross-cultural understanding even further by explicitly decrying violent and exclusionary national boundaries in favor of a spiritual cosmopolitanism. His powerful poetry testifies to the necessity of local universalisms in a world where cross-cultural understanding is increasingly at risk.

Notes 1 A long-serving member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the worst sectarian violence since the 1947 partition. The riots started on 28 February 2002, one day after a train fire, allegedly started by Muslims, left fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims dead. Hindus went on a three-day rampage across the state, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were butchered and burnt to death, while tens of thousands of others lost their homes and livelihoods. Numerous reports and witness accounts have indicated that the violence was orchestrated by a core of Hindu nationalist outfits. Modi had the fifty-eight burnt Hindu corpses put on public display in Ahmedabad and was reported as telling the Gujarat police not to stand in the way of the upcoming “Hindu backlash.” A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on the case has the telling title “We have no order to save you,” which was a commonly heard reply whenever people called the police. As the police stood by, Hindu “activists” dressed in khakis and carrying religiously symbolic weapons went on a murderous rampage. Human Rights Watch, “‘We Have No Orders To Save You’ State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat,” vol. 14, no. 3. www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/

Building Bridges  51 2 For instance, when Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, minister in Mr Modi’s cabinet, in a speech in Delhi on December 2, 104 differentiated between “Ramzadon” (Progeny of Ram) and “Haramzadon” (illegitimate offspring), she was harking back to Savarkar’s definition of who is a true citizen and who is not. 3 See Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Tariq Ali, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (London: Verso, 2011) for more on the issue of how both Indian and Pakistani representations of Kashmir and each other are designed to ignore and reject the Kashmiri people’s ongoing quest for justice and self-determination. 4 In the prologue to Secrets of the Self, Iqbal relates how Jalaluddin Rumi, who is to him almost what Virgil was to Dante, appeared in a vision and bade him arise and sing. He pays homage to Rumi while rejecting his doctrine of self-abandonment. 5 Rumuz-i-Bekhudi, published in 1918, is Iqbal’s other Masnavi in which he articulates the idea that Islamic traditions could only be realized, and a universal brotherhood or ummah established, through a collectivity of countless individuals.

Works Cited Ahmad, Salman. 2010. Rock and Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Appiah, K. A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Bhatt, Chetan. 2001. Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths. Oxford: Berg. Bilgrami, Akeel. 2014. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brennan, Tim. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Compton, Max. 2016. “We Must Not be Seduced by Nationalism.” Wildcat Dispatches. http://wildcatdispatches.org/2016/11/28/max-compton-we-must-not-beseduced-by-nationalism/ Doniger, Wendy. 2009. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin. Human Rights Watch. 2002. “‘We Have No Orders to Save You’: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat.” 14, no. 3 (April), 2002. Accessed October 20th, 2018. www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/ Ingram, James D. 2016. “Cosmopolitanism from Below: Universalism as Contestation.” Critical Horizons 17, no. 1 (February): 66–78. Iqbal, Muhammad. 1920. Secrets of the Self. Translated by Reynold Nicholson. London: Macmillan. ———. “Baal-e-Jibreel.” http://iqbalurdu.blogspot.com/2011/04/bal-e-jibril-139aik-naujawan-ke-naam.html, http://iqbalurdu.blogspot.com/2011/04/bal-e-jibril060-sitaron-se-agay-jahan.html, http://iqbalurdu.blogspot.com/2011/04/bal-ejibril-053-kirad-mandon-se-kya.html ———. ‘Saqi-nama.’ www.rekhta.org/nazms/saaqii-naama-huaa-khema-zan-kaar vaan-e-bahaar-allama-iqbal-nazms. Accessed September 19th, 2018. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2010. Religion, Caste, and Politics in India. New Delhi: Primus Books. Savarkar, V. D. 1969. Hindutva; Who is a Hindu? Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan.

52  Mukti Lakhi Mangharam King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. London: Routledge. Mangharam, Mukti Lakhi. 2017. Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and the Neglected Routes of Democratic Progress. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mignolo, W. D. 2000. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12, no. 3: 742–44. Modi, Narendra. 2016. “Full Text of PM Narendra Modi’s Speech at World Sufi Forum.” Accessed March 17, 2016. www.ndtv.com/india-news/full-text-of-pmnarendra-modis-speech-at-world-sufi-forum-1288303 Robbins, Bruce, and Pheng Cheah, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roy, Arundhati, Pankaj Mishra, Hilal Bhatt, Angana Chatterji, and Tariq Ali. 2011. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. London: Verso. Shah, Bulleh, ‘Bulla Ki Jana Main Kaun.’ https://allpoetry.com/Bulla-Ki-JanaMain-Kaun

3 Sunjeev Sahota’s Fictions of Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality Ana Cristina Mendes

Introduction: Sunjeev Sahota’s Radical Critique of Cosmopolitanism Sunjeev Sahota’s postcolonial fiction explores why and how young, male, working-class British Asians in post-industrial urban spaces in the Midlands of the United Kingdom are drawn to radicalization and militant interpretations of Islam. Sahota’s writings emerge from a young but remarkably dynamic literary subgenre of British Asian literary fiction which surged onto the literary scene in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981).1 Sahota’s work is set in Sheffield; his debut novel, Ours are the Streets (2011), which clinched him a place on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, was inspired by the 7/7 bombings and narrated the disaffection of Imtiaz Raina, a would-be suicide British bomber of Pakistani ancestry; his second novel, The Year of the Runaways, was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Sahota’s novels stand as a radical critique of cosmopolitanism, portraying a “crisis of conviviality” (Georgiou 2017) within the metropolis. In ways that will be detailed through close reading of Ours are the Streets, Sahota’s 2011 novel mediates and explores the opacities and inconsistencies of present cosmopolitan experiences, anachronistically highlighted by the US presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the current postBrexit cultural shock. This failed cosmopolitan conviviality is deeply tied up with issues around political literacy and class, as well as intolerance and Islamophobia, which have given rise to new-old forms of right-wing extremisms invested in combating neoliberal globalism (visible, for example, in the manifesto of the Traditionalist Worker Party in the United States). The Trump election and Brexit, which came after the publication of Ours Are the Streets, should be situated in the same cultural-political milieu that brought in the “crisis of conviviality” that Sahota details in the novel. In effect, these events can be interpreted as mainly an angry, white, and downwardly social mobile response not only to the perceived hypocrisy of neoliberal politics (antiestablishment politics combined with the argument that transnational corporate free trade has not served anyone but corporations

54  Ana Cristina Mendes and their shareholders) but also the failure of cosmopolitan conviviality (the alleged “flatness” of ostensible cosmopolitanism and political correctness, the protectorate and corrosive product of the liberal left). This chapter explores some of the enduring key themes of postcolonial social realism fiction related to social and ethnic inclusion and exclusion (assimilation versus alienation/anomie, tradition versus modernity), tropes (e.g., life in a multicultural metropolis, the demythologization of the West as a promised land, and the venture of conquering a new land), and motifs (such as language learning as a metaphor for integration and migration as a way to start a new life). Furthermore, this chapter argues that the radical critique of the actually existing cosmopolitanism that we bear witness to in Ours are the Streets, drawn from Imtiaz’s monologue, is one that not only sidesteps the teleology of one-way migration but also complicates the usual themes of diasporic literature involving assimilation, alienation, and nostalgia for a lost homeland and eventual coming to terms with one’s new identity forged in a new place. To advance this argument, this chapter addresses some of the emerging themes of British Asian-ness (religious versus familial, cultural, and political affiliations) and focuses on the strength of transnational links and cultural and economic flows and contraflows (Thussu 2007), always in transition and movement, as they are fictionalized in Sahota’s novel. The conditions that led to the perceived failures of neoliberalism and the violence entailed in collectivism, fundamentalism, or sectarian religiosity make these contemporary migration writings starkly dissimilar from the previous émigré or diasporic literature. The primary claim of this chapter is that these conditions prompt the need to draw different critical trajectories to approach new forms of cosmopolitanism in the wake of 9/11, framed within the post-secular-religious turn within both postcolonialism and postcoloniality and the rejection of neoliberalism. Corresponding to new transitory forms of belonging in the globalized world, such conditions demand not just different forms of expression but also different modes of reading fictions of failed cosmopolitan conviviality. The insistence on failure, contrasting with the celebration of notions of progress, development, and social mobility, is crucial for the narrative progression of novels such as Sahota’s, which demonstrate that the ways multicultural coexistence is depicted and conceptualized have changed. Such insistence goes hand-in-hand with the failure of the cosmopolitan ideals of tolerance and diversity, and the ideas of multiculturalism and coexistence themselves. The story being told—“I guess knowing you’re going to die makes you want to talk” (Sahota 2011, 1)—is dedicated to the protagonist’s daughter, Noor. Its depiction of the limits of cosmopolitanism is set against the backdrop of the city. As such, the related, secondary claim of this chapter focuses on topography, and the impact of place and surroundings, especially in an urban setting, on the forging of feelings of belonging. As multiple globalization processes interconnect in the city to produce

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  55 particular, concrete socio-spatial arrangements (Sassen 2005, 460), the changing attitude toward coexistence can be looked at as a refraction of topography. In this instance, the city proves to be “a heuristic space—a space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an epoch” (Sassen 2005, 457); the relevance of the city for this analysis rests in it being the privileged location for “the formation of translocal communities and identities or subjectivities” (Sassen 2005, 463) that come alive in Sahota’s novel.

The Politics of Violence in the Urban Space of Ours are the Streets In what Etienne Balibar calls an “era of global violence,” violence has an intrinsic relation to politics, as demonstrated in the plot development of Ours are the Streets. In fact, the issue of martyrdom violence—understood as mimetic violence that draws suicide bombers into martyrdom—can be linked to the invisible, symbolic violence and overexploitation that accompanies transnational neoliberalism. Balibar’s exploration of a “topography of cruelty” (2001)2 is useful for studying the significance of Sahota’s protagonists’ place attachments, or the lack thereof, and the limits of cosmopolitanism, as refracted through the imaginaries of violence, disenfranchisement, and alienation. According to Balibar’s arguments, civility requires conflict; violence is not the other of politics, as politics does not take place outside the realm of violence. Politics is a continuation of violence, a permanent reaction to violence. In this way, citizenship is one of “the crucial ‘cosmopolitical’ issues which we should try to locate and connect if we want to understand how and why democratic citizenship in today’s world cannot be separated from an invention of concrete forms and strategies of civility” (Balibar 2001, 15). In effect, Sahota’s narrative forces us to depart from Julia Kristeva’s (1996) contention that citizenship is the only construct that can offer comfort and reassurance to immigrants living in a host nation, as citizenship fails to provide affective binding to the United Kingdom in the case of the protagonist of Ours are the Streets. The temporary and transient spaces of diaspora have often been a focus of diaspora studies3; settlement in places potentially creates new identities, and the new journeys which can be undertaken from this place. The arguments advanced in this chapter are informed by a critical geographical conceptualization of “place,” drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) concepts of topophilia and topophobia and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) socially produced and consumed spaces (of space as a social product, i.e., the “trilectic” of social space comprised of spatial practices—perceived space—­representations of space—conceived space—and spaces of representation—lived space). Whereas topophobia accounts for the irrational dislike of a place, topophilia creates a bond: “At one extreme a favourite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole of the earth” (Tuan 1977, 149). Building on

56  Ana Cristina Mendes Doreen Massey’s work on the fluidity of place (1997, 2005),4 the concept of place as process and as a site of multiple identities and histories, and also the uniqueness of place defined by social interactions, of particular “meeting places” (1997, 322), allows for the literal “placing” of Sahota’s British Asian protagonist in transnational networks of the Muslim diasporas. If place is also a product of imagination, fiction is multiply implicated in its production, contesting, or normalizing spatial imaginaries. Arjun Appadurai uses a ventriloquism metaphor—that of the puppeteer—when advancing a new role for the imagination as a social practice and its relation to agency in contemporaneity: “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (1996, 31). 5 Gyan Prakash underlines that the identity of a city “is constituted by the interplay between its spaces and its imaginations” in the sense that it is made up by “both the ­actual physical environment and the space we experience in novels, films, poetry, architectural design, political closer government, and ideology” (2008, 7). Looking at the city from the perspectives of literary theory and memory studies, Andreas Huyssen proposes the use of the palimpsest as a theoretical model to read urban spaces, emphasizing that “literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively, and deconstructively at the same time can be woven into our understanding of urban space as lived spaces that shape collective imaginaries” (2009, 7). The urban is hence a space which lends itself to the imagined, particularly in global cities, which are “well known,” even to those who have never seen them.6 Massey’s notion of power-geometry and her discussions of the classed nature of cosmopolitanism are exemplary of a renewed kind of internationalism, in which it is impossible to think through identity and place without understanding how they derive from all sorts of disparities, which have been more entrenched through neoliberalism. Space is always socially constructed and is never an empty container or a mere setting. We can see how Imtiaz struggles in his monologue to negotiate an increasingly “global sense of place,” a place which is characterized by the intensifying of translocal and transnational dynamics, set against the backdrop of transnational neoliberalism where a plurality of social formations is continuously being forged across intersectional lines, particularly those of race, class, and religion. Sahota’s Ours are the Streets is a bildungsroman presented in the form of a monologue. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid and Home Boy (2009) by H. M. Naqvi, earlier novels of the post-9/11 literature of the Pakistani (Muslim) diaspora, are likewise bildungsromans and monologues. More than just a focus on the attitudes of first-/second-/ third-generation immigrants toward integrating into the host cultural landscape, this fiction signals a shift in focus in terms of translocal and transnational dynamics from diaspora and migration abroad to movement back

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  57 and forth between countries. Within this shift, the failure of ideals of tolerance and diversity is highlighted, and hence violence seems inescapable. As Martin Albrow (1996) contends, it is a characteristic of our “global age” witnessing the demise of the nation-state, the crossing of boundaries via transnational flows, and the emergence of new forms of citizenry. These processes form the backdrop of Sahota’s novel. Imtiaz feels connected to other Muslim diasporas across the world by a “web of affiliation and affect” (Gilroy 1993, 16); in other words, the forging of the new affective affiliations is enabled through the formation of transnational networks of religious fundamentalism.7 The representation of the urban spaces of New York in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy and Sheffield in Ours are the Streets offers no prospect of cosmopolitan self-reinvention, binding instead the characters by their transnational roots. To illustrate this point, it is worth quoting at length from Sahota’s novel because it echoes Balibar’s contention that much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for “consensus” and “peace,” not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. (2001, 15) Imtiaz’s topophobic lenses see the city of Sheffield as alienating: It’s amazing how quiet this city can get. (…) usually, like now, the city goes quiet and it all looks and feels as ghostly as an abandoned fairground. (…) So quiet the city is. Everyone sleeping contentedly. So indifferent to the crimes of their land. (…) These people think that what happens to our people in Palestine and Kashmir and Iraq and Afghanistan is just what happens to people whose lives are meant to be lived in a different way to theirs. (Sahota 2011, 29) Alternatively, Imtiaz’s topophiliac lens sees affective connection and solace in the brightness of Pakistan and even Afghanistan, in a place that, though secluded, became an embodied place for the protagonist because he had traveled there expressly to protect “his” people: I don’t think I left the house once the first week I got back to England. (…) I could see out the window and to the sour grey sky. Everything sempt to have dulled since I’d got back. I’d been shining in Pakistan, but I now knew the brightness hadn’t been coming from me. It were a reflection of something in that land. (Sahota 2011, 283)

58  Ana Cristina Mendes (…) it might’ve been the most isolated place I’ve ever been, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to the world. Not in the packed streets of Sheff or at uni, not in England really, where I always felt that even though there were all the rush and noise you could want, I weren’t actually ever bumping up against life, instead just constantly moving out of its way. (Sahota 2011, 203) Space and place are hence key components in the negotiation of Imtiaz’s identity.8 By highlighting the forging of transnational affiliations, Sahota’s novel not only addresses but also mediates via his narrator the increasing density of the diasporic condition and the truly radical challenge it presents to the collective suspension of disbelief that is the nation-state as an imagined host community: We were meant to become part of these streets. They were meant to be ours as much as anyone’s. That is what you said you worked for, came for. Were it worth it, Abba? (…) What’s the point in dragging your life across entire continents if by the time it’s worth it you’re already at the end? Ameen. (Sahota 2011, 70) Benedict Anderson (1991) described the novel as constitutively imagining the nation as a consensual, particular and organic community, anchored in a delimited material space. What kind of community can be imagined in the postcoloniality that Sahota’s novel describes, especially in the relationship between that imagined community, the nation (and increased calls to new, “white” nationalisms) and transnationalism? Ours are the Streets can be seen as exemplary of trans-nativism, in line with Edward Said’s contention that moving beyond nativism does not mean abandoning nationality, but it does mean thinking of local identity as not exhaustive, and therefore not being anxious to confine oneself to one’s own sphere, with its ceremonies of belonging, its built-in chauvinism, and its limiting sense of security. (1993, 229) Furthermore, Imtiaz’s character development demonstrates the “irony” (in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s words) of being emotionally imaginatively dependent on an “mother country” in a time of increasing deterritorialization, caught between a desired return to imagined origins and the expanded routes allowed by the transnational networks of the Muslim diasporas: the irony of these times is that as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of ethnically and culturally distinct places become perhaps more salient. It is here that it

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  59 becomes most visible how imagined communities come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialised anchors in their actuality. (Gupta and Ferguson 2008, 64)9 At the same time, we should be wary of an uncritical celebration of transnational identifications, as Mendes, News, and Ilott caution: Though transnational connections are certainly central to the functioning of our globalized world, we also need to remain mindful of the very real ways in which communities are legally and politically bounded by nation-states and the way in which this is affected by issues of class and race. The increased suspicion of Muslims since the onset of the War on Terror, for example, has placed real checks on the mobility of these communities both within and between nation-states, most crudely evidenced by Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ in the United States. (Mendes et al. 2018, xxi) The fact is that the pressures exerted on of the concept of nation—aided by global exchanges and mass migrations—and the associated complexities of belonging, together with the emergence and empowerment of a literature that addresses new social formations, point to the need to develop new modes of reading. Since the 1980s, British Asian fiction, which departed from an idea of national literature, has greatly contributed to Europe’s self-understanding in all its diversity, as both a subject and an object of others’ gazes and interventions. Cultural production was characteristically conceived as a process of hybridization and negotiation, also developing out of the renewed culturalism (connected to the idea of “polysemy” and the diverse meanings which individuals and communities can actively create from cultural products) that cultural studies was witnessing at the time, especially since the 1970s and well into the 1990s. In ways that deeply impacted the postwar novel (Connor 1996, 2), following the demise of empire, Britain was confronted with the loss of world authority and influence in political, military, and economic terms, which brought about the lack of confidence in the historical narrative and the need to find reassurance in other cultural narratives. Alongside these transnational tensions, a burgeoning multicultural population, driven by the settlement in the country of a considerable number of immigrants from different regions of the former empire after World War II, problematized a homogeneous notion of Englishness. As Steven Connor noted in the late 1990s, “it is now hard to be sure of what ‘the British novel’ may be said to consist” (1996, 27). At the same time, the New Labour government was invested in linking creativity to urban economic development and city planning. In the mid-1990s,

60  Ana Cristina Mendes New Labour emphasized creativity as the particular expertise that would secure the UK’s viability within the postindustrial global economy; changes in public funding for the arts were ushered in, together with new consumer-­ centered perspectives based on the laws of market surveys and audiences’ research. The creative economy and creative city concepts became part of key branding strategies for New Labour and a cultural narrative for the nation, tactically oblivious to the fact that the structures of urban creativity and innovation are path-dependent and rely on geopolitical equilibria.10 In the 2010s, novels such as Ours are the Streets have been indicative of a shift away from the experiences of the fruition of “chaotic pleasures of the convivial postcolonial urban world” (Gilroy 2004, 151) into pictures of cosmopolitan failure. This suggests the fiasco of the idea “Happy Multicultural Land,” the fantasy of millennial New Labour’s Cool Britannia satirized in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and the timeliness of Smith’s later portrayal in NW (2012) of the UK’s capital as a terrorized city, which mirrors Victor Seidler’s post-7/7 portrayal of London as an urban space of “global injustice, religious fundamentalisms, and a politics of uprootedness and uncertain belongings” (2007, 5). Not only speaking to the “theoretical legacies” of cultural studies (Hall 1996 [1992]), British Asian cultural production stressed the construction of identities as an ongoing, open-ended process against an understanding of cultural identities as easily contained in fixed categories11 while upholding an uncompromisingly secular cosmopolitanism. More recent British Asian writing, published in the wake of 9/11, has maintained a distinct interest in representing marginalized and minority individuals and communities, offering what may be termed “subaltern” perspectives but accentuating nonetheless the centrality of a post-secular-religious turn within postcolonialism and postcoloniality. In the early pages of Ours are the Streets, the first-person narrator’s perception of Sheffield’s urban social space shatters images of openness and inclusion. Imtiaz is overtaken by disaffection—in fact, affective displacement—­which he narrates as an absence of place attachment to the spatial range of his neighborhood; a repudiation of global capitalism; and the symbolic violence linked to overexploitation, mass consumption, and permanent accumulation that he sees materialized in his surroundings: I look out the window and all I can see are row after row of semi-­ detached houses, Toyotas parked out front, and I don’t understand how these people can invest so much hope in those things. (…) I used to hang out with my mates and wear their clothes and be part of their drift towards nothing. (Sahota 2011, 2–3) Imtiaz reacts to the sensory overload of consumerist culture. He sees in it the violence of uneven development constitutive of global capitalism,

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  61 or “capitalist modernity,” to use Arturo Escobar’s terms (2004). Using ­Colombia as a case study, Escobar demonstrates that violence is not only endemic of but also inextricable from development. He argues that development and modernity constitute displacement-producing processes, a characteristic that “has become central to the neoliberal approach of the American empire” (2004, 16).12 Addressing his daughter Noor, Sahota’s protagonist offers a particular radical critique of modernity and progress when he cautions her: “Remember that these material goods are just the things they try to dazzle you with so you won’t notice what’s really going on. And look where it got your baba. Heart attack while chasing some fare-dodger” (Sahota 2011, 75). Imtiaz criticizes the absolute alienation and utilitarian extreme violence that ultimately threaten the lives of those that are de-­utilized by the flexibility and fluidity of transnational markets, transformed into “disposable people” by “new slaveries” in countries such as Pakistan, India, Thailand, and Brazil (Bales 2012).13 Feelings of “uncertain belongings,” mixed with misery and public vexation, are highlighted in Sahota’s novel in an episode at a restaurant that precedes, narrative-wise, the protagonist’s radicalization. In this episode, Imtiaz’s parents are shown as hyperaware of the readiness to scapegoat the foreign, the different. This hyperawareness (leading to visible anxiety on the part of Imtiaz’s parents) relates to those specific visual markers of ethnic-religious difference that may make his parents the potential target of collective violence. The protagonist experiences a mix of emotions, including fear, anger, shame, and sadness: It were then that those slappers came in, drunk. Skirts so tight their splotchy stomachs mushroomed over. (…) I could feel you were nervous, though, Abba and Ammi. The way you went quietly over your food. Like you were trying to make yourselves as small and as invisible as possible. And when I said I were going to the toilet, Ammi looked frightened and asked me not to go, as if any movement away from the table were asking for trouble. Like this were our little corner and we should just stick to it. (Sahota 2011, 44) Neither Sahota’s Imtiaz nor Hamid’s Changez nor Naqvi’s trio—Chuck, AC, and Jimbo—are reduced to the post-9/11 one-dimensional character of radicalized homegrown Muslim youths. In this respect, Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes (2018) advanced the argument of a “post-9/11 re-­orientalism” in Hamid’s novel and its screen adaptation by Mira Nair, combining strategies of confrontation and conciliation that undermine stereotypical representations of the (Muslim) fundamentalist.14 Similarly, Sahota’s Imtiaz, a second-generation immigrant, defies unidimensional representations of the fundamentalist. He seeks refuge in traditional Pakistani values from what he perceives to be his alien status in the United Kingdom. He chooses to

62  Ana Cristina Mendes renounce British cultural influences and reject all forms of US economic and political imperialism after he returns from the “homeland,” from the village in Pakistan where he went to bury his father. “I have changed. I know I have. But it’s for the better. You’ll see. Give it time” (Sahota 2011, 89), Imtiaz reassures his soon-to-be ex-partner and Noor’s mother, Becka, when she worries about his change in demeanor after his sojourn in Pakistan. This transformation is striking in terms of the choice of clothing, in a move that reminds us of the impact of Changez’s beard as an in-your-face discarding of Americanization in The Reluctant Fundamentalist after his hapless pursuit of the American Dream pre-9/11. Born in Lahore, Changez accepts a teaching position at Lahore University after quitting his job as an analyst in the consultancy firm Underwood Samson. Earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11, Changez had decided to change his appearance, favoring a more “traditional” look. For both Imtiaz and Changez, travel and movement enable a negotiation of a complex and at times disrupting interaction amongst alterity and sameness. In this context, clothes become visual and visible markers of affiliation and reappraisal. Imtiaz’s rejection of Western attire, clearly reacting to “non-traditional” cultural influences, is persistent and intersects with topophiliac representations of home, where Pakistan is narrated in the language of familiarity, nostalgia, and longing from the perspective of a second-generation disaffected immigrant. As Thomas F. Gieryn notes, “Place is space filled up by people, practices, objects and representations” (2000, 465). Experiences of belonging and “authenticity” characterize Imtiaz’s sojourn in Pakistan: It became a running joke while we were at the village. Whenever someone would call me a valetiya [foreigner], Aaqil put on a show of correcting them, saying stuff like, Valetiya? Who? Him? No, no. Just light-skinned, that is all. (…) ‘no one here thinks of you as different. You’re not a valetiya any more (…). You’re an apna. You’re ours.’ There it was. I’d never thought a cheap rusty café called Jimmy’s on an unmarked road in Muzaffarabad would be the spot where I learned that I weren’t a lone man in this world. We were all of us here together. (Sahota 2011, 108, 178) If, for Imtiaz, “home” resides in the past, in a backward movement in time and space, it is also a movement toward the future—not a static unified concept but a place in the making: I’d be going round the village and people’d shout me over by calling, ‘Mubtasim Ali’s grandson!’ or when they’d introduce me as ‘Munchiji’s great-grandson.’ I were always so and so’s grandson or such and such’s nephew or whatever. I were never just me, on my own. (…) And I loved that. It were like for the first time I had an actual real past, with real people who’d lived real lives. Now I think that maybe when Noor

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  63 takes her kids back home people’ll call out to them, ‘Arré, Imtiazji’s grandson!’ and then they’ll sit in the shade of a banyan tree and listen open-mouthed to stories of the struggle that I, their abba, were part of. (Sahota 2011, 115) Familiarity and difference, reality and fakeness, and groundedness and detachment are often inverted and drawn upon in the narrative; signifiers of the familiar and the comfortable are contrasted to images of the unfamiliar and foreign. In this respect, the different choice of clothing by Imtiaz and his cousin, Charag, becomes the touchpoint for their seemingly incompatible views of the world: It makes me so angry to see him [Charag] in that stupid yellow pizza uniform with that shameful hat that looks like a boat got turned over on his head. (…) ‘Take that stupid topi off at least. You’re not a servant here.’ (…) ‘Don’t you miss it all?’ (…) ‘Because I do. Loads. I wish I were still there.’ (Sahota 2011, 14) ‘Imz, ya chief.’ (…) ‘What’s with the look, man? You gone all fundamental since you went back home?’ ‘I’m just being respectful, pal. Traditional. (…)’ ‘What? Oh, sure, but any more tra-dish and you’ll be as much of a freshie as him [Charag].’ (Sahota 2011, 68) Charag’s peculiar choice of clothing had left an awkward (verging on unfavorable) first impression on Imtiaz when they met in Pakistan: Charag just looked like an updated version of his abba – clean-shaven to Tauji’s frothy copperish beard. Hair oiled off into a quiff instead of wrapped in a loose turban. A shirt and wide trousers, and not his abba’s lunghi. (Sahota 2011, 93) These excerpts highlight, with almost didactic precision, how items of clothing are used to construct a specific range of subjectivities, accounting for the internally conflicting positions adopted by the “cousin bombers” (Sahota 2011, 13) between blind acceptance and flat opposition to Western culture. Early in the text, Imtiaz remembers a student night when he and his colleagues from the course went to The Leadmill, a live music club in Sheffield, and he was “there without beard or kufi and naked as the [white] girls who were there to tempt [him]” (Sahota 2011, 3). It is equally significant that the group of drunk women that entered the restaurant where

64  Ana Cristina Mendes Imtiaz, his girlfriend Becka, and his parents were having a celebratory dinner were wearing “Skirts so tight their splotchy stomachs mushroomed over” ­(Sahota 2011, 44). The motif of the clothes resurfaces during the discussions about the fitting of their “new clothes” made by “a brother in ­Bradford,” that is, the suicide bombers’ vests (Sahota 2011, 15); “It just felt like a normal waistcoat. With a jacket over the top, no one would ever know” (Sahota 2011, 56). The experience of a displaced existence felt by the migrant, in the sense of being socially and culturally “out of place” and the resultant fissures of identity, has been an enduring subject of postcolonial diaspora literature. While some writers have represented it as a state of loneliness and a constant feeling of “foreignness” with a perpetual longing to return, others have explored its creative potential and used the hybrid identity to challenge binaries in terms of ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, and gender. In fact, the movements of migratory subjects are often considered in a productive, creative perspective, allowing for the reinvention of identity and alternative strategies of homing. Though in the case of Imtiaz’s father his migration to the center was driven by the affect of hope (his relocation to the West was expected to pave the way to the reinvention of social identity), it clearly did not bring about the reinvention of home and identity for his son, nor the promise of social mobility for the father: I don’t know whether I were ashamed of Abba because he were ashamed of himself, or whether I were ashamed of myself for being ashamed of Abba. Or maybe it were both together at the same time. It screws my head up sometimes. And it weren’t just then, it were all the time. I felt it whenever family came round and someone would start boasting about their kids, or the size of their house, the donations they made back home. Afterwards, Abba would work harder, longer, more and more into the ground, like he thought that were all he had to do to join the others in talk about early retirement and summer houses in the suburbs of Lahore. (Sahota 2011, 72–73) Family and home are master-tropes in diaspora literature, which makes the situation described in this excerpt even harsher, more damaging to the migrant’s sense of self-worth. The emotion of shame felt by the father is represented as spatially restrictive—“he had never managed to move away from his estate”—turning the experience of migration into one of not transformation and freedom, but rather social imprisonment.

Conclusion: The Limits of Cosmopolitan Conviviality Sahota’s narrative, via a second-generation migrant narrator who rejects empathic connections with his British hometown, highlights the less

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  65 productive affective afterlives of colonialism (Pedwell 2013). Borrowing Carolyn Pedwell’s words and applying them to Jamaica Kincaid’s novel A Small Place (1988), about the underside of the neo-colonial tourism industry in Antigua, it is clear how novels such as Sahota’s place the focus on “the limits of the imaginative reconstruction, the near magical act of ‘putting oneself in the other’s shoes’, in which liberal narratives of empathy invest” (Pedwell 2013, 22). If cosmopolitanism is an inescapable condition of late modernity, the political, socioeconomic, and affective limits of cosmopolitan conviviality are also very much present today. While Sahota’s novel can be read as a reflection on the impact of 9/11 on the failure of cosmopolitan conviviality, metafictionally, the novel can also be read as a reflection on the impact of 9/11 fiction on modes of reading the experience of minoritization, ethnic belonging, and secularism. In effect, 9/11 fiction has paved the way for a revamped visibility of British Asian writing, accrued to the hypervisibility that it acquired in the 1980–1990s (and its attendant cultural politics, which was not limited to the contemporaneous “Asian Kool” trend). Weighing the words of Sahota’s protagonist—­ “That’s what these pages are all about. A form of prayer. Wanting to be found out, which is another way of wanting to be known” (Sahota 2011, 17)—the novel can be received as a distinct performance of our cosmopolitan present. As a mediation of actually existing cosmopolitanisms, fictions of failed cosmopolitan conviviality such as Sahota’s respond in arguably not-yet theorized ways to the challenge of modern mobility, nomadism, and other forms of transitory affiliations and dwelling. These issues of mobility intersect with, on the one hand, the failures of neoliberalism and, on the other hand, collectivism, fundamentalism, or sectarian religiosity following the 9/11 attacks and the so-called Arab Spring. In sum, they ask us to continuously rethink community and identity, diaspora, and belonging in the sense that their narrative drive is derived from localized sources of loyalty and violence, many of which transcend, to some degree, traditional identity-markers, such as nationality or “race.”

Notes 1 Midnight’s Children, reportedly, was the first novel Sahota ever read. See: www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/jan/16/debuts-danielle-hope-sunjeev-­ sahota (Accessed 27 December 2018). Other British Asian novelists that can be mentioned ae Hanif Kureishi, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, Gautam Malkani, Meera Syal, Anjali Joseph, and Neel Mukherjee. 2 For Balibar, “The term ‘cruelty’ is chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral (…) that, so to speak, appear to us to be ‘worse than death’” (Balibar 2001, 15). 3 See Ana Cristina Mendes, Lucinda Newns, and Sarah Ilott for a recent overview of the exponential growth of diaspora studies in the last decades, continuously permeable to the “critical potential related to new forms of movement across the globe” (2018, xix).

66  Ana Cristina Mendes 4 I draw specifically on Massey’s ideas, originally published in Marxism Today in 1991, of a “a global sense of place” and “meeting place”: What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each “place” can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. (1997, 322) 5 Appadurai claims, No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. (…) The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order. (1996, 31) 6 A theorist of global cities, the urban sociologist Saskia Sassen noted, at the turn of the twenty-first century, that the city is once again emerging as a strategic site for understanding some of the major new trends reconfiguring the social order. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where major macro-­social trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalisation, the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity. (2005, 457) 7 Along the same lines, Kavita Datta writes, “Increasingly identified as offering a framework through which contemporary international migration can be understood, transnationalism is broadly defined as the networks of ties and associations that bind people, places and transactions together” (2012, 22). 8 For the importance of space and place in contemporary British Asian postcolonial fiction, see Sara Upstone (2016) and Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone (eds.) (2014). 9 Interestingly, David Harvey also uses the rhetorical device of irony in a similar, though earlier, discussion of heritage, or rather nostalgic pastiches of the past, as upholding feelings of security and familiarity in the face of space-time compression in postmodernity: The assertion of any place-bound identity has to rest at some point on the motivational power of tradition. It is difficult, however, to maintain any sense of historical continuity in the face of all the flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation. The irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche. (Harvey 1989, 303)

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  67 Relatedly, Homi Bhabha (1999) explores depictions of diaspora identities in which national identity does not disappear as a consequence of transnational borderlessness, but as a result of intensified parochialism. 10 Any definition of creative labor is necessarily impermanent and subject to contestation. Academics have utilized the concept of creative labor to challenge the neoliberal discourse of creativity and the creative industries (Brouillette 2014), while the corporate realm appropriates the term in accord with neoliberal visions of employees and their work as creative capital, following Richard Florida’s notion of the creative class (2002). 11 As Hall recounts, “[a]ctually getting cultural studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism, the critical questions of cultural politics, was itself a profound theoretical struggle” (1996 [1992], 269). 12 Following Escobar’s argument, it might be possible to suggest (though this exploration falls outside the scope of this essay) that empire, rather than diaspora, provides the key framework in which to read the topographies of violence in Sahota’s text. 13 In the preface to the revised edition of Disposable People, Kevin Bales writes, “In the flurry of anti-terrorist campaigns, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, assassination attempts, threats of war with India, and a teetering economy, the bonded laborers of Pakistan are easy to forget” (2012, xi). 14 For an outline of re-orientalism theory, see Lau and Mendes (2011), and for an analysis of Nair’s adaptation as an “updating” of Hamid’s 2007 “source” text which reflects a new geopolitical narrative five years later, see Mendes and Bennett (2016).

Works Cited Albrow, Martin. 1996. The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bales, Kevin. 2012. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. 3rd edition. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Balibar, Etienne. 2001. “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence.” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 15–29. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Manifesto.” Wasafiri 14, no. 29 (1999): 38–39. Brouillette, Sarah. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Connor, Steven. 1996. The English novel in History: 1950–1995. London and New York: Routledge. Datta, Kavita. 2012. Migrants and their Money: Surviving Financial Exclusion. Bristol: The Policy Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2004. “Development, Violence and the New Imperial Order.” Development 47, no. 1: 15–21. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Georgiou, Myria. 2017. “Conviviality Is Not Enough: A Communication Perspective to the City of Difference.” Communication, Culture and Critique 10, no. 2: 261–79.

68  Ana Cristina Mendes Gieryn, Thomas F. 2000. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of ­Sociology 26, no. 1: 463–96. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 2008. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” In The Cultural Geography Reader, edited by Timothy S. Oakes and Patricia L. Price. London: Routledge, 60–67. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 262–75. Hamid, Mohsin. 2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Huyssen, Andreas. 2009. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1996. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lau, Lisa, and Ana Cristina Mendes, eds. 2011. Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London and New York: Routledge. Lau, Lisa, and Ana Cristina Mendes. 2018. “Post-9/11 Re-Orientalism: Confrontation and Conciliation in Mohsin Hamid’s and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53, no. 1: 78–91. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, Doreen. 1997. “A Global Sense of Place.” In Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Enquiry, edited by Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory. London: Arnold, 315–23. ———. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Mendes, Ana Cristina, and Karen Bennett. 2016. “Refracting Fundamentalism in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” In American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, edited by Terence McSweeney. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 109–24. Mendes, Ana Cristina, Lucinda Newns, and Sarah Ilott. 2018. “Introduction: New Directions, New Approaches.” In New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, edited by Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes, and ­Lucinda Newns. London: Rowman and Littlefield, xix–xxxiii. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2013. “Affect at the Margins: Alternative Empathies in A Small Place.” Emotion, Space and Society 8: 18–26. Naqvi, H. M. 2009. Home Boy: A Novel. New York: Shaye Areheart Books. Prakash, Gyan. 2008. “Introduction.” In The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1–20. Sahota, Sunjeev. 2011. Ours are the Streets. London: Picador. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: A. Knopf. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. “The City: Its Return as a Lens for Social Theory.” In The Sage Handbook of Sociology, edited by Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, and Bryan Turner. London: Sage, 457–70.

Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality  69 Seidler, Victor. 2007. Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multicultures and Belongings After 7/7. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Zadie. 2000. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2012. NW. London: Hamish Hamilton. Teverson, Andrew, and Sara Upstone, eds. 2014. Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thussu, Daya Kishan, ed. 2007. Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-flow. London and New York: Routledge. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Upstone, Sara. 2016. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel. London: Routledge.

4 Stuck Between England and Egypt Sudanese Cosmopolitanism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley Suha Kudsieh Unlike other African countries that experienced European colonialism first hand, the Sudan presents a unique case. The country was first colonized by Egypt in 1821 and then governed by an Anglo-Egyptian committee from 1899 until 1956. The result was an embedded form of colonialism with Britain at the apex of the colonial pyramid and Egypt below it. Consequently, Sudanese authors and intellectuals had to configure their national identity against the backdrop of two competing cosmopolitan cultures: Egypt, the regional (albeit superior) “brother,” and England, the foreign colonial power. Although it is common knowledge that European colonizers and colonized locals interacted together in limited settings under colonialism, the uneven power dynamic that transpired at the time invalidated the basic foundations of cosmopolitanism, namely, treating all humans as equal. Indeed, inequality is one of the reasons that makes it difficult for the colonized subjects to stake a claim to cosmopolitanism despite being exposed to diverse forms of cultures and languages. In this essay, I will examine the interplay of cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and nationalism as it unfolds in two novels written at different junctures of the Sudan’s history. Tayeb Salih (1929–2009) published Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal [Season of Migration to the North]1 in Arabic in 1966, in the post-independence period. Although the novel focuses on neo-colonialism, it depicts the intense rivalry between Mustafa Said, who absorbed English culture when the country was suffering under Britain’s colonial yoke, and the much younger narrator. Despite the similarities between the two protagonists (e.g., their shared educational and cultural background), their relationship becomes oppositional and they act as foils to each other. The conflict exposes Mustafa’s limited cosmopolitan experience, as evidenced by his inability to establish meaningful connections with others based on ethical and intellectual considerations. In contrast, the narrator acquires a more wholesome experience. Leila Aboulela (1964), who writes solely in English, published Lyrics Alley in 2011, at a time when globalization

Stuck Between England and Egypt  71 has already transformed world economies and rearranged political alliances. Although the novel is set in the Sudan in the early 1950s, just before the Anglo-­Egyptian Condominium came to an end, it depicts the hyperconsumerism and the superfluous cosmopolitanism that resonates with globalization and open-market economies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Like Mustafa Said, Muhmoud Abouzeid, a business mogul, and his ­Egyptian second wife appear to be worldly, but their cosmopolitanism is limited to their business contacts and the consumption of status brands. However, Nur, Muhmoud’s son with his first wife, is better positioned to mediate between various cultures and to utilize his worldly education and upbringing to cultivate a beneficial form of intellectual detachment. My argument here is twofold. First, I demonstrate how both authors collapse the complex tripartite configuration into a simple binary. In Season of Migration, Tayeb Salih depicts the relationship among the three metropolitan centers (Khartoum, Cairo, and London) in Manichean terms, ­following the rigid binaries which European colonialists applied to A ­ fricans, as outlined by Frantz Fanon (Fanon 1963, 41). According to Fanon, “Manicheism […] dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal” (Fanon 1963, 42). Salih merges the colonial triad that existed among Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan into a Manichean world when he replaces local Egyptians with British Orientalists. By erasing the former from the novel, he glosses over their role in colonizing the Sudan. Salih, like many Arab literati in the 1960s, advocated Pan-Arabism. He avoids dealing with the role Egypt played in the conflict by reducing the multi-tiered colonialism of the Sudan to a simple East-West binary. Leila Aboulela also reduces the tripartite metropolitans into two centers (Khartoum and Cairo) in Lyrics Alley. While Egyptians play an integral role in her novel, they act as if they were British: they dance to Western pop songs, wear Western brands, and reside in houses furnished with the latest products from the West. By depicting their modes of consumerism, Aboulela is able to highlight the differences between cosmopolitanism as a veneer and its authentic alternative. Second, the uniqueness of the Sudan’s history raises interesting questions about the nature of Sudanese worldview as reflected in Salih and Aboulela’s novels. Although both authors present their readers with characters that exemplify positive and negative types of cosmopolitanism, they attempt to reframe the debates surrounding the role Western education and the consumption of Western goods play in limiting the protagonists’ appreciation of different cultures and restricting their ability to advance and support their respective communities. Both authors offer a sharp opposition between what they see as positive and negative forms of cosmopolitanism. They are critical of characters who appear to be worldly but reject the liberal values associated with cosmopolitanism (Simpson 1995, 490). At the same time, they both privilege characters who express their nationalist sentiments without denigrating other cultures or ignoring the golden rule of cosmopolitanism, that is to say, treating others as one would like to be treated.

72  Suha Kudsieh

Colonialism, Race, and Cosmopolitanism in the Sudan In its simplest form, cosmopolitanism indicates an openness toward difference and a positive curiosity about others. It signals moving away from parochialism, a movement that is facilitated by education, travel, and exposure to a variety of cultures. Nevertheless, providing a precise and accurate definition of cosmopolitanism is an arduous task because the meaning constantly shifts and changes depending on the time period in question and based on one’s geographical location. Historically speaking, the use of the term dates back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (Nussbaum 2010, 29–32; see also Robbins 1993, 194 and Appiah 2005, 217–18). In “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Immanuel Kant puts forward nine proposals that define cosmopolitanism, but his salutary endeavors are offset by his sixth proposal in which he declares that “man is an animal who needs a master.” Kant explains that this was necessary because freedom has limits and the “master” is responsible for breaking men’s “selfwill” perforce so that they can obey “a universally valid will under which everyone can be free” (Kant 2010, 21). The contradictions that surface in Kant’s outlook reflect the inherent chasm between Europe’s cosmopolitanism and its oppressive colonialism. As Edward Said (1979) pointed out, although Europe professed to advocate universal justice and prosperity for all humans, it carried out discriminatory policies in the colonies, where the demarcating lines that separate European masters from the locals, who are treated as subalterns, are accentuated. These colonial binaries overlook the consequences of nested imperialism and the complex relations that ensue when a county, such as Egypt, is simultaneously colonizer and colonized. The schema of nested colonialism unsettles the simple binaries of white/black, colonizer/colonized, civilized/ primitive, and European/non-European. It presents a more complex mode of colonialism, whereby the so-called “brother” can be a collaborator and a colonial accomplice. Egyptian bureaucrats and intellectuals developed a colonial policy that paralleled the hierarchal relationship that coalesced between Egypt and Great Britain. Race played a critical role in the resultant power dynamics: Egyptians posited themselves as white, like the British, against the dark Sudanese. The racial demarcations that separated ­Egyptians from their Sudanese brethren were sharpened when Egyptian nationalists began to deploy patriotic terms and images imported from ­Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century (Troutt Powel 2003, 5–8 and 16–19). Egypt’s racial attitudes can be traced back to the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769–1894), who was appointment as the Ottomans’ viceroy in Egypt in 1804. Although he was brought up as a slave, he developed a close affinity with the Ottoman Turks, who held a low opinion of the Egyptians and were biased against the Sudanese. The pasha’s racial prejudices are clear from his correspondence: in one of his letters, he refers to the

Stuck Between England and Egypt  73 Turks as “members of our race.” In another letter, he orders Boghus Bey, his ­A rmenian foreign-affairs adviser, to hire a number of American doctors to treat Sudanese slaves because they had more experience “dealing with ‘this race’” than European physicians (Fahmy 2004, 89). These prejudices must have trickled down to influence lower-rank administrators and common Egyptians. Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), who rose to the rank of Director of the School of Translation in Cairo, was contemptuous of the ­Sudanese and their “primitive” civilization. He viewed them as barbarians and savages who roamed around like “ignorant animals” (Euben 2006, 94). Ali Mubarak (1823–1893), another Egyptian bureaucrat who rose through government ranks and went on to direct the Ministry of Education in the 1850s and 1860s, was also conscious of racial differences. In his memoirs, he identifies the Sudanese with the ignorance (jahiliyya) attributed to the pre-Islamic tribes of Arabia (Troutt Powel 2003, 30). During that period, Egypt developed close diplomatic relationships with Western Europe and implemented its educational policies based on French and British models. Both facets—Egypt’s rising dominance and its contact with the West—enhanced the ruling classes’ biases about race. Those biases persisted in the twentieth century, when Egyptian nationalists began to articulate their project by mimicking the racial stereotypes originally introduced by European colonizers. By doing so, Egyptian intellectuals impeded their Sudanese counterparts from forging their own national identity and undermined their struggle for independence from both England and Egypt (Troutt Powel 2003, 156–67). Ironically, Egypt was the main proponent of Pan-Arabism in the first half of the twentieth century. The ideology gained new momentum after 1952, when the Free Officers in Egypt deposed the monarchy and Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power. Writing in the 1960s, at the height of Pan-­A rabism, Salih chooses to overlook Egyptian prejudices. In contrast, Aboulela chooses to unveil them after Pan-Arabism waned and was replaced with globalization and neoliberal policies at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim Al-Hijra Ila Al-Shamal Tayeb Salih’s novel revolves around two main protagonists: Mustafa Said and an anonymous narrator. Mustafa represents the generation of colonized Africans who were educated in England and grew up to love British culture and the English language, yet were keenly aware of the injustices meted by European colonialists on their compatriots. As a result, they developed a schizophrenic relationship with Britain: they simultaneously loved what it symbolized (civilization, progress, and modernity) and hated it for its racial prejudices and exploitation. Mustafa manifests this Janus-faced interaction when he refuses to be treated by the British as an Othello, declaring that the tragic Shakespearean protagonist was nothing but a lie, a figment of the West’s imagination (Harlow 1979, 162–67). Nevertheless, he does not

74  Suha Kudsieh ­ frica to enhesitate to use European exotic myths about an imagined A snare the British women he meets in London (Salih 2005, 37). In contrast, the narrator represents the Sudanese postcolonial generation, who, like their predecessors, were trained and educated in Britain but are more self-­ reflective and critical of their local cultures. Patricia Geesey identifies both men as cultural hybrids, but Mustafa’s “cosmopolitan” education transforms him into a colonial instrument and renders the narrator passive and ineffective in his local community. While Mustafa represents the “less than happy intermingling of East and West,” his hybridity does not symbolize symbiosis between diverse cultures, but their troublesome “contamination” (Geesey 1997, 129). Mustafa’s exposure to European culture was perforce, a consequence of colonial expansion. His upbringing marked him as a nomad devoid of national attachments. He was born in Khartoum in 1898, during the Anglo-­Egyptian Condominium. He grew up aloof and was not particularly attached to his family or to the city of his birth. His father had passed away when he was an infant and he did not have any siblings. His ordeal begins when he parts from his mother at the age of ten years to join the British boarding school in Khartoum. The separation symbolizes his break with his local culture—a rupture that leaves him emotionally apathetic and immature, even as his mind expands and he excels in his studies. At school, he absorbs Western biases and prejudices, which depict Africans as primitive savages. As Uday Singh Mehta notes, the language employed by European philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to articulate cross-cultural comparisons was steeped in “notions of superiority and inferiority” (Mehta 1999, 20). The universal and inclusive values associated with cosmopolitanism in the West are thus undermined “by the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and ‘types’ of people” (Mehta 1999, 46). In this regard, Simon Gikandi points out that the “very institutions that were supposed to will into being universal and cosmopolitan identities were not simply corrupted by racialism, but were immanently racialist, if not racist” (Gikandi 2002, 599). Mustafa Said epitomizes the devastating effects of those ideologies: they marred his psyche and destroyed his ability to act rationally. Mustafa remains unaware of the negative consequences of his dilemma because the education he received does not teach him to reflect on his actions inwardly. Instead of lamenting his loss of family and culture, he celebrates his so-called freedom. For this reason, his aloofness should be considered not a manifestation of “cosmopolitan detachment” (Anderson 2001, 64) but a symptom of his antisocial persona. He confesses, “Since childhood, I felt I was different. […] I was like a round rubber ball, which you can throw in the water and it won’t get wet, throw it on the ground and it bounces” (Salih 2005, 22). This statement demonstrates that his detachment does not precipitate aesthetic or intellectual growth; rather, it signals destructive nomadism. Instead of cultivating a healthy form of

Stuck Between England and Egypt  75 detachment, one that promotes “critical reason, disinterestedness, and realism” (­A nderson 2001, 7), Mustafa becomes culturally dislocated, and the metaphors he deploys (rubber ball and desert) underscore his intellectual and aesthetic barrenness. His travel to Egypt aggravates his dilemma. When Mustafa travels to Cairo to further his education, he meets Mr.  Robinson, his new British tutor and his wife. The Robinsons show Mustafa the city, taking him to visit mosques, museums, and antiquities— sites that are popular with Western tourists. Like the Robinsons, Mustafa comes to regard the city as an extension of Britain, as an imagined Orient. Although the Robinsons genuinely care for him, their love is condescending and paternalistic. The attention they offer Mustafa parallels the training Friday receives at the hands of Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s well-known novel. It is therefore not a coincidence that Crusoe and the Robinsons share the same name: the Robinsons took Mustafa under their wing and trained him to be their obedient right-hand man, just as Crusoe trained Friday. Thus, Mustafa acquires his encyclopedic knowledge about Cairo from the same artefacts (museums and mosques) and exotic motifs (tamarind and the Nile) that attracted the attention of European travelers. In Cairo, Mustafa’s encounter with Mrs. Robinson stirs his latent sexual desires and triggers his fascination with the British women who embody British culture and civilization. After traveling to England to pursue his graduate studies, he realizes that he will never be fully assimilated into the surrogate culture, despite his sharp mind and achievements. Consequently, he hatches devious plans to avenge himself against the British. Drawing on Britain’s racial stereotypes, which he learned and absorbed, he decorates his room with exotic motifs and materials—ivory, sandal incense, ostrich feathers, and Persian artefacts—aimed at luring British women to his den. By using British stereotypes about Africa as the Dark Continent to entrap the women, Mustafa is in effect writing back to the Empire and turning the tables against it.2 But the exoticism he cultivates cuts two ways: on the one hand, British women find his foreignness attractive and fascinating. On the other hand, these same women perceive him as a lowly savage, a primitive creature who has just emerged from an African jungle. From his perspective, his relationships with the women are not based on equality but on the assiduous hierarchy of colonizer and a savage African. Mustafa becomes embroiled in the fixed stereotypes the West constructs about him. He is neither entirely African nor fully integrated as Western. He is doomed to be regarded by his British superiors as a savage African, despite his Western training and education. His final act of resistance, of writing back to the Empire, culminates in the murder of Jean Morris, his wife: suspecting that she is having an affair with another man, Mustafa drives a dagger into her heart. But his gesture, for all its defiance, merely affirms the deep-seated Western stereotypes of “Negro’s animality” and irrationally (Bhabha 1994, 77): when faced with a cheating wife, an educated African will revert to his savage state and kill her in a moment of blind jealousy.

76  Suha Kudsieh While Mustafa’s hybridity transforms him into a rootless nomad, thus revealing a troubling side of cosmopolitanism, the narrator embodies a more rooted version of cosmopolitan commitment. He immediately feels at ease with his family in the village where he was born. He compares himself to the old palm tree in the courtyard of the family’s house. He is impressed by the strong tree and its steady trunk: “its roots, stretched deep down into earth, and the green branches hanging from its top.” When he looks at it, he is instantly filled with serenity because he is not a feather blowing in the wind. He is like the palm tree, a human being “who has origins, roots and who has a purpose” (6). He muses that, “I am not a stone thrown in the waters, but a seed planted in a field” (9). The images that the narrator selects underscore the importance of being attached and rooted in a specific culture. The sense of rootedness, however, does not diminish the narrator’s ability to look beyond his local context and appreciate the humanity of strangers. He spends many years studying in England, and when he returns home, he assures the villagers that the British are exactly like the Sudanese: They are born and they die. During the interim journey from the cradle to the coffin, they dream dreams, some of which they achieve while others they miss. They fear the unknown and seek love. They search for peace of mind in one’s spouse and children. (Salih 2005, 7) The parallels he draws between the two groups reveal not only his deep appreciation for both cultures but also their humanity. The version of cosmopolitanism espoused by the narrator seems to support Bruce R ­ obbins’s suggestion that rootedness is vital to furthering cosmopolitan ­experiences— ­no one can claim it while “belonging nowhere” (Robbins 1993, 195). Kwame Anthony Appiah similarly dismisses the charge of “deracination” levied against transient persons and travelers. In his view, global wanderlust lies deep within all of us (Appiah 2005, 214–15) and the experience gained invariably affirms the slogan “Think globally, act locally” (Appiah 2005, 224). The narrator embodies those values. He does see the world not as “us” versus “them” (see Fanon 1963, 41–42) but rather as one human race that is beset by universal concerns and mysteries. After spending time in British prisons, Mustafa Said returns to the Sudan and settles in the narrator’s village. He is silent about his past, and marries a young local woman. When the narrator returns to his village, Mustafa is compelled to inform him about his past. Soon afterward, Mustafa suddenly disappears. In his will, he appoints the narrator as a guardian for his two young sons. Wad Rayyes, an old and wealthy man in the village, proposes to Hosna, Mustafa’s widow, who rejects him. During the narrator’s last visit to the village, he learns that Hosna’s family forced her to marry Wad Rayyes, and that no one in the village rose to help her. Wad Rayyes then attacks Hosna because he is unable to consummate their marriage, and she

Stuck Between England and Egypt  77 defends herself vigorously. Although the villagers hear their screams, they do not interfere. In the morning, they discover their bruised and bloodied bodies. When the narrator finds out the truth, he is stunned by the village’s silence, particularly by his grandfather’s sadness over the death of Wad Rayyes. Shocked and dazed by the village’s complacency, and their dismissal of Hosna’s wishes, the narrator wades deep into the river Nile, almost drowning himself, but he realizes that he has responsibilities and duties to take care of. At that moment, he awakens from his stupor and decides to take action by calling for help (149–51). Kwame Appiah argues that it is not enough to pass laws protecting all members of society, men, and women; enforcing them is more important (Appiah 2005, 262). Sudanese laws and traditions should have protected Hosna, but the villagers buried the two bodies hastily and the authorities were not informed. They also tried to cover up what happened and were evasive when the narrator started asking questions. The narrator’s experiences on the other hand render him impotent at first because he is unaware of “the nature of the ‘hybrid zone’” that exists in the Sudan after its independence (Geesey 1997, 133). Although he recognizes his grave mistake, that he was lulled by the idyllic village and its deceptive serenity, his realization occurs rather late, for he was unable to save Hosna. The rivalry between the two protagonists symbolizes the strained relationships between the hybrid generation that managed to lead the Sudan through the struggle for independence, and the young generation who grew up after that momentous struggle was achieved. The differences between the two generations underscore the vast gap that separates true cosmopolitanism from its false semblance.

Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley Like Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics ­Alley attends to the conflict between generationally specific forms of cosmopolitanism, although she takes a somewhat different path. She examines the role globalization and consumerism play during the struggle for the country’s independence instead of focusing on the nexus between education and nationalism. By writing about the past from the vantage point of the contemporary period, she raises important issues that pertain to the recent reconfiguration of world politics as a result of implementing neoliberal economic policies, which influence the way people across the world interpret their national histories and their relationships with their respective local cultures. Moreover, like Salih, she presents her readers with characters that embody positive and negative forms of cosmopolitanism. In Aboulela’s portrayal of the Sudan in the early 1950s, Egyptians display ingrained misconceptions about their racial superiority over the Sudanese. Their racialized attitudes in Lyrics Alley mirror those of the British

78  Suha Kudsieh in Season of Migration. The conflict in Aboulela’s novel coheres around the Abouzeid family, a Sudanese family with Egyptian roots. Muhmoud Abouzeid, a shrewd business mogul, is at the helm of the family’s sprawling and lucrative businesses. He appears to be educated, open-minded, and modern but he is married to two women, each living in her own quarter in a large residential compound in Khartoum. The clash between Mahmoud’s two wives (Waheeba and Nabilah) symbolizes the Sudan’s divergent ethnicities and the country’s complex colonial past, in particular the nested hegemonic paradigm that places the West at the top, Egypt in the middle, and the Sudan at the bottom. Waheeba, the first wife, is Sudanese and she typifies the country’s outdated traditions. She is described as dark, provincial, and crude. On the other end of the spectrum stands Nabilah, the second wife, who is Egyptian. She is depicted as fair, young, beautiful, and educated. The novel pits the provincial wife against her cosmopolitan counterpart. The novel is set in the final years of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956). It portrays the Sudan as a country that lies within the sphere of Egypt’s influence. To highlight the role of Egyptians as colonizers, Aboulela sharpens the cultural differences between the two countries. Although the Sudan is depicted as rich in oil, a resource that attracts many companies, investors, and Arabs who hope to get a job or become rich, it lags behind Egypt in education and cultural activities. In reality, the oil boom in the Sudan does not take place until the 1970s, but Aboulela depicts a fictional Sudan to bring it closer to the contemporary country, thereby allowing her to voice her criticism of the current state of globalization-driven hyperconsumerism. The author hints at the ethnic diversity in the country’s northern urban centers by mentioning a couple of Greeks and some Armenians, Brits, and Anglo Egyptians but this assortment is too feeble to leave its mark on Sudanese society or infuse it with original ideas (Aboulela 2011, 34, 58, 69, 202). The imagined Sudan in the novel is not culturally vibrant; in fact, its cultural and artistic scenes are almost barren. Nevertheless, it is a country awash with new money (46) and crude products for export, such as Arabic gum and cotton (42 and 52). Its consumer-driven culture is the result of free-market economy and neoliberal policies. Since the economic boom in the Sudan is not tied to political or cultural revival, its cosmopolitanism is fake. According to Aboulela, the dynamic between cosmopolitanism, progress, and modernity cannot be limited to buying and wearing European brands. In this, she shares David Simpson’s assertion that cosmopolitanism is predicated on “dialogic inquisitiveness.” But as a liberal project, it is subject to the advantages and the disadvantages of liberal visions (Simpson 1995, 489–90). Therefore, flaunting one’s riches and wearing expensive brands leads to the creation of a cultural and intellectual cul-de-sac, as exemplified by Mahmoud, who smokes Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (Aboulela 2011, 20), buys his suits “from Bond Street,” and wears “Bally” shoes (49). Unlike Mustafa Said, whose British education acquainted him with the theories of

Stuck Between England and Egypt  79 British reformers and intellectuals, Mahmoud’s knowledge of the West is guided by his consumption of Western brands, the performance of Western dance styles, and the appreciation of European architecture and décor favored by the Egyptian monarchy. Consumerism in the novel pervades even the most intimate aspects of his life: he decides to marry Nabilah after seeing her photograph displayed in the window of a shop. He chooses her in the same way he chooses to buy one of his British-made suits. Judith Walkowitz writes that this cultural veneer demonstrates a cosmopolitanism that is “less associated with disinterested humanitarianism than with transnational forms of commercialized culture and with transnational migrants.” As a result, it is conveyed not only as a fascination with cultural imports but also as “a suspicion of them as tainted” (Walkowitz 2010, 430). Tanya Agathocleous and Jason R. Rudy observe that although cosmopolitanism can represent positive values, like having a cosmopolitan character and adhering to cosmopolitan principles, it can be disparaging because it signifies disloyalty. Since the latter definition emerged during the Cold War era, it condemned the lifestyles associated with bourgeois decadence on the grounds that they weaken national spirit and demonstrate migratory impulses (Agathocleous and Rudy 2010, 389). This definition fits the prevalent hyperconsumerism and the sweat shops that sprang globally as a result of implementing global neoliberal policies. This type of worldliness is invariably superfluous and feigned. Aboulela cautions against confusing people’s mimicry of Western consumer patterns in the Middle East with cosmopolitanism. Homi Bhabha’s analysis of mimicry in colonial settings is relevant here. Bhabha explains the connection between mimicry and mockery by pointing out that “instances of colonial imitation” thrive on “the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry,” that is to say, when imitating someone produces a copy that falls short of the original. According to Bhabha, such an imitation “fixes the colonial subject” as partially present—the subject is the same but not equal to the original (Bhabha 1994, 66). In Season of Migration to the North, the dilemma of being the same— but not quite—fuels Mustafa’s desire to rebel and turn against his patrons, namely, the British. In Lyrics Alley, Mahmoud and Nabilah are spared from ­experiencing a similar psychological turmoil because they lack the required intellectual depth (Anderson 2001, 30). They are not self-reflective or conscious of their acts of mimicry, unlike the narrator in Salih’s novel. In contrast to the cultural hollowness of the Sudan, Egypt is envisioned as modern and culturally advanced. The colonial role of the British in the novel recedes to the background and upper-class Egyptians are now the masters of the Sudan and Egypt. As pseudo-British, they inherit Britain’s sense of superiority and racial bias. These negative traits are exemplified by Nabilah’s disregard for Waheeba, Mahmoud’s first wife. The information we receive about her is often filtered through the eyes of other characters, like Mahmoud and Nabilah, who look down on her. Their attitudes reveal class and racial prejudices within Middle Eastern societies—issues that are

80  Suha Kudsieh rarely touched upon in Arab literature. Waheeba is described as dark and African (Aboulela 2011, 16) with tribal scars on her cheeks and hennaed head and braids (31–32). She is portrayed as ignorant, vulgar, and superstitious (112–13). Nabilah is unaware of the covert role Waheeba played in solidifying her husband’s business and elevated social rank. But when she pays a visit to Waheeba’s quarter as a formality after Nur’s tragic accident, she surveys the room with the eyes of a Western tourist, noting the exotic details. She cannot help but admire “the linen, the embroidered pillowcases, and the charming tablecloth.” She sits on “fresh-smelling, ironed sheets and the glass she drank from sparkled.” Everything is neatly washed, ironed, and clean, and the tea is “spiced with cardamom” (171). Despite witnessing firsthand Waheeba’s wealth and gold bangles, Nabilah denies her rival cultural equivalency at the end. She also denies her equivalency on the grounds that both women are mothers. She persists instead in regarding the family as inferior to hers. The Abouzeids proclaim they act independently, but their business deals and profits are deeply enmeshed in the complex colonial system of the Anglo-­Egyptian Condominium (40). Mahmoud is happy to join the classes that exploit the Sudan’s natural resources. In return for his services, he is promoted to the rank of Bey by King Farouq of Egypt. He also does not hesitate to oppose the nascent Sudanese national movement lest it brings about drastic changes that could damage his business and undermine his distinguished rank. His son Nur is quite the opposite. He is a talented poet and appreciates the arts, particularly popular and national songs, but he does not dare to defy his father’s wishes. Mahmoud wants his son to follow in his footpath, to be his right-hand man and to help him run the large family businesses. When Nabilah stumbles by chance on a poem written by Nur, the entire family derides his talents. For them, writing poems and “silly” songs is a waste of his time and education (35–36). The only family member who encourages Nur is Soraya, his cousin, whom he dearly loves. The family dynamic changes radically when Nur suffers a tragic accident while swimming in Alexandria. The accident paralyzes Nur for good. When Mahmoud grasps the gravity of the situation, he reacts callously: he is filled with “a sudden shame” because he begins to regard his son’s condition “as a blight on the tapestry of the family’s life” (193). His thoughts drift to his business deals rather than to his son. When his business associates and acquaintances drop by to visit Nur at the hospital, Mahmoud chooses to discuss world affairs and economy with them (103–04). Despite the tragedy that has befallen the family, his social and business life continue to flourish (109). Eager to be seen by his peers as sparing no expense to cure his son, Mahmoud decides to take Nur to England. His preoccupation with his public image prevents him from allowing Waheeba, Nur’s mother, to accompany him stating that “London is not a place for her.” Instead, he takes Nabilah because he will be “meeting people and making new contacts,” without taking into consideration his son’s best interest (114).

Stuck Between England and Egypt  81 The differences between father and son become more visible when they reach London. Nur is immediately aware that the British hands that carry him around are rough and their accents are coarse, unlike his teachers at Victoria College. Nevertheless, he dismisses class differences and sees the English as humans. He also feels that he knows London by heart because he is familiar with the city through the books he read, the films he watched, and the songs he heard. In this regard, he fits well with Jeremy Waldron’s definition of cosmopolitanism as “a way of being in the world, a way of constructing an identity for oneself that is different from, and arguably opposed to, the idea of belonging to or devotion to or immersion in a particular culture” (Waldron 2000, 227). Nur’s reflections and actions mark him as a true cosmopolitan despite his disability and his strong national sentiments. He draws parallels between his condition and London after World War II. Instead of an orderly and thriving empire, he sees “war-­ damaged, dented buildings.” London “is a city in rehabilitation, poised between peace and construction, between austerity and boom, between rationing and plenty” (Aboulela 2011, 115). He sees himself in the battered city: they are both injured and in need of reconstruction. Nur’s paralysis is set against the backdrop of Sudan’s struggle for independence. While Mahmoud disregards the students’ riots and the troubles that frequently erupt in the streets (156), Nur is responsive to the students’ calls and eagerly follows the news of their success. Although he is physically disabled, his imagination soars high. He composes fervent patriotic songs camouflaged as love songs. His songs and poems become emblems of the Sudanese national movement: they are published in local newspapers, put to music, sung by well-known local singers, and broadcast over the radio (225 and 251). He is elated by this unexpected success, which inspires him to compose more songs. Throughout those developments, Nur is careful not to name Soraya, his ex-fiancée, in any of his poems. His father broke their engagement after the accident, and released his brother’s family from the promises they made regarding their children’s future. His motives were selfish and not altruistic: he wanted to avoid facing people’s pitiful glances regarding Nur’s impotence and disability. Soraya eventually and marries Nur’s best friend, but Nur is not jealous. He continues to guard her reputation and his poems provide him with a venue to express his innermost feelings. His ability to act selflessly and to follow the golden rule, despite his own tragedy, demonstrate his true cosmopolitanism.

Conclusion Writing immediately after the Sudan gained its independence from England, Tayeb Salih depicts the interaction between England and the Sudan in binary terms, as an existential struggle between the East and the West. In contrast, Leila Aboulela depicts an imagined Sudan in the throes of an economic boom. In doing so, she exposes the negative effects of globalization

82  Suha Kudsieh and neoliberal market policies. David Kurnick writes that cosmopolitanism is a “dialogic inquisitiveness” (2010, 489)—it makes one curious about the Other, but Mustafa Said, Mahmoud, and Nabilah fail to live up to this expectation despite their worldliness. Mustafa was so enthralled by the British that he could not appreciate any other culture. Despite his sharp mind, he did not go out of his way to meet Egyptians or experience the city as a local would. He saw Cairo through the eyes of the Robinsons, his surrogate British family. Notwithstanding Mahmoud’s success in business and Nabilah’s education, neither character was perceptive enough to recognize their indebtedness to Waheeba, whose rich dowry financed the family’s business ventures and paid for Nabilah’s lavish lifestyle. For this reason, the cosmopolitanism of those characters is negative; it does not involve “planetary expansiveness of subject matter,” an act that emphasizes dialogue and intercultural exchange (Robbins 1993, 181). Although both novels are set in the Sudan, the authors treat the West as epicenter, culturally and educationally, and as the dominant force in circulating transnational forms of material culture that influence global consumer habits. Both authors in effect limit their attention to characters who have come into frequent contact with British and Western culture, whereas pivotal characters like Hosna and Waheeba remain marginalized. This approach enshrines the misconception that worldliness is attainable only through exposure to Western culture. In this, the authors associate worldliness with characters who are “privileged” and who can exercise “aesthetic, and ethical form of thinking” (Walkowitz 2010, 429). The narrator and Nur represent such a tendency. Although they embody positive types of cosmopolitanism, they are empowered by their exposure to Western education and travels, not by their indigenous culture. This problem seems to be unique to the Sudan, possibly because of the triangular colonialism the country experienced in the past. Unlike Kwame Anthony Appiah who feels empowered by the tribal traditions in Ghana (Appiah 2005, 224), Salih and Aboulela inadvertently shun local culture, privileging that of the West. Arjun Appadurai raises this issue when he highlights the Herculean challenge of liberating cosmopolitanism from the “authority of the Western experience” or “the models derived from that experience” (2003, 49). One way to meet this challenge is to remember that the seeds of cosmopolitanism were planted in the Middle East, in Ancient Egypt, whose Pharaohs ruled over the Sudan and Greater Syria. The golden rule of treating others as one’s equals surely predates colonialism, and it is the basic cornerstone that facilitates communal cohesion and solidarity worldwide. It is a universal rule that functions as an effective antidote against insularity and parochialism. As Tim Brennan observes, cosmopolitanism is “an unlikely entryway” into current debates about equality and justice between the global north and the south, and the boundaries between national sovereignty and globalization (i.e., multinational c­ apitalism) ­(Brennan 1997, 310).

Stuck Between England and Egypt  83 Nevertheless, both authors offer a glimmer of hope at the end. The narrator in Season of Migration awakens from his mental stupor and comprehends the traditional, oppressive social structure his village is beholden to, and the corruption that is rampant in post-independence Sudan. Salih’s novel closes with the narrator vowing to fight back. In Lyrics Alley, the promise of a better future manifests in Nur. Undeterred by this, he composes poems and songs that resonate in every Sudanese household, stirring the zeal of the younger generation for Sudan’s independence. Moreover, Egypt and Sudan’s struggle for independence from Britain unites the two countries in Aboulela’s novel.

Notes 1 All translations from Arabic into English are mine. I am grateful to the editors, Aleksandar Stevic and Philip Tsang, for their constructive comments and extensive feedback on this article. 2 As Ashcroft et al. (1989) argue, postcolonial novels aim to unsettle Euro-­centric notions of race, history, literature, and language. The term they use, which has become a well-known phrase, is the “empire” (ex-colonies) “writes back” to the colonial center. For more details, see Ashcroft et al. 1–13.

Works Cited Aboulela, Leila. 2011. Lyrics Alley. New York: Grove Press. Agathocleous, Tanya, and Jason R. Rudy. 2010. “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms: Introduction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 2 (September): 389–97. Anderson, Amanda. 2001. The Power of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Distance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. Modernity Al at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brennan, Timothy. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Defoe, Daniel. 2010. Robinson Crusoe, edited by Evan R. Davis. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press Euben, Roxanne. 2006. Journeys to the Other Shores: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fahmy, Khaled. 2004. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmet Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Geesey, Patricia. 1997. “Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb Salih’s Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North).” Research in African Literature 28, no. 3 (Autumn): 128–40.

84  Suha Kudsieh Gikandi, Simon. 2002. “Race and Cosmopolitanism.” American Literary History 14, no. 3 (Autumn): 593–615. Harlow, Barbara. 1979. “Othello’s Season of Migration.” Edebiyat 4, no. 2: 157–75. Kant, Immanuel. 2010. “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” In The Cosmopolitan Reader, edited by Garret Wallace Brown and David Held. Cambridge: Polity Press, 17–26. Kurnick, David. 2010. “Unspeakable George Eliot.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 2 (September): 489–509. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2010. “Kant and Cosmopolitanism.” In The Cosmopolitan Reader, edited by Garret Wallace Brown and David Held. Cambridge: Polity Press, 29–44. Robbins, Bruce. 1993. Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture. London: Verso. Salih, Tayeb. 2005. Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal [Season of Migration to the North]. Khartoum, Sudan: Dar al-’Ayn lil-Nashr. Simpson, David. 1995. “The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case for Translation.” European Romantic Review 16, no. 2: 141–52. Troutt Powell, Eve M. 2003. A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great ­Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Waldron, Jeremy. 2000. “What Is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (June): 227–43. Walkowitz, Judith R. 2010. “Cosmopolitanism, Feminism, and the Moving Body.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 2 (September): 427–49.

Part II

Subjects of Displacement

5 Unbelonging Caryl Phillips and the Ethics of Disaffiliation Aleksandar Stević

Something is not quite right with the novels of Caryl Phillips. Since the late 1980s, when he first joined together narratives of African slavery and the Holocaust within the covers of a single novel, Phillips’s writings have persistently violated cultural taboos surrounding the representation of traumatic memory: they have brought together historically distinct narratives of collective suffering, they have conflated materially and ethically dissimilar experiences, they have blurred the line between victims and perpetrators. Such willingness to conflate incommensurable histories has, in turn, animated a lingering sense of discomfort in numerous critical responses to Phillips’s work, a discomfort often shared by his harshest critics and by scholars otherwise favorably disposed toward his work. This generalized sense of unease in the face of Phillips’s writing stems largely from the suspicion that his tendency to bring together distinct histories reflects an uncritical adherence to the seemingly antiquated humanist assumptions that underlie the project of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. In this essay, I use Phillips’s unabashed commitment to humanist universalism to examine the unusual interplay of cosmopolitan ethics and traumatic memory that informs so much of his work as a novelist. In fact, as I show in the pages that follow, Phillips’s universalist commitments speak directly and deliberately to contemporary debates about the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

The Problem While Phillips’s early fictions like The Final Passage (Phillips 1995a [1985]) and A State of Independence (Phillips 1995b [1986]) focused on ­t wentieth-century Caribbean immigration to England, thus remaining squarely within the remit of his personal and family history, it did not take long for his novels to branch out into world history in ways which were bound to raise difficult questions about historical trauma and the ethics of representation. In the four novels published between 1989 and 1997, the thematic coordinates of Phillips’s fiction have expanded dramatically, incorporating not only the history of the transatlantic slave trade but also that of the Holocaust, often within the confines of the same book. With the publication of Higher Ground (Phillips 2006a [1989]), Cambridge

88  Aleksandar Stević (­ Phillips 1992 [1991]), Crossing the River (Phillips 2006b [1994]), and The Nature of Blood (Phillips 2008 [1997]), the pages of Phillips’s books, once dedicated solely to the narrow subset of Caribbean immigrants in modern Britain, have been opened to the survivors of Middle Passage and of the Nazi death camps, to slave traders and escaped slaves, and to contemporary ­A frican refugees and Jewish settlers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the central points of critical contention around Phillips’s work has been precisely the ecumenical scope of his fictions and their tendency to juxtapose and conflate seemingly incommensurable experiences. This essential problem manifests itself on at least three main levels. First, as it is often noted, in approaching the history of transatlantic slave trade, Phillips seems content to divide his attention between victims and perpetrators while refusing either to fully exculpate the former or to indict the latter: whereas in Cambridge, he forces the eponymous slave to share the limelight with Emily Cartwright, a daughter of an English slave owner who has traveled to the Caribbean to inspect her father’s plantation, in Crossing the River, Phillips seems to give equal weight to the voices of slaves looking for freedom and to that of an English captain whose ship is on its way to collect the human cargo from West Africa. Moreover, both Higher Ground and Crossing the River suggest African complicity in the slave trade: whereas Higher Ground opens with the narrative of an unnamed African man employed by the Europeans to facilitate the trade of human beings, Crossing the River begins and ends with a quasi-mystical voice of an African father who has sold his children. Second, Phillips is eager to bring together the histories of African and Jewish diaspora, and the attendant traumas of slavery and the Holocaust. Higher Ground begins with the early days of transatlantic slave trade but ends with a history of a Jewish survivor who has escaped the Holocaust as a part of the Kindertransport. Perhaps even more radically, The Nature of Blood intertwines the story of Othello with the history of early modern Jewish ghettos, the creation of modern Israel, and, finally, the aliyah of African Jews in the wake of Operation Moses. Finally, Phillips’s fictional production has a pronounced tendency to conflate catastrophic world-historical events with what is best described as ordinary experience: in Crossing the River, the protagonist of the novel’s first section is Nash, a freed American slave trying—and failing—to build a life for himself in what is soon to become Liberia; the protagonist of the last section is Joyce, a working-class woman from Yorkshire who finds a refuge from an abusive marriage in an affair with a black American soldier. Conversely, in A Distant Shore (Phillips 2003 [2004]), Phillips juxtaposes the experience of an African refugee who has witnessed the murder of his family with that of a maladjusted and lonely retired teacher who has spent her unhappy but generally unremarkable life in postwar England, fully spared from the horrors of historical violence. Not only does Phillips consciously violate the victim/perpetrator divide; he also conflates distinct histories and aggressively juxtaposes events of different magnitude.

Unbelonging  89 The question which thus arises is that of the normative basis on which these juxtapositions rest. In other words, how can we justify Phillips’s compulsive desire to bring together the historically, geographically, and morally remote histories of slavery, racist violence, genocide, refuge flight, and social isolation? One widespread answer to this question has been that we cannot. The intertwining of the histories of enslaved Africans and white Europeans in novels like Cambridge and Crossing the River has prompted the accusation that Phillips was silencing African slaves and robbing them of agency while giving voice to their white masters: in the final instance, the allegation goes, these texts end up privileging the white colonialist subject at the expense of its victims (Goyal 2010, 213–14). Conversely, Phillips’s turn to the Holocaust in Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood has led to the charge that he was, as Hilary Mantel rather ungenerously suggested, appropriating a history which was not his own. As Mantel writes, “it is indecent to lay claim to other people’s suffering: it is a colonial impulse, dressed up as altruism” (Mantel 1997, 39). Behind both allegations lies the sense that Phillips’s project is rooted in some kind of troubling, unreflective universalism which threatens to elide historical specificity and to suppress vital moral and material differences between victims and perpetrators and between historically embedded forms of suffering. Yogita Goyal thus warns that “Phillips’s insistence on complicity between slave and master risks folding into common liberal humanist notions of universalism” (Goyal 2010, 208). She further protests that “in Phillips’s version of the black Atlantic world, the sharp indictment of Western modernity is lost in the attempt to transcend the artificiality of race-based models of identity” (Goyal 2010, 216). As is commonly the case with postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment, Goyal sees universalist humanism—the central tenet of the Enlightenment project—as inseparable from European imperialism and insists on the “complicity of Enlightenment rationality with racial terror” (216). As her somewhat exasperated rhetoric reveals, universalism is not something one could possibly take seriously, but rather something one slips into inadvertently: if only someone would tell Caryl Phillips that the liberal humanist subject has been deconstructed, all would be well. Significantly, more affable critics than Goyal and Mantel have often been equally uncomfortable with the universalist implications of Phillips’s work, and, in particular, with his tendency to appropriate narratives of historical trauma to which he bears no apparent personal connection. Because they are every bit as concerned about the dangers of projection and identification, and because they share with Phillips’s detractors the deep-seated suspicion toward ethical universalism, the only recourse such critics have in defending Phillips’s work is to argue that he has not in fact run afoul of the taboos he was accused of violating. To take the most obvious example, when Stef Craps takes on the task of defending Phillips from Hilary ­Mantel, he does so not by challenging the broad theoretical basis of Mantel’s claims,

90  Aleksandar Stević but rather by arguing that she has failed to appreciate the full complexity of Phillips’s writing (Craps 2008, 196–97). The intricate aesthetics of Phillips’s novels suggests that his use of wide-ranging historical analogies does not constitute an unreflexive exercise in “incorporative identification or crude empathy” (Craps 2008, 197), but rather a more subtle attempt to question the limits of identification. We should therefore recognize in Phillips’s writing those “textual signs that complicate the pursuit of imaginative identification, inviting critical reflection on the potentially harmful consequences of the drive to fully imagine another’s reality or voice” (197).1 There is a curious convergence here between the attitudes of Phillips’s critics and his defenders: while Goyal and Mantel argue that Phillips should know better, Craps argues that he does in fact know better. In other words, while the former believe that Phillips shouldn’t be doing what he is doing, the latter finds comfort in the belief that he isn’t doing what he seems to be doing. Both critical attitudes appear to be premised on the underlying belief that a universalist, cosmopolitan position invested in an ideal of shared humanity constitutes little more than a retrograde fallacy inseparable from the hegemonic aspirations of European imperialism. Consequently, Phillips is either criticized for slipping into this fallacy or praised for managing to avoid it. The difficulty with both of these critical attitudes is that they refuse to take seriously Phillips’s commitment to cosmopolitanism and the attendant moral universalism. Contrary to such approaches, I will argue that at a certain level his tackling of traumatic histories is in fact predicated on a commitment to cosmopolitanism in the strong sense of the word: the forceful connection of his writing to the history of the African diaspora notwithstanding, Phillips occupies an ethical position that both limits the significance of narrow loyalties and emphasizes the responsibility for the distant stranger in a way that closely follows the cosmopolitan logic of universal inclusion. 2 In that respect, Goyal is right: Phillips’s literary practice does suggest that he is unperturbed by the kind of anti-universalist discourse that is widespread in academic humanities generally and postcolonial studies specifically. I wish to suggest, however, that the task at hand is not to deplore Phillips’s adherence to old-fashioned humanism (nor to try to rescue him from it), but rather to reconstruct the kind of ethical argument he feels sanctions the literary practice rooted in the conflation of different historical experiences. This is the task I will take up in the following pages.

Cosmopolitanism as Homelessness In order to explore Phillips’s relationship to cosmopolitanism, I will first turn to the significant body of his nonfictional writing. I take this path not in an attempt to find refuge in the protective embrace of authorial intention, but rather because Phillips’s novels, travelogues, essays, and interviews participate in a shared struggle with questions of belonging and identity.

Unbelonging  91 What this struggle persistently reveals is an author at once deeply invested in the traumatic experience of the African diaspora and reluctant to be fully defined by that experience. There is, Phillips claims in an interview, “an umbilical cord from my own life to this world of the Middle Passage” (Rice 366). This connection is, of course, obvious: all of his novels—however thematically and formally diverse—are written in the shadow of transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, on a certain level, Phillips’s entire literary career can be described as a series of increasingly complex attempts to examine a single question: what is the fate of the deracinated children of Africa in the wake of European colonialism? This is the lingering question that animates his long-standing and highly personal interest in the Caribbean, his explicit engagement with the realities of transatlantic slave trade, and his repeated attempts to reimagine the lives of both fictional and historical black figures, from Othello to Bert Williams. The commitment to the divergent histories of African diaspora is equally visible in Phillips’s nonfictional writing, from his essays on the major figures of African American and Afro-Caribbean literary histories (including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, and Jamaica Kincaid) to his travelogue The European Tribe (Phillips 1987) in which he sought to examine his own relationship to Europe, and further to The Atlantic Sound (Phillips 2001 [2000]) in which he physically revisits the former slave-trading ports along the edges of the Atlantic Triangle. Given such an overwhelming preoccupation with black history and with the transatlantic movement of both slaves and economic migrants, it is hardly surprising that Phillips’s work is often seen primarily as a fictional exploration of the triangular space which Paul Gilroy famously described as “the black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993). And yet, despite the strength of this “umbilical cord” that ties Phillips to the Middle Passage, it is difficult to imagine an author more resistant to any form of Afrocentrism and more skeptical about postcolonialism as a critical paradigm. 3 In A New World Order, he approvingly quotes Frantz Fanon: there is no Negro mission; there is no white burden… I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world. My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro values. There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence. (Phillips 2002, 133; compare Fanon 1986, 179) And just so that there is no confusion about his understanding of Fanon’s words, he concludes, “Fanon is a humanist whose sympathies traverse all boundaries, imaginary or otherwise” (2002, 133). Here lies the most significant paradox of Phillips’s authorial positioning: although he has dedicated his literary career to the history of African diaspora and although his writing developed directly from the personal history of racialized abuse and marginalization, Phillips believes that what he needs in order

92  Aleksandar Stević to cope with this legacy—personal as well as collective—is neither racial solidarity nor a radical critique of the Western imperialism, but rather a cosmopolitan ethics.4 Phillips’s embrace of cosmopolitanism is most clearly visible in his rejection of both physical rootedness and of a whole range of identity-based claims. As he comments in an interview with Stephen Clingman, “I am not that much of a believer in the importance of being able to claim a rootedness—a landscape, a geography—which you carry around with you” (Clingman 2004a, 116). Lack of rootedness, or rather the rejection of rootedness in a local context, is both the most common charge against cosmopolitans and the foundational claim of cosmopolitan theory. As James Ingram points out, cosmopolitan’s assertion of a common humanity is first and foremost negative. We identify with the universal first of all by not identifying with—by disidentifying from—the local… On this level, then, cosmopolitanism emerges as a negative identity politics, a politics of disaffiliation, always defined first and foremost by what it opposes. (Ingram 2013, 49; emphasis original) What Phillips opposes—in this interview at least—is more or less any attempt to be defined by the determinants of race and national origin usually associated with his work, including “Black British,” “Caribbean,” and “postcolonial” (Clingman 2004a, 121–22). In making this argument, Phillips is following a long line of twentieth-century authors—including James Joyce, J.L. Borges, and Danilo Kiš—who have explicitly rejected the framework of a national culture as unduly constraining. 5 What is at stake for him is not merely the inadequacy of particular labels, but rather a wholesale refusal to be labeled. Hence, Phillips’s pronouncement that he can positively identify only with the writers who don’t fit comfortably into a national tradition, who, for whatever reason, in their work or individual selves would resist being grouped by race, which seems to be an increasingly irrelevant term in talking about literary culture or literary practice. (Clingman 2004a, 122) The question worth posing at this juncture is why would an author whose entire body of work is a meticulously researched testimony about the history of racialized violence adopt such an uncompromisingly polemical stance on the issue of relevance of identity-based categories for his own literary practice and for a broader literary culture? Is Phillips not, then, pursuing a project of disaffiliation from the very history that defines his work? Finally, in what way is his insistence on disaffiliation conducive to the representation of specific historical trauma? The answer to these questions offered by Phillips’s work is layered, and in some ways paradoxical.

Unbelonging  93 On a certain level, for Phillips, unbelonging is very nearly an inescapable condition. While authors like Joyce and Borges pursued what Ingram describes as the “politics of disaffiliation” in an attempt to overcome what they saw as the excessively restrictive boundaries of national literary traditions and to place their writing in dialogue with a much broader—Western, if not outright global—literary heritage, what is at stake for Phillips is less a matter of willful disaffiliation than one of an impossibility of affiliation. In other words, while cosmopolitans generally aim to overcome or bracket local affiliations in order to build a larger community, for him the problem seems to be that belonging to a narrow community is an impossible task. This impossibility is an obsessive presence in Phillips’s fictional and nonfictional writings. As he writes successively about Africa, the United States, and England, “I recognise the place, I feel at home here, but I don’t belong. I am of, and not of, this place” (Phillips 2002, 1). Some version of this predicament plagues most of his heroes. Leila, the young protagonist of Phillips’s first novel, The Final Passage, abandons the brief attempt to settle in England and returns home to the Caribbean, fully cognizant that a similarly unsuccessful journey will be attempted one day by her children (Phillips 1995a, 204). In A State of Independence, published only a year later, Bertram Francis returns from England to what appears to be St.  Kitts in a futile attempt to “find a position in the society and make back my peace with the island” (Phillips 1995b, 50), only to be told off and instructed to go back where he came from: “England is where you belong now” (Phillips 1995b, 136). In Phillips’s subsequent novels, settlement of any kind remains an impossibility. The eponymous hero of Cambridge is repeatedly tossed around the Atlantic Triangle: enslaved and taken from Africa to North America, he finds a temporary reprieve in England, but soon departs back to Africa as a Christian missionary, only to be enslaved again and taken to a Caribbean plantation. For Emily Cartwright, the novel’s other key protagonist, the journey from England to the Caribbean island where she is due to inspect her father’s plantation, turns her into an outcast. She falls pregnant and gives birth to a stillborn child fathered, out of wedlock, by the plantation’s overseer. Following the experience, she feels her life is effectively over: “Are there no ships that might take me away? But take me away to what and to whom?” (Phillips 1992, 183). Similar questions haunt the protagonists of Crossing the River. For Nash, a freed slave on his way to settle in what will soon become Liberia, the return to Africa is both a homecoming and a misadventure. On the one hand, “Liberia is the star in the East for the free colored man. It is truly our only home” (Phillips 2006b, 18). On the other hand, “it is strange to think that these people of Africa are called our ancestors” (Phillips 2006b, 32). The Nature of Blood offers an equally fragile fantasy of homecoming. At the beginning of the novel, Stephan has left behind the “old world” of pre-Holocaust Europe—his family is either lost to the Nazi camps or scattered throughout England and America—and is now playing his role in the birth of modern Israel. Still haunted by the

94  Aleksandar Stević nostalgia for the “old country,” he is nonetheless solemnly dedicated to the creation of the new homeland, “distant, yet so tantalizingly close. Our troubled land. Palestine. Israel” (Phillips 2008, 3). And yet the pathos and sentimentality of the novel’s opening lines stand in sharp contrast to its conclusion in which a young black Jewess denounces the fantasy of homecoming. Although she had first “thanked God for returning us to Zion” (Phillips 2008, 203), the poignant fantasies of return to “our land” have quickly turned sour when she realized that she will always be an outsider: “You say you saved us. Gently plucked me from one century, helped me to cross two more, and then placed me in this time. Here. Now. But why? What are you trying to prove?” (Phillips 2008, 209). As with Nash’s return to Africa in Crossing the River, homecoming in The Nature of Blood is a dubious endeavor. Finally, Phillips’s more recent novels, which tend to shy away from the extreme geographic and historical diversity typical of the books he published during the 1990s, nonetheless remain committed to a sense of homelessness. Like the migrants in Phillips’s early novels, Gabriel, the African refugee in A Distant Shore (Phillips 2004 [2003]), finds England a disappointment: “this was not the England that the thought he was travelling to, and these sad people are not the people that he imagined he would discover” (Phillips 2004, 176). Even In the Falling Snow (Phillips 2009), the most geographically constricted of Phillips’s novels—the action is confined to London and Leeds—cannot help but ponder displacement. Keith, the novel’s middle-aged anti-hero is the son of Caribbean immigrants who have chosen to remain in England; although he was born in the UK and, like his peers, “had no memory of any kind of tropical life before England” (Phillips 2009, 41), he is nonetheless attracted to the idea of going back to the West Indies or, as his estranged wife cynically calls them, his “imaginary homeland” (Phillips 2009, 176). Both the sense of homelessness and the clearly impossible fantasy of return to an imaginary home persist even if only as little more than a response to mid-life crisis. For Phillips, this homelessness is a condition that is both historically embedded in the specific trauma of transatlantic slave trade and irreducible to its traumatic origin inasmuch as it constitutes a universal condition. On the one hand, it is historically conditioned by the legacy of both forced and voluntary migrations that have spanned the triangular space between Africa, Britain, and North America: across the centuries, countless millions have traversed this water, and unlike myself, these people have not always had the luxury of choice. They have felt alienated from, or abandoned by, the societies that they have hitherto known as ‘home’. They have hoped that somewhere, over the horizon, there might be a new place where they might live and raise their children. (Phillips 2002, 305)

Unbelonging  95 What is at stake is not so much a high-minded refusal to be confined by a restrictive understanding of what constitutes home, but rather an attempt to come to terms with a history of homelessness. On the other hand, however, homelessness is not merely a particular predicament of those touched by colonialism but also a universal one inextricable from the processes of globalization: “these days we are all unmoored. Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions” (Phillips 2002, 6, cf. also Clingman 2004a, 135). Both as a colonial predicament and as a feature of globalization, homelessness is irreversible and inescapable. It is not surprising, then, that the “the umbilical cord” which Phillips mentions connects him not to Africa itself as a place of shared origin, but to the great in-between of the Middle Passage, not to a mother or a home but to a condition of homelessness imposed by the slave trade. This is clear from the sharp divide Phillips chronicles between the inhabitants of modern Ghana—the historical center of transatlantic slave trade—and the members of the African diaspora who would like to imagine it is as a home to return to. As he writes in The Atlantic Sound, “do they not understand? Africa cannot cure. Africa cannot make anybody feel whole. Africa is not a psychiatrist. (…) What on earth do these people want?” (Phillips 2001, 173). Despite the bewilderment, Phillips must know what they want: they want to feel at home and to feel rooted in some way. The trouble is that he sees such desires as hopelessly misguided: there is no cure for homelessness, and group solidarity will not help.

The Ethics of Disaffiliation It is not, however, resignation or moral indifference in the face of history that finally animates Phillips’s resistance to narrow commitments, but rather the opposite. As Ingram points out, cosmopolitanism generally entails a complex dialectic of disaffiliation and moral commitment: when cosmopolitans reject narrow loyalties, they generally do so because they believe that such loyalties stand in the way of cosmopolitanism’s central ethical imperative, namely, the notion that “each and every human being, including those with whom we do not share a political, cultural, religious, or other community, should count as objects of moral concern” (Ingram 2013, 66). When brought to bear on the context of traumatic history, however, such a universalist impulse comes into conflict with a different kind of moral imperative—that of acknowledging the specificity of particular forms of suffering. As we have seen, this tension is central to critical debates about Phillips’s writing, and animates much of the hostile response to his work. Somewhat counterintuitively, in this conflict between universalism and particularism Phillips himself seems to fall squarely and unapologetically on the side of the former because he feels that the attempts to isolate traumatic histories run the risk of marginalization and ghettoization and

96  Aleksandar Stević that those risks outweigh the dangers of what Craps calls “appropriative sympathy.” What is at stake, then, is the belief that the history of collective trauma must be brought into the world rather than protected as the sole property of the victimized group, especially in a world in which rootedness seems an increasingly distant ideal. In order to highlight the implications of this gesture, I wish to introduce a brief but instructive comparison with the Holocaust writings of Danilo Kiš. The Holocaust shapes Kiš’s fiction in the way in which the Middle Passage shapes Phillips’s. Kiš’s first novel, published in 1962, chronicles a young woman’s escape from Auschwitz, while several of his subsequent books draw on his own childhood during the Holocaust. And yet, despite the Jewish roots, despite his family history—Kiš’s father, a Hungarian Jew, was killed in Auschwitz—and his commitment to Holocaust testimony, Kiš (like Phillips) has forcefully refused to be labeled: I refuse to be categorized as a Jewish writer. I am opposed to every variety of minority literature: feminist, homosexual, Jewish, black. I am equally opposed to any tightly defined concept of national literature. I think of literature as my country of origin. I am for Goethe’s concept of world literature. I maintain that the Jewish problem in my work is not an intellectual issue; it is the only content of my life that can be called literary. It gives me everything I need: victim, executioner, distance in time. (Kiš 1995, 216) Having started to write at a moment when the status of the Holocaust in Europe’s collective memory was still delicate, and in a country in which tribal loyalties were growing more powerful, Kiš sensed that as long as he is considered primarily a Jewish author, the historical traumas his books addressed could also be dismissed as minority issues whose significance pales in comparison with the collective suffering endured by the country’s larger ethnic groups or, indeed, in comparison to the grand narrative of Yugoslavia’s struggle against fascism—the narrative at the very heart of the official communist mythology. In a word, if Kiš is merely a minority writer, then the Holocaust itself is merely a minority affair whose significance for anyone but the Jews is limited at best. Hence, the categorical pronouncement in his Advice to a Young Writer: “do not be a minority writer” (Kiš 1995, 124). Although there is no reason to believe that Phillips is familiar with this dictum, he nonetheless heeds Kiš’s advice. Asked if he thinks that he “writes in a black literary tradition, whether in the US, Caribbean, or Britain” (Clingman 2004a, 121), Phillips dismisses such a possibility: to the African American tradition, he is an outsider, and as for the other two, he is not persuaded that they exist at all. He is similarly dismissive about the critical association of his work with that of Hanif Kureishi and Ben Okri,

Unbelonging  97 and argues that “common pigmentation” is hardly grounds for establishing a literary tradition (Clingman 2004a, 121). Both Kiš and Phillips are thoroughly dedicated to a particular history of collective trauma and persuaded that such histories do not constitute an inalienable property of specific groups. From the perspective of both writers, to reach out and engage traumas that are not obviously our own is not “a colonial impulse,” but rather a bulwark against marginalization. Conversely, the assertion of uniqueness, of the fundamental separation between forms of collective suffering, is not an ethically scrupulous way to avoid colonizing other people’s pain, but rather a dangerous step: if we capitulate beforehand to the unassimilable otherness of the traumas experienced by other groups, then why should we even care? Even worse, why should anyone care about our suffering? From this perspective, then, the insistence on the radical separateness of diverse histories runs the risk of dehumanizing the other.6 It is this line of reasoning that led both Kiš and Phillips to feel comfortable appropriating experiences to which they could lay no personal claims. Having spent most of his early career writing about the Jewish persecution under Nazism, Kiš has first built a significant international reputation with his 1976 A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a book that displaces the personal experience of the Holocaust with an exploration of Stalinist terror, an experience decidedly not his own.7 As for Phillips, he has not only branched out from the confines of the Atlantic Triangle and into the history of the Holocaust but has also explicitly denounced concerns about cultural appropriation: “to argue, as I have heard people do, that one is culturally appropriating this or that voice is not only ludicrous now, it has always been ludicrous” (Clingman 2004a, 135). As far as Phillips is concerned, writing in the voice of others with whom one cannot obviously identify along the lines of nationality, gender, race, and historical experience is not just permissible but constitutes the most fundamental writerly task. Given this analysis, we may well conclude with Goyal that Phillips falls back onto “common liberal humanist notions of universalism” (Goyal 2010, 208). However, it is equally important to note that what is at stake in Phillips’s universalist commitments is not merely a regression to a widely dismissed stance, but rather a conscious attempt to rethink universalist cosmopolitanism from a minority perspective, a perspective from which universalism functions not as a tool for marginalization, but rather as a defense against it. In the final section of this essay, I will return to Phillips’s fiction in order to trace the practical implications of this project.

Beyond the Atlantic Triangle As we have seen, for all of Phillips’s commitment to the trials of the black diaspora, he nonetheless considers openness toward the histories of others as both practically inescapable and ethically desirable. This dual demand— to testify to a particular historical experience while nonetheless refusing

98  Aleksandar Stević to assert its radical separation from other strains of human history—has largely shaped the development of Phillips’s literary career. Although the cumulative effect of his fiction is certainly that of a frantic triangular movement between Africa, America, and Europe, a movement that forever retraces the trajectories of transatlantic slave trade, this triangle, in the final analysis, fails to contain Phillips’s analogical imagination. While black slaves, former slaves, imprisoned African-Americans, Caribbean migrants, and African refugees that inhabit his novels can, in one way or another, trace their plight to the reality of European imperialism and the attendant slave-trading enterprise, Phillips systematically refuses to turn this shared genealogy into an essentializing force. In his hands, the triangle is not really a polygon, a fully enclosed geometric shape, but rather one whose borders are intermittently broken to admit other histories that seemingly don’t belong there. This method is employed with particular force in Higher Ground and Crossing the River. Higher Ground begins with the history of the slave trade, but then expands geographically and historically in ways that defy easy explanations. The first of the novel’s three narratives is firmly rooted in the history of slavery, and follows an African narrator who plays the role of an intermediary between the European colonizers and the local tribes, before he is enslaved himself. As he ponders during the long imprisonment in the haul of a slave ship, there are steps, small and precise, that I have taken which have helped these intruders to subject thousands of my people to this abasement. It is too late to feel guilty, and there is nobody to whom I could realistically apologize. I do not feel like a traitor, I feel like a fool. (Phillips 2006a, 58) The second narrative follows Rudy, a young African American imprisoned for robbery during the Civil Rights era; in thralls of a revolutionary Afrocentric ideology, he sees his imprisonment as an extension of slavery and rejects any kind of détente with the white majority, denouncing in the process all those whom he sees as merely trying to pacify the white oppressors, including Fanon (Phillips 2006a, 70), Louis Armstrong (135), and Martin Luther King (150). Rudy’s narrative flirts with the notion that the mass incarceration of black Americans is a continuation of slavery by other means. The title of this section of the novel is “The Cargo Rap” (61), a clear allusion to the condition of African slaves during the Middle Passage. Moreover, in his own analysis, Rudy repeatedly refers to the prison as a “plantation” (67, 99). The novel therefore seems to suggest a continuum of experience between its first two parts: Rudy is not merely a descendant of the African slaves hauled across the Atlantic, but, like the narrator of the novel’s first section, continues to suffer much the same indignity.

Unbelonging  99 And yet, even before Higher Ground breaks through the boundaries of the Atlantic Triangle by abruptly shifting its focus onto the Holocaust, it has already started to question the historical analogies it had invoked. As several critics have noted, the analogy between Rudy’s condition and that of the African slaves is largely dismissed as a naïve projection: the letters he exchanges with the relatives on the outside suggest that they are not very interested in his revolutionary zeal and his demands for extreme ideological purity which no one—including Dr. King—seems capable of satisfying; instead, they hope that he will win an appeal and that they will be able to get on with their lives.8 In the final instance, Rudy’s Afrocentrism appears self-defeating. With his narrative, Phillips invokes the theme of continuity but seems eager to avoid facile historical analogies. The final, seemingly fully incongruous narrative compounds this difficulty. It follows Irina/Irene, a thoroughly traumatized Eastern European Holocaust survivor living in England and struggling to piece her life back together. Following a suicide attempt, she has spent years in a psychiatric hospital, and now that she is finally released, she seems to see some kind of future with Louis, a West Indian man who has just arrived to England only to be faced with torrents of racist abuse. Once again, Phillips provides and does not provide a connection: clearly, Louis, like Rudy, is connected to the Middle Passage described in the novel’s first section. Moreover, in some ways, both Louis and Irene are victims of history, both are marginalized, both threatened with racialized violence. And yet, once again, these links are feeble, tentative: the encounter between a Jewes and a black man is only momentary, as Louis quickly understands that he cannot stay with her: “it was probable that this woman will extend and demand a severe loyalty that he could never reciprocate. Not now. Sorry” (Phillips 2006a, 216). Their shattered lives cannot come together, but neither can the novel’s three narrative strands: Phillips hints at analogies and genealogical connections but does not push them. Instead, he leaves his ­protagonists—a slave, an African American prisoner, a Caribbean immigrant, a Holocaust survivor—to coexist within this odd asymmetrical structure without seeking to impose a strong sense of narrative or symbolic unity on their disparate stories. Such oddly inconclusive, open-ended acts of comparison and cooptation are central to Phillips’s approach to history, an approach that simultaneously imposes a definite historical framework and sheds it. This method in which he focuses on the Atlantic Triangle only to begin shifting its borders will be at work again a few years later in Crossing the River. Its action covering three centuries and as many continents, the novel opens and closes with the seemingly omniscient voice of a mystical African father who ponders the shared history of uprooted Africans from the eighteenth-century heights of transatlantic slave trade to the middle of the twentieth century. Unlike Higher Ground, which merely juxtaposes historically remote experiences,

100  Aleksandar Stević here the father’s voice functions as a frame which aims to impose a sense of coherence on a series of disjointed narratives: A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them (two boys and a girl) along weary paths, until we reached the place where the mud flats are populated with crabs and gulls. (…) I soiled my hands with cold goods in exchange for their warm flesh. A shameful intercourse. (…) And soon after, the chorus of a common memory began to haunt me. For two hundred and fifty years I have listened to the many-tongued chorus. And occasionally, among the sundry restless voices, I have discovered those of my own children. My Nash. My Martha. My Travis. (Phillips 2006b, 1) The histories that follow thus have a single point of origin in the damning transaction between the father and the European traders. The stories of Nash, the freed American slave who returns to Africa; Martha, who unsuccessfully seeks to escape slavery in the American South by moving westwards; and Travis, a black American soldier in World War II England can all be traced to this originary moment. And while the inclusion of Travis’s narrative in a book which overwhelmingly focuses on the history of slavery is not an entirely unprecedented gesture inasmuch as it emphasizes the continuity of the African American experience, Crossing the River takes a more radical step in including a white woman among these displaced children of Africa. When the father’s voice reemerges at the end of the novel, his children will include not only Nash, Martha, and Travis but also crucially “my daughter” or “my Joyce” (Phillips 2006b, 235), a working-class Englishwoman who finds a respite from an abusive marriage in a wartime romance with Travis; after Travis is killed in the war, she gives birth to their son and then quickly gives him away to start her life anew. The novel therefore makes not only a temporal move to include a more contemporary African American experience but also what can be described as a lateral move to co-opt Joyce. Travis can at least be linked to the same continuum of racial oppression as Martha and Nash. But more curiously, Phillips seems to suggest that there is a continuum of experience connecting African slavery with an Englishwoman who has abandoned her biracial child; indeed, he suggests that this woman has a claim to African paternity.9 Both Crossing the River and Higher Ground are deliberately and jarringly dissonant, persistent in their desire to bring together different histories but utterly uninterested in putting those histories on equal footing or in granting them equal treatment. How can we account for Phillips’s commitment to asymmetry? Rebecca L. Walkowitz describes Phillips’s novels as “anthologies” (Walkowitz 2006, 537), but, as Walkowitz herself admits, Phillips’s texts lack coherence we generally associate with anthologies (538). As a form, anthology demands

Unbelonging  101 some level of consistency, a clearly stated and at least relatively consistently executed principle of selection. Phillips seems to invoke such a principle— Atlantic Triangle, historical trauma—but simultaneously resists the temptation to treat the histories he portrays as a totality. Higher Ground has no frame that would fully account for its choice of disparate narratives. Crossing the River offers such a frame, but has it pierced. Both novels collate narratives that are and are not alike: the status of African Americans in the mid-twentieth century is connected to the legacies of slavery, but is not reducible to them. Holocaust survivors and victims of slavery may be lost and homeless in similar ways, but not quite. Whatever frame Phillips introduces, there is always a residue that cannot be assimilated within its boundaries.10 To account for this residue, we should turn to some of the key themes of cosmopolitan theory: the tension between inclusion and asymmetry is not only central to assessing the ethical and formal stakes of Phillips’s fiction but also a vital part of any discussion about cosmopolitanism. Indeed, cosmopolitanism, particularly in its strong version to which, as we have seen, Phillips appears to subscribe, is rooted in the claim to equal treatment of all human beings, in the belief that “every person, wherever they live and whatever citizenship they hold (or do not hold), commands our respect and moral concern” (Ingram 2013, 103). And when such cosmopolitanism is taken to task by its critics, it is usually because of its failure to extend this kind of concern evenhandedly: we care about some lives more than about others, and we focus on some tragedies, not on others, inevitably following the logic of proximity, cultural as well as geographic. However, as Ingram has shown, those who criticize cosmopolitan universalism almost always do so on universalist grounds: “even if the promise of universalism is eternally condemned to betray itself, there seems to be no way to oppose these betrayals aside from ever-new appeals to the universal” (Ingram 2013, 149). The response to the failures of universalism seems to be more universalism. Ingram’s own response to this difficult problem is to emphasize the piecemeal character of universality as a process, as something “emerging from the bottom up through challenges to denials of universal values” (Ingram 2013, 22). In other words, what is at stake is “the negation of particular exclusions, inequalities, and false universals” (Ingram 2013, 20). “A negation of particular exclusions” is at the heart of Phillips’s project, and not merely because he focuses on Jews and Africans whose omission usually serves as the prime reminder of the limits of Enlightenment universalism.11 It is, rather, the structure of Phillips’s novels, their seeming incoherence, that speaks to the principle of inclusion, to what he sees as the practical and ethical impossibility of keeping remote histories apart. Phillips chooses not to impose clear hierarchies between different plotlines, he joins narratives that lack a fully articulated historical or analogical connection, and ties them into asymmetrical, consciously uneven structures: in a word, while the connections he provides are by no means random, he refuses to fully elaborate the principle of inclusion.

102  Aleksandar Stević This is perhaps the most quintessentially cosmopolitan gesture: the acknowledgment of the reality that human histories and human traumas overlap and diverge in ways that we cannot fully account for, and that they can be joined together even without a clear sense of moral equivalence or a totalizing principle that can account for their coexistence within the pages of the same book. What is at stake is an acknowledgment that, from a cosmopolitan perspective, proper acts of inclusion are always in part groundless, that is, grounded in little more than the belief in (yes) common humanity. For Phillips, whose novels often deliberately shy away from a totalizing sense of historical or symbolic coherence, this is a key formal principle: to open the doors ever so slightly, to admit into his narratives those figures who seem just a tad out of place and not quite assimilable, all this is to expose both the condition of universal homelessness and the inadequacy of tribal divisions. Cosmopolitanism is, Phillips seems to suggest, always an unfinished business.

Notes 1 Along similar lines, Timothy Bewes has argued that “Phillips cannot—and does not really try to—give ‘voice’ to the marginalized or subaltern other” (Bewes 2006, 49). From Bewes’s perspective, Phillips’s formal experiments have strayed so far away from any kind of mimetic ambition that the whole question of voicing is beside the point. As he puts it, “there is no voice as such in Phillips” (Bewes 2006, 47). 2 For the purposes of this essay, I understand “strong cosmopolitanism” as an ethical and political stance built on the assumption that primary source of our moral obligations is humanity at large, rather than some narrower community. The most forceful contemporary articulation of this position was offered by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 1996). For the distinction between strong cosmopolitanism and various “weaker” or “qualified” versions of cosmopolitanism, see Ingram 2013, 67–68 and Stević 2017a, 603–5. 3 In The Atlantic Sound, Phillips is deeply cynical toward the celebrations of African unity (167–86). For his rejection of Achebe’s critique Conrad, see Clingman (2004a, 122), and for his similarly skeptical attitude toward Edward Said’s critique of Jane Austen, see Clingman (2004a, 123). 4 For Phillips’s rejection of racial solidarity, see Clingman (2004a, 119–22). 5 On Joyce and Borges, see Stević (2017b, 46–47). For Kiš’s attack on cultural nationalism, see Kiš (1995, 42). 6 In her attack on Phillips’s decision to dabble in the history of Jewish suffering, Mantel is very clear about the significance of group differences: “we are not all Jews. That is a simple fact. It is why the Holocaust happened” (Mantel 1997, 40). That, of course, is a simple fact. Ironically, however, the logic of uniqueness which Mantel seeks to preserve is also why the Holocaust happened: it happened because of the belief in the unassimilable uniqueness of the Jews. 7 For Kiš’s many comparisons of the Gulag and the Holocaust, see for instance 1995, 177 and 275. 8 See, for instance, Rothberg (2009, 160–61) and Craps (2013, 94–95). 9 Such moves by Phillips are sometimes excused by claiming that when he includes white characters in his novels about slavery, as is the case in Cambridge and Crossing the River, he tends to focus on the disadvantaged and oppressed ones (see for instance O’Callaghan 1993, 41–42 and Ledent 1995,  58).

Unbelonging  103 Such explanations, however, can never fully account for the jarring incongruence between the historical experiences Phillips brings together. 10 One way to address this difficulty is to claim that Phillips brings together disparate histories precisely in order to demonstrate their incommensurability. As Stef Craps argues, “The Nature of Blood does not assume an uncomplicated relationship between black and Jewish identities and histories. The fact that the differences—both formal and thematic—among the narratives that Phillips juxtaposes are at least as pronounced as the similarities further suggests that the novel rejects simple equations and straightforward analogies” (Craps 2013, 97). It is certainly right to argue that Phillips is avoiding facile identification of different experiences of which he is sometimes accused, but I worry that Craps’s vindication cancels out the very raison d’être of Phillips’s fiction: surely, he did not spend more than a decade persistently, obsessively bringing together these different histories in novel after novel only to underscore their fundamental incommensurability? 11 On the Enlightenment’s treatment of Jews and Africans, see in particular Scrivener (2007, 97–200) and Ingram (2013, 15).

Works Cited Bewes, Timothy. 2006. “Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliché in Caryl Phillips.” Cultural Critique 63: 33–60. Clingman, Stephen. 2004a. “Other Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips.” Salmagundi 43: 112–40. ———. 2004b. “Forms of History and Identity in The Nature of Blood.” Salmagundi 43: 141–66. Craps, Stef. 2008. “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-­ Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood.” Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1–2: 191–202. ———. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills: ­Palgrave Macmillan. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Goyal, Yogita. 2010. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingram, James D. 2013. Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kiš, Danilo. 1995. Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews. Edited by Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Ledent, Bénédicte. 1995. “‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories:’ Cross-Culturality in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 1: 55–62. Mantel, Hilary. 1997. “Black is Not Jewish.” Literary Review, February, 1997: 39–40. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” For Love of Country? Edited by Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon: 3–20. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. 1993. “Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28, no. 2: 34–47. Phillips, Caryl. 1992. Cambridge. London: Picador.

104  Aleksandar Stević ———. 1995a. The Final Passage. London: Picador. ———. 1995b. A State of Independence. London: Picador. ———. 2000. The European Tribe. New York: Vintage. ———. 2001. The Atlantic Sound. New York: Vintage. ———. 2002. A New World Order. New York: Vintage. ———. 2004. A Distant Shore. New York: Vintage. ———. 2006a. Higher Ground. New York: Vintage. ———. 2006b. Crossing the River. New York: Vintage. ———. 2008. The Nature of Blood. New York: Vintage. ———. 2009. In the Falling Snow. London: Harwill Secker. Pulitano, Elvira. 2009. “Migrant journeys: A conversation with Caryl Phillips.” Atlantic Studies 6, no. 3: 371–87. Rice, Alan. 2012. “A Home for Ourselves in the World: Caryl Phillips on Slave Forts and Manillas as African Atlantic Sites of Memory.” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 3: 363–72. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scrivener, Michael Henry. 2007. The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832. London: Pickering & Chatto. Stević, Aleksandar. 2017a. “Convenient Cosmopolitanism: Daniel Deronda, ­Nationalism, and the Critics.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 3: 593–614. ———. 2017b. “Stephen Dedalus and Nationalism without Nationalism.” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 1: 40–57. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer.” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4: 527–45.

6 Why Is the Patient “English”? Disidentification in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction Philip Tsang

In 2018, two renowned US scholars each published a book on the issue of identity. Although they are both motivated by the “identity politics” or “identity talk” that underlies recent political developments in the United States and Europe, they adopt different approaches and reach different conclusions. In Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama situates contemporary identity politics in a lineage of western concepts about recognition, the inner self, and dignity. According to his diagnosis, the problem we face today is that many marginalized groups would demand recognition and respect by asserting their superiority. The proliferation of group identities also hinders communication and collective action. For Fukuyama, it is neither desirable nor plausible to abandon identity altogether. Rather, his proposal is that we should embrace one particular identity: a national identity that is not ethnically based but “built around liberal and democratic political values” (179). Kwame ­A nthony Appiah takes a more descriptive approach in The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. For Appiah, our identities are fluid, multiple, and most importantly, social. While we may not be able to choose them, identities are labels that shape our thoughts and bind us to other people. Appiah wants us to recognize that even though identities are constructed, they have real effects. Knowing better the history of various forms of identity—religious, national, ethnic, and so on—can rid us of many misconceptions. Now, imagine an extreme scenario: a man survives a plane crash. His body has been burned beyond recognition. He would not say his name or his country of origin. There are no documents showing who he is or where he comes from. He has no identity. In this essay, I take the central conceit and titular character of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992) as the emblem of a distinct cosmopolitan imaginary whose formative principle is the disavowal of identity. I posit this imaginary as an antithesis to both Fukuyama’s and Appiah’s models of identity and to their respective cosmopolitan visions. Fukuyama’s defense of national identity prompts him to espouse “an international order built around nation states” and to emphasize “the necessity of the right sort of identity within those states” (138). The Lies That Bind extends Appiah’s model of rooted cosmopolitanism developed in his earlier books The Ethics of Identity (2005) and Cosmopolitanism

106  Philip Tsang (2006). Ondaatje’s fiction, in contrast, manifests a persistent eagerness to liberate the self from identity-shaping narratives and categories. Through an analysis of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost (2000), I understand disidentification as the desire to transcend identitarian boundaries. The fact that those boundaries are ultimately untranscendable does not dampen but rather heightens the utopian energy of disidentification. The second goal of this essay is to place Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan aesthetics in a longer historical lineage. While Ondaatje’s multicultural collage and transnational mixing have often been aligned with postmodernism and especially with historiographic metafiction, I trace the impulse of disidentification in The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost to an older form of imperial cosmopolitanism exemplified by Rudyard Kipling’s work.1 Many critics have noted the centrality of Kipling in The English Patient, but they share a consensus that Ondaatje undermines the Victorian writer’s imperial and racial tropologies. I propose instead that Ondaatje furthers a narrative possibility in Kipling’s fictionalization of India. Ondaatje’s novels, I contend, enable fresh insights into Kipling’s aesthetic ideology, and disclose overlooked intimacies between late nineteenth-century imperial forms and late twentieth-century cosmopolitan styles. My essay draws on recent scholarship on the Victorian geopolitical imagination, particularly Lauren Goodlad’s The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic (2015) and Nathan Hensley’s Forms of Empire (2016). Goodlad reconciles the normative principles of cosmopolitanism with the geopolitical structures and networks on which actually existing cosmopolitanisms depended. Under her framework, “Victorian literature is no longer conceived as the centripetal product of an impermeable sovereign nation, but, rather, as a ‘world literature’ immersed in a pluralizing global matrix” (36). Hensley highlights the role of Victorian literary and cultural artifacts in mediating the tensions in British sovereignty across the empire. Sharing Goodlad’s investment in formal analysis, Hensley understands form as “the various shapes language takes when subjected to the intense and distorting pressures of England’s project of global rule” (17). My essay furthers this line of inquiry by exploring the longevity of the Victorian geopolitical imagination. As Fredric Jameson has powerfully argued, narrative forms often exist beyond their originating social structures because the remains of those outmoded forms can transmit ideological codes to later narratives. 2 In examining how the Victorian imperial aesthetics continues to inform contemporary global imagination, I do not aim to invite suspicious readings of Ondaatje’s cosmopolitanism but rather to call for a greater attention to its enabling conditions.

“He isn’t an Englishman” Bruce Robbins concludes his 1999 book Feeling Global with a comparative reading of Tagore’s The Home and the World and Ondaatje’s The English Patient. While Tagore’s novel centers on the Bengali nationalist Sandip’s seduction of his friend’s wife, Ondaatje’s novel casts the cosmopolitan

Why Is the Patient “English”?  107 explorer László Almásy as the successful lover. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s idea of an “eroticized nationalism,” Robbins finds in The English Patient an eroticized cosmopolitanism, which licenses “an eroticizing of bonds not just across different races within one nation but across different nations” (164). But there is a twist in Robbins’s reading. Toward the end of the novel, the Indian sapper Kip’s confrontation with Almásy in the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan problematizes the English patient’s longing for transnational bonding. From that perspective, “[a] national or anti-imperial feeling gets the last word” (166). However, Robbins argues that Kip, by insisting on his Sikh identity that is “pointedly subnational” and professing a “self-identification as ‘Asian’… [which] is larger than national” (167), ultimately aligns with Almásy’s cosmopolitanism. Robbins’s reading exemplifies a host of critical approaches to Ondaatje’s work that emphasize his investment in cultural hybridity and transnational connectivity.3 While critics have been careful not to conflate Almásy’s cosmopolitanism with the author’s, there is no doubt that Ondaatje is particularly drawn to what the Almásy terms “international bastards.” The patient’s self-identification as “English,” however, suggests a more complex genealogy to his cosmopolitanism. In fact, given Robbins’s pairing of The English Patient with The Home and the World, a text written during the British Raj, it is striking that Englishness receives scant attention in his analysis. In Tagore’s and Ondaatje’s novels, Englishness is a ghostly, ambiguous third term that mediates the embattled relations between the nation and the world. Robbins is definitely right to suggest that “Ondaatje’s novel inscribes the lover’s principled cosmopolitanism into his sexual appeal” (165). What I want to explore here is how Almásy’s “principled cosmopolitanism” is consecrated when he becomes the severely burned, ­unidentifiable—yet “English”—patient. Almásy’s cosmopolitanism evinces a desire not only to transcend national boundaries but also to reject all identities. Ondaatje’s novel associates identity with possession. The desert has no identity because it does not belong to anyone: “The desert could not be claimed or owned” (138). For Almásy, his desert explorations result in the corrosion of possessive identification: “By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation” (139). Almásy hates the nation because it represents the strong form of identity. At the heart of his cosmopolitanism is an aspiration for disidentification. Disidentification signals a desire to erase identity; it counters the possessive logic that, according to Almásy, underlies all identity formation. His dictum “Erase all nations! Erase all family names!” not only expresses a wish to break free from all given identities but also implies a disavowal of possessive relations to individuals, nations, and geographies (139). It is significant that Almásy’s explorations are not officially affiliated with any governments, but are “privately funded expeditions” carried out by an international group of experts and dilettantes compared to “Conrad’s sailors” (134). For this non-institutional, non-hierarchical “oasis society,”

108  Philip Tsang mapping and exploring the desert does not and must not serve any national or political interests. Disidentification reaches its apotheosis in Almásy’s burned body. As Hana recalls, “In the Pisa hospital she had seen the English patient for the first time. A man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification consumed in a fire… There was nothing to recognize in him” (48). His unidentifiable body becomes a mirror image of the desert, liberating him from all national, cultural, and racial labels. Here, we should distinguish disidentification from detachment, a key concept in the scholarship on cosmopolitanism. In her influential work, Amanda Anderson (2001) defines detachment as an endeavor to distance oneself from cultural givens. Critical detachment is character-­strengthening, horizon-broadening, and beneficial to the cultivation of normative ethics. Disidentification entails a similar effort of self-distancing, but it differs from detachment in that it does not promote any normative ideals or practices. While the ethos of detachment aims at a critical examination of one’s cultural roots and affiliations without bracketing them, disidentification suspends the question of “Who are you?”; it leads not to the consolidation of selfhood but rather to its dissolution. Almásy’s cosmopolitanism may be termed a strategy of disidentification, which informs the novel’s formal structure and stylistic pattern. Ondaatje’s use of multiple perspectives and his mixture of genres and registers have often been subsumed under postmodern aesthetics. Yet by attending to the specific cosmopolitan imaginary The English Patient embraces, we can trace its ideological formation to an earlier cultural discourse. Almásy’s idealization of a nationless desert is shot through with his memory of a particular friend. As he recounts his explorations from 1932 to 1934, There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African – all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations. (138) Almásy’s hatred of nations is intensified by the death of his English friend. His fantasy of “planetary strangers” goes in tandem with his affection for Madox, the “man I loved more than any other man” (240). While Ondaatje is clearly drawing on the recurrent trope of male-male bonding in a long line of imperial narratives including E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, what is distinct in The English Patient is that Madox inspires another kind of intimacy: He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world… When we came upon messages on our travels – any wording, contemporary or ancient, Arabic on a mud wall, a note in English written in chalk on the fender of a jeep – he would read it and then press his hand upon it as if to

Why Is the Patient “English”?  109 touch its possible deeper meanings, to become as intimate as he could with the words. (243) Through his English friend, Almásy invokes a fantasy of textual intimacy— to touch written words as if touching a body. Their fraternal bonding not only runs parallel to Almásy’s heterosexual romance but also underpins the novel’s romance with words. Madox is the single most idealized character in the novel. It is tempting to read him as the author’s surrogate, as a poet who can link words to erotic desire: The deserts of Libya. Remove politics, and it is the loveliest phrase I know. Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well. The b and the y. Madox said it was one of the few words in which you heard the tongue turn a corner. (257) Such passages abound in Almásy’s narration. Yet it is Madox who is the wordsmith of the desert, who gives “beautiful accounts of our traversals and coursings”; Almásy is merely a “mechanic” (240). Almásy’s identification with Madox does not contradict but is the enabling condition for his peculiar brand of cosmopolitanism.4 If his burned body epitomizes his renunciation of identity, it is his self-identification as “the English patient” that forms the symbolic center of the multinational group in the villa. Almásy’s (and Ondaatje’s) choice of “English” is not arbitrary, but reveals a curious logic in the novel: to be English, or to identify as ­English, is to have no identity. The fact that Almásy turns out to be ­Hungarian only reinforces the semiotic force of “English.” It is in the discursive space of Englishness that identity can be made irrelevant and even evacuated. The English Patient evades the traditional alignment of Englishness with national and imperial identity. 5 In Ondaatje’s narrative logic, Englishness licenses disidentification. Let me explain this more fully by turning to ­Simon Gikandi’s analysis of the “rhetoric of Englishness.” Gikandi (2001) locates a paradox in F. R. Leavis’s writings. In placing English literature at the center of the cultural life of an insular England, Leavis promotes a parochial discourse of nation as “organic community.” However, since Leavis completely brackets issues of cultural and racial difference, he creates a “grammar” for English-schooled postcolonial subjects to dissociate the ideal of Englishness from England: “in the process of reading English texts according to the Leavisite grammar, colonial readers were being asked to leave their differences behind and join the common community of Englishness, denoted by literature against the logic of colonial governmentality” (651). Englishness, for which literary education served as its most powerful vehicle, thus came to be both exclusively national and potentially universal.

110  Philip Tsang In other words, the appeal of Englishness lies in its allowance for disidentification. As Gikandi puts it, Englishness can circulate as a “free-floating cultural object” that breaks free from its original determinants, thus encouraging postcolonial peoples to “substitute for England the new nation that had emerged from decolonization—Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, or India” (650). The English Patient suggests another trajectory for this modulated Englishness: rather than nationalism, it is cosmopolitanism that takes a powerful hold on Ondaatje’s narrative imagination. I will address the connection between Ondaatje’s own English education and his cosmopolitan aesthetics in the last section of this essay. Here, I want to further our investigation of the entanglement of Englishness and disidentification by turning to another character in the novel: Kip. There is a critical tendency to oppose Kip to Almásy: Kip is the spokesman for colonized peoples, whereas Almásy is the elite cosmopolitan who dreams of eradicating identities.6 But this reading downplays Kip’s own identification with Englishness. Throughout the novel, Kip aligns Almásy with his English teacher: “He was most comfortable with men who had the abstract madness of autodidacts, like his mentor, Lord Suffolk, like the English patient” (111). Unlike Almásy (and Madox), Suffolk shows not the slightest interest in the world beyond the English country where he resides. Yet his provincialism is what attracted his Indian student in the first place: “Lord Suffolk was the first real gentleman he had met in England… this lord who had never stepped out of England and planned never to step out of Countisbury once the war ended” (186–7). Interestingly, the one object that most powerfully encapsulates Kip’s identification with Englishness is a map in Soffolk’s house: “Countisbury and Area. Mapped by R. Fones. Drawn by desire of Mr. James Halliday.” Upon reading these words, Kip realizes that “He was beginning to love the English” (190). The parallel between Fones’s mapping of the English countryside and Almásy’s mapping of the desert is hard to miss: both surveys are “drawn by desire,” and that desire is in turn mediated by the desire for an Englishman. Later, after Suffolk’s death, Kip writes down everything his teacher has taught him on a blueprint sheet, at the bottom of which he inscribes, “Drawn by desire of Lord Suffolk, by his student Lieutenant Kirpal Singh, 10 May 1941” (199). Kip’s desire for Suffolk prevents the formation of a racial or cultural identity. In fact, that desire allows him to neglect his difference altogether: “He was accustomed to his invisibility” and to “being the anonymous member of another race” (196). His racial invisibility does not disturb him, so long as he can imagine an exclusive intimacy with his English teacher: “he knew he contained, more than any other sapper, the knowledge of Lord Suffolk” (196). Therefore, while Almásy considers himself and Kip “international bastards,” we should not forget that their internationalism is predicated on their English education. “Kip and I are both international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get

Why Is the Patient “English”?  111 away from our homelands all our lives,” says Almásy (176–77). But what follows is a conversation about Kip’s training in England: “Who was your teacher?”; “The best kind of teacher. That must have been Lord Suffolk”; “What was he like, Kip?” (177) Kip’s confrontation with Almásy after the atomic bombings of Japan may seem to undo the novel’s valorization of Englishness. Pointing his rifle at the patient, Kip sees Almásy as the symbol of all the “customs and manners and books and prefects and reason” that the sapper himself has internalized (283). While this climatic scene hints at an emergent “Asian” identity for Kip, it also exposes the pitfalls of his imaginative identification. His metonymic linkage of the casualties in Japan with “the streets of Asia full of fire” depends on his blindness to the atrocities of Japanese militarism across Asia. Moreover, when he lumps “brown races” and Japan together and blames the “Englishman” for their suffering, he enacts an oppositional logic that Almásy has painstakingly striven to transcend (286). “He isn’t an Englishman,” Caravaggio tells Kip (285). In the form of a negative declarative, Caravaggio spells out the utopian promise of disidentification: to be English, one doesn’t have to be an Englishman.

Kipling’s Lesson The formative role of Englishness for Almásy’s cosmopolitanism helps explain a central contradiction in the novel: while Almásy dreams of “an earth that had no maps,” he is himself a surveyor (261). One of the first things we learn about him is his encyclopedic knowledge: I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me… I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades. (18) His assimilation of geographical knowledge is indistinguishable from the archival fantasy of empire. As Thomas Richards has pointed out, the vastness and unevenness of British imperial administration generated fears and anxieties that could only be ameliorated by fictions of total knowledge. After all, “it was much easier to unify an archive composed of texts than to unify an empire made of territory” (4). The imperial archive offered an animating fiction of collectable, accumulable knowledge serving the interests of the imperial state. In fact, Almásy himself is keenly aware of the proximity between imperial cartography and his work as a surveyor. However, he fashions his cosmopolitan longings in explicit opposition to imperial politics: “The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging

112  Philip Tsang their sphere of influence” (141). Almásy’s vision of a mapless desert is itself a response to geopolitical reality. Our assessment of his cosmopolitanism thus requires a double perspective. “Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert!” (139) On the one hand, we should recognize that the desert teaches one no such things. It is only when the desert is situated at the center of imperial interests that Almásy’s dream of identity erasure makes sense. On the other hand, disidentification embodies a utopian impulse: it gestures toward an alternative vision of the world that exceeds the imperial order of things. In this section, I trace Ondaatje’s strategy of disidentification to a writer who is anything but indifferent to British imperialism: Rudyard Kipling. The English Patient, as is well known, is obsessed with Kim. Most intertextual analyses of the two novels read The English Patient as a corrective rewriting of Kim, casting Ondaatje as the cosmopolitan and Kipling as the imperialist. My following reading aims to demonstrate the deeper continuity between the two writers. I argue that Ondaatje does not so much revise the strategies and tropologies in Kipling’s fiction as transpose them. In fact, Ondaatje’s explicit reference to Kim may have occluded his larger debt to Kipling’s short fiction, which, by foregrounding the scenes and conditions of storytelling, accentuates the epistemological ruptures in colonial India. The English Patient’s narrative structure is also more akin to the complex framing devises in Kipling’s stories than to the relatively straightforward narration in Kim. Two of Kipling’s early stories deserve particular attention: “On the City Wall” (1889) and “The Bridge-Builders” (1893).7 Set in Lahore, “On the City Wall” features a native courtesan who manipulates an Englishman into escorting a Sikh revolutionary to safety. The Englishman, who narrates the story, is infatuated with Lalun’s beauty, which is said to be “so great that it troubled the hearts of the British Government” (131). What’s more, Lalun is alarmingly knowledgeable about the local community: “she knew the hearts of men, and the heart of the City, and whose wives were faithful and whose untrue, and more of the secrets of the Government Offices than are good to be set down in this place” (134). Kipling explicitly sets the government’s epistemological power against Lalun’s. Although the “Supreme Government” is “above all and below all and behind all,” its knowledge is limited: “no one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the Empire” (131). In contrast, Lalun’s salon encompasses an extended information network: “all the City seemed to assemble in Lalun’s little white room to smoke and to talk.” There, we find people from all religious and ethnic groups: Shiahs, Sufis, “wandering Hindu priests,” Pundits, Sikhs, “red-eyed priests from beyond the Border,” and “MAs of the University” (133). Lalun’s “little white room” thus emerges as an information center superior to the British administration. The task of convoying the revolutionary Khem Singh was initially assigned to a young Muslim man named Wali Dad. Like Ondaatje’s Kip,

Why Is the Patient “English”?  113 he is an English-schooled “educational mixture” who straddles European and Indian societies (132). “Thanks to your Government, all our heads are protected, and with the educational facilities at my command,” he tells the narrator, “I might be a distinguished member of the local administration” (135). Yet his intentions and allegiances remain shrouded throughout the story. His capabilities, however, are no match for the narrator’s “white face” when it comes to protecting Singh from the police (147). Even though the narrator eventually finds out that he has been used, he remains loyal to Lalun and delights at the thought of having become her “Vizier” (148). Just as “On the City Wall” makes fun of “the great idol called Pax Britannica” (132), “The Bridge-Builders” trivializes the grandeur of imperial constructions. One of Kipling’s most memorable portraitures of public works, the story opens with the near completion of a railway bridge over the Ganges. The chief engineer Findlayson, who is obsessed with imperial honors, looks at “his bridge” with satisfaction: “the work was good”—and more importantly, the bridge will stand as a “permanent” structure outlasting “the memory of the builder” (246). The story takes a bizarre turn when, during a flood that threatens to destroy the bridge, Findlayson takes opium and, in his hallucinations, witnesses a Punchayet (council meeting) of Hindu gods. The gods complain that the bridge-builders have disturbed and defiled the sacred river, but in the end they agree to leave men and their work alone. The bridge is allowed to stand. The most interesting aspect of the story is the title. Who are the bridge-builders? The opening pages suggest that “the bridge was two men’s work,” referring to the two Englishmen, Findlayson and his assistant Hitchcock (though we are also reminded of the involvement of “labour-­ contractors by the half-hundred”) (247). At the gods’ meeting, ­Hanuman the ape god mentions that he is less concerned about the English bridge-­ builders because he too has built a bridge (an allusion to R ­ amayana). Confident that he can change their faiths, he exclaims, “Ho! ho! I am the builder of bridges indeed – bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads surely to Us in the end” (263). Finally, Kipling emerges as the bridge-builder between the English and the Indians. The imperial world and the divine world, neatly corresponding to the two halves of the story, unite in the writer’s imagination. “On the City Wall” and “The Bridge-Builders” reveal a recurrent pattern in Kipling’s fiction, namely that he defines his fictional prowess against the authority of colonial governance. Both stories conclude with the restoration of British power. In “On the City Wall,” Singh voluntarily returns to captivity after realizing that he is too old to lead a rebellion. But this contrived ending hardly diminishes the powers of surveillance and organization that Kipling attributes to Lalun and Wali Dad, who have undoubtedly outshone the “Supreme Government.” Lalun and Wali Dad could potentially be the better imperial agents—were it not for the identitarian lines structuring

114  Philip Tsang colonial governance. In “The Bridge-Builders,” Kipling showcases his e­ xpert-level knowledge of civil engineering, only to displace that knowledge by inventing a mythical realm that, while capable of destroying imperial constructions, finally gives permission for their survival. My reading by no means suggests that Kipling undermines the integrity of empire.8 On the contrary, it is precisely because he perceives British rule as unchallengeable that he sees no need to justify or defend it in the domain of fiction. Separating fiction from reality, he rises above the strictures of imperialism by constantly shifting authority away from colonial governance. This supra-imperial imagination, with a legacy that extends well into the twentieth century, is the ideological predecessor for Ondaatje’s cosmopolitanism. The utopian energy that Ondaatje invests in disidentification, as exemplified by Almásy’s mapless desert, resonates with Kipling’s irreverent suspension of imperial epistemology and of the identity-based paradigm of colonial governance. It is thus of no small significance that “the English patient’s first lesson about reading” is specifically about reading Kipling (94). Qadri Ismail (1999) reads The English Patient as “a thoroughgoing critique” of “the disciplines of ethnography and history” that Kim “uncritically inhabits” (420). Yet it is difficult to see how Ondaatje diverges from Kipling when Ismail characterizes that “critique” as merely “demonstrating [Kipling’s] novel’s dependence upon the disciplines of ethnography and history” and “illustrating how the colonial novel inhales and exhales them” (420). Here I want to pursue a different line of inquiry: if Kim is The English Patient’s formidable ante-text, what has Ondaatje learned from it? One of the most famous scenes in Ondaatje’s novel is the “reversal of Kim.” In this scene, Hana watches Kip sitting next to the English patient: “it seemed to her a reversal of Kim. The young student was now Indian, the wise old teacher was English” (111). Hana’s thought then merges into a flashback in which she reads passages from Kim to the patient at night. She sees herself as Kim: “But it was Hana who was the young boy in the story. And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton” (111). Amidst this double reversal of Kim is a passage quoted from the novel. In the passage, Kim is trying to concentrate in order to “arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle” (111). Interestingly, Ondaatje omits the question to which that “tremendous puzzle” refers: “Who is Kim – Kim – Kim?” (Kim 156) This question, a recurrent one in Kim, has been the center of Kipling criticism. Most scholars approach that question through the lens of imperial identity. For Zohreh Sullivan, that question “suggests the possibility of self-discovery and integration of his many selves, the arrival at an identity mediated by the lama Kim learns to love” (148). In this reading, Kim depicts the entanglement of the protagonist’s identity plot with the colonial power structure. More recently, Jed Esty (2002) emphasizes the open-endedness of Kim’s question: Kipling does not stabilize his protagonist’s identity because

Why Is the Patient “English”?  115 imperialism resists the framework of national-historical time, on which the narrative closure of the Bildungsroman depends. The English Patient guides us to another interpretation: “Who is Kim?” is less a question about identity than one of “What role should and can Kim play?” Kipling does not offer an answer to Kim’s question because the question is never meant to be answered. Kim does not have to choose between his multiple conflicted selves: he can perform any one of them as he sees fit through disguises and lies. In staging a double reversal of Kim, Ondaatje does not so much rewrite or subvert Kipling’s novel as amplify a possibility that is already embedded in it. Kipling tells us right at the beginning of the novel that “Kim was English” (3). Here, “English” designates less a national identity than a field of possibility, in which different roles can be taken. It is only because “Kim was English” that he can keep the question “Who is Kim?” in playful suspension. His freedom to affiliate with anyone and any group lies at the core of Kipling’s fantasy of Kim as the “friend of all the world.” Salman Rushdie is right to suggest that there are two Kiplings, the Indian and the English, only that these two personae do not designate “a personality in conflict with itself” (74) but exemplify a cultural imaginary in which Englishness can potentially transcend all identitarian boundaries: this is the most important lesson that Ondaatje has learned from Kipling.

The Limits of Disidentification “We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders,” writes Ondaatje in Running in the Family (1982), his fictionalized memoir about his ancestral homeland Sri Lanka (81). That haunting sentence, which lays bare the symbiotic relationship between national identity and the idea of ownership, comes from a chapter titled “The Karapothas.” That chapter surveys the impressions of Sri Lanka recorded in Westerners’ (mostly Englishmen’s) journals. For D. H. Lawrence, Pablo Neruda, Robert Knox, Leonard Woolf, and others, Sri Lanka is picturesque yet surreal, sensuous yet evil. These foreigners are the Karapothas, “the beetles with white spot who never grew ancient here, who stepped in and admired the landscape, disliked the ‘inquisitive natives’ and left” (80). Ondaatje does not challenge those foreigners’ perceptions of Sri Lanka. Though he grew up in Sri Lanka until the age of eleven, he resists the position of the native informant. At the beginning of the chapter, he declares, “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner” (79). In disavowing his Sri Lankan identity, Ondaatje may seem to represent the “ruthless cosmopolitanism” that Appiah finds problematic and dangerous (Cosmopolitanism 220). Yet Ondaatje’s interest in foreigners reveals something more than an uncritical celebration of geographical and cultural mobility: since the so-called Karapothas “never grew ancient” in Sri Lanka, they evade the historical norms of settlement and ownership that brought national identity into being.

116  Philip Tsang Disidentification enables a non-possessive relation not only to one’s homeland but also to language. “The Karapothas” contains a middle section, in which Ondaatje describes his learning of Sinhala during his childhood: When I was five—the only time in my life when my handwriting was meticulous—I sat in the tropical classrooms and learned the letters , and , repeating them page after page. How to write. The self-­ portrait of language

. (83)

This scene of language learning takes place in the larger context of colonial education: Ondaatje is attending St Thomas’ College Boy School, a prestigious Anglican institution in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala alphabets in  the passage, along with the Sinhala sentences in the next paragraph, mark the only instance a Sri Lankan language enters Ondaatje’s English prose. The ­singular bilingualism of this section, then, points to the general absence of Sinhala or any Sri Lankan language in Running in the Family, which, despite its setting, is written in a spontaneous, intimate prose that is rarely defamiliarized by the languages native to the island. As Ondaatje writes at the beginning of the book, “I wanted to touch them [his memories of his family in Sri Lanka] into words” (22). The textual intimacy that the author achieves in the English language compensates for his lost intimacy with a Sri Lankan language. Those days of Sinhala learning, as he puts it, are “the only time in my life when my handwriting was meticulous”; but his loss of the language, as implied by its foreignness in the memoir, also troubles the identity-shaping power of the native language. “The Karapothas” illustrates the historical formation of Ondaatje’s strategy of disidentification. Ondaatje neither writes back to the center of imperial culture nor reclaims roots and allegiances. In The English Patient, whose setting immediately precedes the years of his colonial childhood, Ondaatje fashions a distinct cosmopolitan aesthetics inextricably tied to his English education in Sri Lanka. At the same time, his writings on Sri Lanka make apparent the limits of disidentification. I want to end this essay by reflecting on some of those limits. The text for my analysis is Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje’s novel about the Sri Lankan Civil War. Like his memoir, ­Anil’s Ghost narrates the return of a native: this time, a thirty-three-yearold woman who left Sri Lanka at fifteen for a Western education. She returns to her home country as a forensic scientist to gather evidence on the Sri Lankan government’s human rights abuses. A large part of her mission involves the identification of a skeleton nicknamed Sailor, who Anil suspects is one of the victims of government-sponsored murders. Arguably Ondaatje’s most controversial novel, Anil’s Ghost has invited two kinds of criticism. One group of critics accuses Ondaatje of flattening historical traumas and political conflicts in Sri Lanka into an irresponsible aestheticism. In a scathing review, Tom LeClair takes Ondaatje to task

Why Is the Patient “English”?  117 for avoiding any concrete analysis of the political tensions in Sri Lanka: “Ondaatje chooses to write his ‘real’ words and beautiful sentences for the walking ghosts of Sri Lanka, the traumatized apolitical survivors. But what about the dead?” For LeClair (2000), Anil’s Ghost is yet another example of Ondaatje’s habit to “use terror as a background for class nostalgia and romance.” Antoinette Burton (2003) concurs with LeClair’s critique, arguing that Ondaatje’s problematization of Western norms and methodologies for history writing only re-introduces a romantic, Orientalist view of history. However, she still finds “Ondaatje’s romance with and for history” of interest to her “precisely because of the bourgeois political sensibilities and ultimately reactionary commitments it lays bare” (51). Another group of critics finds Anil’s Ghost politically biased in its representation of the Sri Lankan Civil War, but there is no consensus as to which side the novelist sympathizes with. For Rajini Mendis (2000), Ondaatje indicts the Sinhalese government of murdering civilians, but remains silent on the crimes committed by Tamil terrorists. In contrast, Qadri Ismail (2000) interprets the absence of Tamils in the novel as a pro-­ Sinhalese stance: “since the only Lankan history it presents is Sinhalese history, Anil’s Ghost is clearly on the side of… Sinhala nationalism” (28). In foregrounding these critiques of Anil’s Ghost, I want to recast the perceived shortcomings of the novel in light of Ondaatje’s strategy of disidentification. My aim is not to defend the novel, but to suggest that its persistent investment in disidentification necessitates what critics take to be its failures. In fact, one might say that failure is the premise of the novel. Anil’s human rights mission in Sri Lanka comes to a dead end. Many characterological readings of the novel either treat Anil’s failure as a sign of the author’s lack of political engagement, or recuperate that failure by suggesting that it prompts a more rigorous re-examination of human rights practices and institutions.9 The novel’s main text is preceded by an “Author’s Note.” After giving a historical overview of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Ondaatje adds, Anil’s Ghost is a fictional work set during this political time and historical moment. And while there existed organizations similar to those in this story, and similar events took place, the characters and incidents in the novel are invented. At first glance, this disclaimer is somewhat at odds with Ondaatje’s oeuvre, whose hallmark is the blurring of the real and the fictional: from Billy the Kid and László Almásy to the author’s family, Ondaatje reimagines historical figures and blends them with legends and rumors. In Anil’s Ghost, however, Ondaatje uses his “Author’s Note” as an important framing devise. By unblurring the line between empirical history and fictional invention, he assigns the latter an exclusive task: Anil’s Ghost claims fictionality as the privileged site for disidentification.

118  Philip Tsang Fictionality is figured most prominently through the epigraphist Palipana and the clay sculptor Ananda. Palipana was once a renowned scholar who “wrestled archeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans” (79). His translations and commentaries earned him widespread praise, but accusations of forgery led to his expulsion from the academic world. His translation of some obscure sixth-century texts caused a major scandal: “there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about” (81). Despite his loss of institutional credibility, the novel never loses faith in him. In fact, one might see him as the ideal practitioner of Ondaatje’s own brand of historiographic metafiction. He fills the gaps in historical materials with imaginative details. Sarath’s description of his teacher’s working method could as well apply to Ondaatje’s fiction: Palipana could move within archeological sites as if they were his own historical homes from past lives – he was able to guess the existence of a water garden’s location, unearth it, reconstruct its banks, fill it with white lotus… He’d take one imagined step and be in an earlier century. (191) Palipana’s understanding of distant pasts hinges on “as if,” an imaginative effort as rigorous and meticulous as empirical research. Like Palipana’s commentaries and translations of ancient texts, Ondaatje’s work animates such “unprovable truth” and “unprovable theories” (83). Rather than organize historical fragments into a larger narrative, Palipana’s goal is to form an intimate relationship with those fragments: Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past. Most of his life he had found history in stones and carvings. In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie. (105) This method, which Sarath’s brother mocks as an attempt to “study history as if it were a body,” treats each archeological finding as a physical encounter (193). Palipana privileges the materiality of writing over its semantic content: since his work entails tactile deciphering of inscriptions and carvings, his “potent sightlessness” only enhances his perception of history (98). The bodies that Palipana touches, however, remain nameless and unidentifiable: they are free from the causal and hierarchical relations that constitute the organizing principles of historiography. Burton thus writes, “Ondaatje uses Palipana’s story expressly to set up a dichotomy between western epistemological presumptions and practices… and those derived from non-western experiences and sources” (44). I argue that the

Why Is the Patient “English”?  119 dichotomy is less between “western” and “non-western” than between, on the one hand, an identitarian logic that underlies Anil’s forensic work as well as her attempt to reconcile her Western and Sri Lankan selves, and, on the other hand, an aesthetics of disidentification that structures both Palipana’s and Ondaatje’s fictional methods. When Anil and Sarath seek Palipana’s help to identify the skeleton, they are doomed to fail. Sarath explains to his teacher: You’ve reconstructed eras simply by looking at runes. You’ve used artists to re-create scenes from just paint fragments. So. We have a skull. We need someone to recreate what he might have looked like. One way to discover when he was twenty-eight is to have someone identify him. (96) What Anil and Sarath have overlooked is that Palipana’s reconstructive method does not restore individual identities but rather dissolves them. Nevertheless, Palipana sends them to Ananda, a local sculptor who practices Netra Mangala, a ritual of eye painting. In the end, Ananda is able to reconstruct a face from the skull, but that face, which looks calm and peaceful, does not help Anil determine the identity of Sailor. Ananda’s work diverges from Anil’s forensic research in two important ways. First, the face Ananda reconstructs does not yield an accurate identity: it could be any victim. As Sarath explains, the serene face is what Ananda “wants of the dead,” a wish catalyzed by the disappearance of Ananda’s wife (184). While Anil focuses on reading, deciphering, and interpreting signs and markers on the skeleton in order to name the victim, Ananda’s work represents an act of imaginative remembrance. The reconstructed face is not individuated but communal: it does not belong to a nameable victim, but could belong to anyone among the dead. Second, ­A nil’s human rights mission implies a metonymic logic: “Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest” (56). But this logic is incompatible with the nature of Ananda’s work, which resists the assimilation of an individual into a larger whole. The contrast between Ananda and Anil extends beyond their approaches to Sailor’s remains. The novel begins by introducing Anil as a returning native: “she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (11). However, over the course of the novel, Anil’s fixation on identifying the skeleton deprives her of the opportunity to observe or “interpret” her birthplace in any meaningful way. Her “long-­ distance gaze” merely affirms the separation of her Western mentality and her Sri Lankan past. Yet after Anil’s departure, the novel concludes by invoking a different form of distance. The last chapter, titled “Distance,” narrates Ananda’s reconstruction of a Buddha statue that was destroyed by thieves. Working with a team of local villagers, Ananda reconstructs the head of the statue, focusing on “the composure and qualities of the face” (302). The last part to

120  Philip Tsang be restored is the eyes. As Ananda is working on the second eye, he knows that that would be the only time those eyes look so closely at a human being: “After this hour the statue would be able to witness figures only from a great distance” (306). Having finished the reconstruction, Ananda looks into the distance from the position of the Buddha’s eyes and sees a natural world without the close-ups of human suffering. The “distance” with which the novel ends not only refers to the distance between the Buddha’s eyes and the earth but also allegorizes the distanced perspective to which Ondaatje aspires throughout. In that fictional distance, individual identities are kept at bay, and faces become interchangeable with each other. Ondaatje’s distanced gaze does not disprove the validity of the critiques of Anil’s Ghost outlined earlier. If anything, it brings into sharper focus why so many readers find the novel frustrating. In the end, it is the identitarian logic underlying Anil’s human rights work that represents the governing norm of our thinking and of what we expects of fiction today. In bracketing that logic, Ondaatje fails to account for its actual benefits and progressive ideals. Yet the provocative power of Ondaatje’s fiction lies precisely in the implausibility of disidentification: when identity has become a mandatory frame of reference, he makes its suspension imaginable in the alluring yet fragile space of fictionality.

Notes 1 For the association of Ondaatje with historiographic metafiction, see Hutcheon (1988). 2 See Jameson (1981), particularly Chapters 2 and 3. 3 For similar analyses, see Smyrl (2003) and McVey (2014). 4 For an influential account of identification, see Diana Fuss, Identification ­Papers (1995). My reading of the entanglement of Englishness and disidentification is informed particularly by two of Fuss’s insights. The first is her claim (following Judith Butler) that disidentification depends on a prior identification (7). Almásy’s identification with his English friend and Kip’s identification with his English teacher are formative elements of their respective modes of disidentification. Second, Fuss troubles the distinction between identification (the wish to be the other) and desire (the wish to have the other) (11). This is a particularly salient point for The English Patient, a novel that explicitly links identity to possessive desire. 5 See, for example, Baucom (1999), who claims that “Englishness has consistently been defined through appeals to the identity-endowing properties of place” (1). 6 See, for example, Smyrl (2003). 7 Both stories are collected in Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King. 8 For a trenchant critique of Kipling’s imperial ideology, see Parry (1988). For related postcolonial readings of Kim, see Said (1994), Baucom (1999), and Sullivan (1993). 9 An illuminating example of the latter approach is Joseph Slaughter’s reading. For Slaughter, Anil’s Ghost narrates two parallel quests for identity, which are developed from two distinct genres: the first, taken from the repertoire of the Bildungsroman, poses the problem of Anil’s identity in terms of a conflict between her Sri Lankan past and

Why Is the Patient “English”?  121 her contemporary cosmopolitan habits and assumptions as a ‘citizen of the world’ who represents a court of world opinion; the second, borrowed from the genre of detective fiction, seeks to discover the identity of a disinterred skeleton provisionally called ‘Sailor’ … to ‘name the rest’ of the victims of human rights abuse. (187) Slaughter attributes the failure of both identity plots to the fact that Anil’s cosmopolitanism remains mired in “the logic of nation-statism that fuels the war” (196). The novel instead proposes “alternative micropublics” that, though “ultimately too idealized, too utopic, and too intimate to be sustained,” nevertheless enable diverse processes by which the individual can be incorporated into the social texture (197). In other words, for Slaughter, Anil’s Ghost ultimately buttresses the identitarian logic underwriting human rights discourses.

Works Cited Anderson, Amanda. 2001. The Powers of Distance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burton, Antoinette. 2003. “Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 1: 39–56. Esty, Jed. 2012. Unseasonable Youth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fuss, Diana. 1995. Identification Papers. London: Routledge. Gikandi, Simon. 2001. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3: 627–58. Goodlad, Lauren. 2015. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hensley, Nathan. 2016. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Ismail, Qadri. 1999. “Discipline and Colony: The English Patient and the Crow’s Nest of Postcoloniality.” Postcolonial Studies, 2, no. 3: 403–36. ———. 2000. “A Flippant Gesture Towards Sri Lanka: A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Pravada 1, no. 9–10: 24–29. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY and London: ­Cornell University Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 2011. The Man Who Would Be King. London: Penguin. ———. 2002. Kim. New York: Norton. LeClair, Tom. 2000. “The Sri Lankan Patients.” Nation. June 19, 2000: 31–33. McVey, Christopher. 2014. “Reclaiming the Past: Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History.” Journal of Modern Literature, 37, no. 2: 141–60. Mendis, Ranjini. 2000. Rev. Anil’s Ghost. Chimo (Fall 2000): 7–12. Ondaatje, Michael. 1993a. Running in the Family. New York: Vintage.

122  Philip Tsang ———. 1993b. The English Patient. New York: Vintage. ———. 1993c. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Vintage. Richards, Thomas. 1993. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso. Robbins, Bruce. 1999. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands. London: Penguin. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Smyrl, Shannon. 2003. “The Nation as ‘International Bastard’: Ethnicity and Language in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” SCL/ÉLC. 28, no. 2: 9–38. Sullivan, Zohreh T. 1993. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7 Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga The Limits of Nation-Building and Cosmopolitanism as Interpretive Models for the Clandestine Immigrant Mary Anne Lewis Cusato “Nasser, he’s the neighborhood’s good looking kid. He, Omar and I, we had decided to ‘burn.’ Burn. Get out. Leave, disappear from this country, erase the past.”1 At this moment, Allouache’s camera turns from an overview of Algerians moving about the city of Mostaganem to focus on Nasser’s face. The narrator continues, “Just as others have done before us. And as others will do after us.”2 Nasser is the first living character on whom Merzak Allouache’s camera focuses for more than a passing moment in his 2009 film Harragas, and it is no coincidence that this same Nasser is immediately inscribed into a risky and urgent phenomenon, that of hrig, or burning. Harraga, a term derived from the Arabic root hrig, roughly translated as the verb to burn, is rich with meaning and symbolism. According to Hakim Abderrezak, in Arabic Hrig and harga, or “burning,” can alternatively signify “the clandestine migrant’s (1) burning desire to leave, (2) burning of kilometers to the final destination, and (3) burning identification papers in hopes to make repatriation more difficult for authorities” (Abderrezak 2016, 7–9). Although often considered a recent phenomenon, likely due to extensive promotion of this understanding through Western media, hrig has been traced back by historians to 711 CE with Berber general Tariq Ibn Ziyad’s decision to burn his ships off the coast of Spain, rendering his troops’ return to North Africa difficult if not impossible (Abderrezak 2016, 68). For the purposes of this essay, however, harraga (sometimes spelled “harragua”) refers to that term used in the contemporary Maghreb as well as in many French media outlets to designate those individuals who emigrate clandestinely, often but not always seeking to cross the Mediterranean, in search of a better life. When one studies literature and cinema from the postcolonial Maghreb, postcolonial cultural production more generally, and analyses and critiques of these, one often comes across a rather common hermeneutical practice, namely to interpret a given work, especially one produced in the wake of decolonization, as an act of nation (re)building. Alternatively, this construction and/or reconstruction might be described along cultural, ideological, political, or even infrastructural lines. This is quite understandable when we

124  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato consider the waves of occupation and colonialism, by France and others alike, that have shaped the Northern African region for centuries. At the moment of independence and decolonization through the 1950s and 1960s, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, just three among many other countries, had to set about the long process of national rebuilding as much in the political context as in those of infrastructure, economics, and culture. It should not be surprising that university courses on the Maghreb tend to focus on these processes of nation-building and rebuilding. On the other hand, an almost utopian emphasis on cosmopolitanism has recently become an interpretive path welltrod. The harraga, however, resists both modes. Indeed, he does not take up the task of rebuilding a nation; he leaves. Upon arrival in the new country, he becomes an immigrant, thereby negotiating a new relationship between human and nation. Hence, the harraga resists the category of nation, for he exists between two, his between-ness defining him until this liminal state ends. When nation ceases to be useful as a category through which to interpret geopolitical positioning and identity, what can take its place? The notion of world citizenship provides a tempting alternative to national identity for scholars and critics, and the “beyond nation” is undoubtedly present in both Sansal and Allouache’s portraits of the harraga. Just as Sansal and Allouache explore the clandestine immigrant’s relationship to place and nation as he prepares to leave his country of origin behind, so, too, do they gesture toward the question of what, if anything, can replace nation in determining geopolitical identity and thinking belonging beyond the nation. Similarly, from the late twentieth century, the terms “globalization,” “globalisation,” “mondialisation,” “world,” “monde,” “world literature,” and “global studies” have proliferated, especially in contemporary cultural production, and study of it, in postcolonial contexts. Pascale Casanova, in her 1999 book La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters), describes a literary world equipped with its own capitals, as well as its own laws and patterns that govern literary canonization and the accumulation of cultural capital, a world with historically central and peripheral regions that do not necessarily correlate to economic or political dominance. Demonstrating that the literary map has historically changed much more slowly than the political map, Casanova traces French literary hegemony back to 1549 with du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française. This, she claims, marked the first time that a vernacular literature set itself up against the indomitable Latin, thereby freeing French literature from domination by the Catholic Church and Italian humanists. In other words, she shows language as both political and exclusive, as the vehicle for shaping, even creating, the nation both politically and culturally. Furthermore, as Christopher Prendergast (2004), in his introduction to the book Debating World Literature, writes, In recent years, Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur has received a fair amount of attention in two (often overlapping) areas of inquiry, comparative literature and postcolonial studies, most notably (and especially in the United States) in connection with the theme of globalization.

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  125 … Yet quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for the reason that ‘globalization’, if it exists at all is not a state but a process, something still in the making. (vii–viii) Indeed, Goethe wrote of a universal world literature being shaped and formed; he gestured toward a cosmopolitan coming together of some of the world’s great literary traditions. Such questions have been famously taken up by Jean-Luc Nancy, who makes the distinction between the terms globalisation and mondialisation in French; Emily Apter, who illuminates these phenomena by showing the limits of translatability; Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman, who propose a new approach to literary history with their volume French Global; and the manifesto “Pour une ­littérature-monde,” published in 2007 by forty-four writers writing in French and proposing that literature should be interpreted as a worldwide phenomenon rather than a national one—the list goes on. In these cases, and similarly to both Sansal’s and Allouache’s depictions of the harraga, local identity and global systems exist in constant negotiation with one another. Analysis of the harraga figure as represented by a writer and filmmaker who were born and continue to work, at least in part, in Algeria, where clandestine immigration takes place regularly, can illuminate the nature of connections among harraga, globalisation, mondialisation, and the word at the center of these—monde/world. What, indeed, is in a wor(l)d, we might ask. Why is the harraga figure so often associated with other worlds, rather than simply representing the hope of creating a more welcoming and accessible nation model? Why do we see the words monde (world) and univers (universe) so often associated with this figure, as opposed to nation or pays (country)? In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson (2006) writes, “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). He then cites Renan: “Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have much in common, and also that they have all forgotten much.”3 Both Anderson and Renan offer some insight into nation as sociological, having been agreed upon in some way by a large group, and as at least as exclusionary as it is inclusive. If nation, nationalism, and nationality are noticeably absent from discourse around the harraga, it is because this figure exists in definitive rupture with his country. The harraga no longer imagines himself part of the community into which he was born; he has begun to think of himself and his future elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, another lexicon emerges, and it describes the creation not of a new nation but of a new world. It designates the invention of an entity that is cultural, political, and economically open; an entity dependent on the openness of host populations. The harraga figure is not constant

126  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato either—sometimes male; sometimes female; sometimes old, young, urban, rural; more iterations abound. The essential trait of the harraga consists in desire or desperation, in leaving the nation of origin, the motherland—this motherland that has forced its child into itinerancy, that has no place for the harraga. And so she, or he, escapes in search of something new, something greater than nation—a new world. Two of Algeria’s most well-known artists—the writer Boualem Sansal with his 2007 novel Harraga and filmmaker Merzak Allouache with his 2009 film Harragas—have created beautiful, provocative, and poignant representations of the harraga. This essay explores these two representations of the harraga as (s)he prepares to make the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean Sea, to a land that will challenge their humanity, geopolitical coherence, and recognition of rights both publicly and privately. It also argues that these portraits of the harraga challenge common practices of interpreting works of postcolonial cultural production as, alternatively, works of postcolonial nation-building or cosmopolitanism. What happens when the harraga leaves the birth nation for an adopted country? Does his changing relationship to nation affect his relationship to humanity, to the notion of cosmopolitanism as “universal fellowship”?4 If so, how? Reda Bensmaïa (2003) gestures toward some answers in his groundbreaking Experimental Nations, in which he articulates the concept of “becoming” as a transitional state in which the human navigates and builds nation and in so doing straddles multiple identities and possibilities of identity, especially in the wake of national erasure. In this paper, I similarly examine the figure of the harraga as one whose humanity and social identity shift, even as relationship to nation, geopolitical positioning, language, culture, and human rights associated with that positioning also shift. The term harraga evokes, whether alternatively or simultaneously, an imagined reality of a better, perhaps idealized, elsewhere and self in it. It connotes a past characterized by frustration, pain, and missed opportunity; a present laden with desire, determination, hope, and often great hardship; and a future either having failed to reach a better place or one to be determined in the new home country. It emphasizes forward thinking, both literally in the sense of physically moving ahead and figuratively in the sense of conceiving of oneself in a “better” place, signifying an imagined self free from those problems that plagued one’s past. Hrig, however, has its limits, too. Its focus on leaving and burning restricts its ability to communicate or even imagine the necessary processes of negotiating between the clandestine immigrant’s past, with the influence of inherited nationality, and the inevitably new present in a new country of residence. Furthermore, fictionalized representations of hrig have seen a notable increase recently, and this includes works by prominent Francophone Maghrebi artists working across a variety of media. 5 Indeed, twenty-first-century cinematic and literary interpretations of the harraga figure abound, even if, as Charles Bonn has noted, many such texts place clandestine immigration not at the center but at the periphery of the narrative.

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  127 Many of these works take up the phenomenon of hrig as well as subsequent problems associated with the difficulty, and in some cases impossibility, of finding a new home and integrated identity in a “host” country. As Abderrezak demonstrates, the children of immigrants … are imagining a form of diverging migration, which … consists in the redefinition of the concept of émigré and its false attribution to the children and grandchildren of immigrants, by way of a physical or symbolical journey outside the traditional Maghrebi migratory pole (North Africa → France). (22) In this way, one journey, the hrig, characterized by an undeniable urgency, often translates into subsequent journeys for subsequent generations. In other words, although hrig describes the distinct process(es) of burning, it is nevertheless deeply connected to questions of past, native land, nationality, and emergent national identity within a host country distinct from the motherland. The term also indicates the shift from a person complete in their relationship to nation to a condition of what I call “alien-nation.” By this, I mean the state of not belonging fully to a particular nation, especially culturally, economically, politically, or some combination of these. Like the term harraga, alien-nation can take on many meanings, signifying at times the relationship a refugee or clandestine immigrant has to a host country; or denoting the harraga’s relationship to the motherland especially once he has burned his identity papers, to offer just two examples. Central to the term’s import, however, is the exclusion and separation felt by an individual toward both the nation in which (s)he is living and making a life and the nation into which (s)he was born. Whereas Benedict Anderson’s famous study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, emphasizes the communal aspects of nationalism, the condition of alien-nation underlines the distance and difference that can define one’s relationship both to one’s home country and to one’s host country. In the two texts studied here, one literary and one cinematic, analysis of the harraga naturally lends itself to studying the limits of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In his preface, Sansal emphasizes the all too real context in which his novel Harraga is inscribed: This story would be quite charming if it were solely the fruit of imagination … But it is truthful, from one end to the other, the characters, the names, the dates, the places, and in this sense, it tells the misery of a world that has no faith or values left, that no longer knows anything but applauding its own misdeeds and profanations. The reader will read as he pleases, perhaps in both modes since even literary types never know how to distinguish between the real and the imagined.6

128  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato Although he acknowledges that some readers will interpret the novel as pure fiction, while others will read it for the truths it offers, Sansal opens his work with two important points. First, he insists on the veracity at work in the fiction. Second, his novel does not take a neutral position with regard to the harraga. This transitory figure is not benign in the text. And although the title, Harraga, suggests that the harraga occupies the center of the story, the narrative is constructed, rather, on two female characters, Lamia, a pediatrician in her thirties and the narrator of the novel, and the tempestuous teenager Chérifa. They are connected through Lamia’s brother, Sofiane, the harraga indicated in the title and, we learn, the father to Chérifa’s unborn child. The author’s framing, then, suggests a particular interpretive mode, and it points to the truths, in the broadest sense of the term, of literary representation. The back cover of Sansal’s novel Harraga, with its particularly illustrative language, speaks to the alien-nation experienced by the harraga by highlighting those liminal spaces between reality and dream, between the lived and the imagined, that are associated with the figure: A house that time erodes with regret. Ghosts and old memories that one sees appear and disappear. An erratic city that is being destroyed by boredom, by sloppiness, by fear of life. A neighborhood, Rampe Vallée, that seems to no longer have a reason to exist. And everywhere in the rough streets of Algiers there are Islamists, rulers ready for anything, and the weak who sell their soul to support them. Men above all, the women not having the right to either feel or to walk freely about. The young, absent to the point of insolence, who dream, their backs to the walls, of the Promised Land. It is this excessive and frighteningly banal universe in which Lamia lives, with her daily companions of solitude and sheer lunacy. But suddenly a young harebrained woman, from another world, comes knocking at her door. She says she is called Chérifa, she moves in, wreaks havoc and willy nilly will lead the former to thinking, to rebelling, to loving, to believing in this life that Lamia had begun to forget and to hate.7 Sansal insists on two dichotomies here, that of the tangible and the intangible, and that of two genders. First, he juxtaposes the concrete and material aspects of the house, the city of Algiers, the neighborhood of Rampe-Vallée, the streets, the walls, and the door, with descriptions of ghosts, memories, boredom, fear, the dreams of youth, la folie douce, and un autre monde (another world). Such association of the worldly with the otherworldly poignantly symbolizes the competing realities experienced by the harraga—this person who exists in in-between-ness, between life in the home country and a second, unknown world, often north, always close by in the imagination, in dreams. That which separates the two worlds likewise bridges the gap between real and perceived; in this case, the Mediterranean Sea, with its

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  129 set of two banks, each representing a set of cultural norms and history, each with its own cultural capitals, and those perceptions of which it is the source, as well as those that have been projected onto it. This modality of blurred existence that defines the harraga manifests itself as an intermediary position. The harraga is the one who always exists in between: between two universes, neither truly here nor truly there—and it is precisely this characteristic of instability that becomes, in a paradoxical manner, the permanently defining characteristic of this figure. As soon as the harraga ends his travels, his identity shifts. If he reaches Europe, he becomes an immigrant. If, on the contrary, he must return to his country, he recuperates his nationality. The harraga’s identity is, by definition, always in flux, always in the process of leading to another state of being, to another identity, national and otherwise, that risks canceling out that which preceded. This identity, and by extension the figure of the harraga, is always transitory. The second contrast that Sansal evokes, that of gender, likewise speaks to the alien-nation experienced by all characters in the novel. Leyla Sanai (2014), in her astute review of Harraga, notes the association of women with the future, in direct contradiction to the male Islamists that Sansal has so directly critiqued: The first-person narrator is a paediatrician called Lamia who lives alone. Her parents and older brother have died, and her younger brother Sofiane is among the harragas, or path-burners, who have fled the country in search of better prospects abroad. A garishly dressed pregnant teenager, Chérifa, appears at Lamia’s door, and Lamia develops maternal feelings for her. When she disappears, Lamia is determined to find her, knowing the risks faced by a stroppy girl wearing defiantly western clothes. And indeed, the second striking juxtaposition reflected on the back cover of Harraga regards the prominent depiction, even more present in the novel than in the paratext cited earlier, of males in Algeria as corrupt, power hungry, powerless, and weak, in direct opposition to active, albeit troubled, women who become a force of change and who are associated with the efforts of staying and rebuilding and with the future, as opposed to laziness, apathy, and fear associated with fleeing, an act depicted as motivated by a problematic interpretation of the past. Sixteen-year-old Chérifa arrives at the house pregnant with Sofiane’s, Lamia’s brother’s, child. It is at this moment that the reader learns that Sofiane is the harraga of the story, for he has left Algiers for Oran, ostensibly destined for travel to Europe; in the process, he has left behind Chérifa with little help but his sister and, by extension, their family home. So it is that Chérifa settles in with no warning or preparation at Lamia’s house. All of a sudden, inside this formidable old house, the “universe” of Lamia and Chérifa’s “world” come face to face, in a moment of meeting, opposition, immediacy, and frantic

130  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato fervor. And although this meeting cannot be described as peaceful or pleasant at its inception, it is the central mode through which Sansal moves the narrative forward. Notably, though he titles his novel after the absent ­Sofiane, Sansal tells the story of Harraga through a woman’s voice, ­Lamia’s. Moreover, Chérifa notably bucks tradition with her Western clothing and illegitimate child. In sum, all characters in the novel find themselves at odds with Algerian society, Lamia in her solitude, Chérifa in her defiance, and the Islamists in their desperate attempts to control an evolving Algerian society. Each character, whether male or female, fundamentalist or secular, determined to leave or resigned to stay, experiences alien-nation. The harraga embodies this alien-nation, but he is not alone in his sense of isolation, exclusion, or frustration. Sansal opens the book with Chérifa’s arrival at Lamia’s house, describing it thus: It is in the same way that whirlwinds enter a house. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in my way of being would ever lead me to believe that one day I would open my door and my life to such havoc. I opened because that is what you do, you open when someone knocks on the door… There is also that foreboding feeling and its underlying urges, that subtle force of things hidden, the calls from another world, the sudden desire to brave the great mystery. All of this pushes much more quickly than fear holds back. To tell you the truth, I opened mechanically. I’m like that, a woman of impulse. Mechanically, maybe not, the hope of seeing my brother again, of hearing him knock on the door one day, doesn’t leave me. Every noise makes me think of him. This torture will never end. ­Sofiane, I know it, has left never to return. (16–17)8 The book begins, then, with a poignant contrast between the material reality of the house and the hidden possibilities evoked by “another world.” Likening Chérifa’s arrival to a whirlwind, Lamia leaves no doubt that she and Chérifa’s differences will cause turmoil and disruption. Indeed, if we are to interpret the house and the people in it as an allegory for the nation of Algeria and its citizens, then we are witnessing an initially divided ­A lgeria, its citizens represented here as two females, one with child, all three people connected through the absent harraga. The young Chérifa, whose arrival is related to “the calls from another world,” will inspire serious reflections and personal change and growth in Lamia. Chérifa will, indirectly, teach her elder the values of love and rebellion, she will introduce Lamia to news way of seeing the world, her world, their world. And increasingly, as Sansal focuses his narrative on the neighborhood of ­Rampe-Vallée, the city of Algiers, and the buildings and history of the architecture through which Lamia incessantly searches for her brother, he insists on the visible,

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  131 architectural history of nations and empires, undeniably visible within ­ amia’s family home. Sansal’s lexicon consistently emphasizes the tangiL bility of the house, the neighborhood, and the city, and when he uses the term “world,” he hearkens to that which people create, both in dreams and in tangible modes, as well as to that which exists beyond the nation. The “calls from another world” beckon Lamia to open the door, to “brave the great mystery,” and they help her overcome her fear. Chérifa, too, is described through Lamia as having “a world all to herself, quite far from ours, where there is no shortage of fairies or Prince Charmings,” a place where dreams and idealism can reign (18–19).9 Although Chérifa’s utopian world does not correlate peacefully to Lamia’s universe, the two share a vision for something beyond, and greater than, the current state of nation in Algeria. Moreover, the clash between these two visions and understandings proves, albeit perhaps only temporarily, productive and generative. When compared with the back cover of Harraga’s description of the “excessive universe” in which Lamia lives, it becomes clear that Chérifa’s world and Lamia’s universe must collide. They cannot exist in harmony. And yet the women hail from the same country and live, at least for a time, in the same house. In this portrait of Algeria, then, Sansal brings together a world, associated with young Chérifa; a universe, associated with Lamia; and the Algerian nation, associated with the house that plays such a central role in the story. With Chérifa’s arrival, this young woman described as having arrived “from another world,” and as the saving force for Lamia, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, all the frantic, destabilizing movement she brings with her, Sansal contrasts world, universe, nation, and harraga. There is no utopian vision of universal world citizenry here, nor is there erasure of national particularities and local history with its many problems. Rather, Sansal offers a sharp critique of the harraga in representing his weakness, cowardice, and perhaps most importantly lack of vision for, or faith in, his own country. The house is left to Lamia, Chérifa, and the unborn. And it is they who will reconstruct it; it is the heroine who occupies the center of the story here. In this way, Sansal’s novel exposes the limits of both nationalism, as represented by the Islamists who have brought Algeria to its knees, and cosmopolitanism, the light of which has failed to reach any of the characters in the novel. A second example of the harraga can be found in the film of Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache. Harragas, released in 2009, straddles the line between fiction and reality, similarly to Sansal’s novel. Although it tells a fictional story, it is nevertheless anchored in the phenomenon of the kind of clandestine immigration that currently takes place across the Mediterranean. Allouache makes this particularly clear with the text, in both Arabic and French, that precedes the closing credits. His closing words, with their white lettering across a black background, remind viewers of the 13,444 migrants who perished within European borders and the 9,500 migrants who died in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean between 1988 and

132  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato 2009, just to offer two of the many statistics Allouache highlights. He dedicates the film to all the harragas who have disappeared in the sea, and indeed this is a film that insists on viewers’ seeing and experiencing the angst, turmoil, waiting, and danger that the harraga must endure. Harragas tells the story of clandestine immigrants, nine men and one woman, waiting to leave the Algerian city of Mostaganem and looking to reach the Spanish coast, only a distance of about 200 kilometers from their departure city. Moreover, this is a film that shows alien-nation and struggle in three dominant modes: visually, through dialogue and its absence, and thematically. Visually, Allouache has quite precisely divided the film into, first, scenes depicting the harragas waiting, along the magnificent natural beauty that characterizes the northern Algerian coastline bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the natural beauty that surrounds them, the harragas wait, frustrated, powerless, and just hopeful enough to embark on an infamous journey across the sea. The second half of the film shows the ten harragas in a new position of struggle. Huddled closely together in a small boat with limited resources, the harragas face seemingly endless waters, the constant threat of the coast guard always in their minds, as evidenced by both dialogue and a scene depicting their close call with the coast guard. Allouache gives viewers a keen sense of the extraordinary risk that the harragas willingly take on, even paying a significant price to do so, with his elevated shots portraying the tiny boat, barely visible amid the expansive Mediterranean. From so far above, these shots, frequent throughout the film, show the harragas as lost, helpless, unmoored, uprooted, disconnected. Furthermore, much of the dialogue in Harragas underscores the lack of, and in some cases impossibility of, communication amongst the group. Both on land and in the sea, factions develop in opposition to one another. Misunderstandings occur; technology fails; mechanical failures jeopardize the journey; and as the boat attempts to move northwest to Spain, any attempt to move forward toward consensus among the harragas fails. Harragas depicts the problem of the disconnectedness and rootlessness that envelops Mostaganem’s inhabitants, even from its opening scenes. The first image of the film anchors the story in the city of Mostaganem. Viewers see a black background, with white letters in both Arabic and French: “Mostaganem, Algerian Port City, 200 kilometers from the Spanish coast.”10 Next, the distant sound of waves accompanies the image of two feet that hang, just inches above the ground. Suicide, we soon understand. Allouache thus associates, from the very first scenes of his film, the sea with hopelessness and suicide. These feet hang, never touching the ground, showing literal disconnection with the ground, earth, reality, the concrete, the real; all this, in sharp contrast to the daily activities of Mostaganem and the images of the people shopping in local markets, bustling about in groups among the streets, buildings, and city life that will follow. Here, a young man’s feet hang lifeless and disconnected. Physically and visually, these hanging

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  133 feet represent the “between-ness” that defines the harraga. His body lightly swings in the air, rootless, the life within departed. It is not only through images but also through dialogue that Allouache emphasizes rootlessness and disconnection. The film’s narrator explains, “My name is Rachid. No, those are not my feet that you see. Those are Omar’s feet, my best friend. My brother…”11 Allouache thus uses the first two sentences of the film to destabilize the spectator and demonstrate rootlessness visually with the hanging feet and disconnectedness through the narrator, whose voice is disconnected from the image depicted. At first glance, the spectator associates this voice with the person shown, from the feet slowly up to his face. But the narrator, Rachid, corrects this notion immediately. The camera advances vertically, showing the torso, then the head of Omar, and the narrator continues, “He decided to leave us. Just like that, with no warning. That day was a terrible day for us.”12 Thanks to this short explanation, the viewer only now begins to understand that the film concerns a group; that other people, including the narrator, will miss this recently deceased man; that he is leaving others behind; and that, although he might seem to be all alone, Omar’s absence does not leave others indifferent. The pain and alien-nation he must have felt so deeply to compel his final and ultimate decision and demise did not simply have a neutral effect on those around him. Although Omar did not “burn” per se, he has certainly left. Hence, Allouache shows his feet hanging and his body unmoored. And just as in Sansal’s novel, hrig is represented not as a solution, but rather as destructive, so, too, does suicide set off a series of events that will ultimately prove fruitless for some and life-ending for others. A slow and beautiful music takes over, and the spectator sees scenes of daily life unfolding in the city of Mostaganem. With a high angle shot, the camera films the city’s streets and inhabitants, suggesting, first, the existence of something greater and more powerful than the people of the city and, second, demonstrating the very real ties these people share to each other through their city, their vulnerability, and their daily rhythms and habits. The camera moves down slowly toward the urban restlessness of the markets and crowds of Mostaganem until the title Harragas, The Burners (“Harragas, Les brûleurs”) appears. Moving to an eye-level angle, the camera begins to focus on the subjectivity and individuality of one man, accompanying his movement as the narrator continues: This hurried man, it still isn’t me. It’s Nasser, my other best friend. We grew up in the same cité. Nasser, he’s the neighborhood’s good looking kid. He, Omar and I, we had decided to ‘burn.’ Burn. Get out. Leave, disappear from this country, erase the past.13 The camera turns to focus on Nasser’s face, and the narrator continues, “Just as others have done before us. And as others will do after us.”14

134  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato Although Nasser is filmed head on, and although he is the first living person to be shown for any length of time, he is nevertheless described as a person among others, as someone whose story and history are inscribed in a risky tradition, and as a man at the heart of a community formed by a network of geopolitical realities, that of the harragas. Moreover, Allouache sets in motion here an emphasis on the cyclical nature of alien-nation and hrig. As viewers will see, all the harragas depicted in the film are motivated to burn by a sense of exclusion from national opportunity and a disconnection from national resources, policies, decision-making, and belonging; so, they burn. Many are caught and sent back to their homeland, if they are lucky enough not to perish. And the cycle of alien-nation and hrig begins again. The camera follows Nasser, who enters a building. Inside, he takes out several dinars (pieces of Algerian money) from a plastic bag and passes them to an old man who gives him a mobile phone. Nasser slowly and carefully takes out his own mobile to call the one he has just bought, ostensibly to ensure that it works correctly. Although a short scene in the film, this portrayal of people in the same country functioning in a disconnected, mistrustful mode pervades the film. Indeed, the first instance of communication that takes place between two people does not signal one of community or trust, a far cry from nation or nationalism; rather, fear and mistrust, two symptoms of alien-nation, guide the scene. Next, the spectator hears the ring of a phone and sees a simple shack on the edge of the sea. The ringing continues, repetitively and aggressively, while the camera directs the viewer’s gaze toward a simple room, probably the interior of the beach shack from a moment before. The image of Omar’s body hanging there as the phone continues to ring signals a failed departure, failed life, failure to connect, and successful suicide. The viewer’s gaze is led back to several pieces of green paper, a torn up identity card, that symbolize an absolute rupture with personal history and national identity, a poignant symbol of alien-nation. Another voice off screen speaks as we see a young woman seated at a table. She cries while reconstructing something from small pieces of paper.15 The narrator introduces her: Imène, my dear sister. Finally, I am leaving. Three times they’ve caught me. This time, they won’t be able to. In writing this, I have a bad feeling. I don’t understand how this happened in my head. My country has become a black stain that has swollen to the point of filling up my brain. You remember what I told you when you kept me from leaving. If I leave, I die. If I don’t leave, I die. So, I am leaving without leaving and I’m dying. It’s simpler.16 As in Sansal’s novel, it is a woman who is both left behind and who attempts to reconstruct. In Allouache’s film, she cries, devastated by her brother’s death, but nevertheless pieces together his identity card, literally reconstructing national identity, to no avail. Omar’s letter, in which he explains,

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  135 “I’m leaving without leaving and I’m dying,” denotes both desperation and impossibility, an interrupted mission, and the lack of either solution or resolution. Omar’s words speak to his sense of absolute alien-nation. The strain of his relationship to his motherland has become so acute that death becomes a source of relief. Allouache punctuates his film with scenes that depict the harragas waiting, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group, whether on the beach, in a shack, in a small boat, or, finally, in handcuffs on northern shores. The director focuses his attention on tangible elements that shape the reality of clandestine immigration—engulfing waters; the coast guard; thirst; limited resources; the tension one must face while waiting … waiting … waiting … to arrive; the mercilessness of the elements; and the inevitable personal divisions that accompany uncertainty, stress, and limitation. His film is one of departure and trajectory; the viewers never even discover what exactly motivates the departure of the ten harragas at its center. And the sea is just as much a character in the film as are the brutal Samir, the strikingly handsome Nasser, and even the narrator Rachid. Allouache shows the harragas as part and parcel of both physical and geopolitical realities; in his film the coast guard, lack of gasoline, and dangerous waters represent equal threats. The harraga is a prisoner in this film, constrained by national policies, geopolitics, weather, their own physical limitations, the confines of a boat, and international law. Indeed, throughout the second half of the film, Allouache staggers bird’s eye view shots representing the voyage undertaken by the harragas across the boundless sea, that is to say shots that emphasize the harragas’ helplessness; with scenes that focus on the ten harragas in the boat: Rachid, the narrator; Nasser, Rachid’s friend and Imène’s boyfriend; Imène, the late Omar’s sister; Samir, a man about whom little is revealed, except that he had been working as a police officer in Algeria and that he seeks to maintain this authority on the boat; Hakim, a former friend of Rachid and Nasser whose amorous pursuits of Imène failed, leading him to leave the group and join a fundamentalist religious group; and five harragas who have crossed the Sahara Desert to northern Africa in order to access the Mediterranean Sea and, eventually, Europe. These Saharans, as they are called, neither speak French nor know how to swim, and access (or lack thereof) to the French language above all distinguishes one group, the Saharans, from the other, the Algerians, as they make their way across the sea. By the end of the film, Samir and Hakim will have fought, fallen out of the boat, and drowned; Rachid will have taken off on his own to swim toward the Spanish coastline after the boat’s motor fails; Nasser and Imène will follow him, not far behind; one of the Saharans will have lost his mind, jumped into the sea, and drowned, the pressures and uncertainties of waiting in the boat with no oars and inability to swim too great to bear; and the other four Saharans will have been discovered by a lone boatman, likely ending their journey in a repatriation center. In the end, then, not one harraga succeeds; three drown, and seven face either punitive measures, repatriation, or both.

136  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato Allouache, then, although humanizing the harraga, does not idealize him or his fate. The harraga does not triumph, nor is he a hero. Both Sansal’s and Allouache’s portraits of the harraga depict a figure who is unable or unwilling to participate in nation-building or reconstruction. The harraga chooses instead to attempt to start again elsewhere. Furthermore, division and alien-nation persist in both works. Although Chérifa and Lamia occupy the same house for some time, although they sometimes inspire and support one another, they nevertheless remain separate and divided until Chérifa, like all others close to Lamia in the past, leaves. Even in the same small boat in Allouache’s film, the harragas quickly form divisive factions. They argue, threaten violence against one another, and most remain remarkably underdeveloped as characters. This lack of community among the harragas, this emphasis of discord in both works, demonstrates the necessity, above all, for a world, something beyond the dysfunctional nation, that would afford them enough opportunity, enough political space to participate fully. Both Sansal and Allouache’s representations of the harragas point to limitations, lack, and the impossibility of community in a world so distinctly characterized by such lack. In both Sansal’s and ­A llouache’s depictions of the harraga, limitation and lack lead to exclusion, disillusionment, and the condition of alien-nation. Sansal depicts a lone harraga of whom the reader learns precious little, save his legacy of chaos, unresolved problems, and irresponsibility; Allouache, in turn, portrays multiple harragas who hail from various countries, have limited ability to communicate with one another, and who nevertheless find themselves intimately linked in their urgent desire to leave. Indeed, in Allouache’s film, Algeria, despite its great natural beauty, is represented as a departure zone at best, a zone of danger and illicit opportunism at worst. Finally, the harraga is characterized by a particular temporality. Motivated by a past and present that seem void of hope, the harraga seeks, at any price, a future in another space. This fact places him in a relationship to both space and time that is profoundly fragmenting and alienating. He seeks to separate himself from his birthplace and to move beyond both past and present, and yet the future holds uncertainty and, likely, many challenges that range from logistical to monetary to linguistic to intimate, etc. The harraga lives between the dreams of the future and the reality of the past and present. The portraits of the harragas from Sansal and Allouache complicate theories associated with both nation-building and cosmopolitanism. The harraga exists in a state of alien-nation, that is to say the condition of rupture with his motherland and in an uncertain relationship with the host country. He models alien-nation rather than nation-building, and his willingness to take on almost certain danger, even mortality, speaks to his perception of and relationship to his homeland. Sansal and Allouache speak, respectively, to the enormous burden left to those who cannot or do not leave, and to the extraordinary hardship and unforeseen challenges before, during, and immediately after crossing. If nation is represented, this is done in order to point to the problematic and corrupt systems that have taken the place of

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  137 colonialism. Boualem Sansal and Merzak Allouache devote significant textual and cinematic material to the portrayal of corruption and opportunism within Algeria. These portraits do not gesture toward integration, assimilation, or the hopes associated with cosmopolitanism. Rather, they speak to rootlessness, division, and alien-nation at their most profound and tragic states. They speak to that which might motivate someone to dare to cross, to dare to burn, despite known dangers of exploitation, unsafe conditions, and the challenges of constructing a new world upon arrival.

Notes 1 The original French follows: “Nasser, c’est le beau gosse du quartier. Lui, Omar et moi, on avait décidé de ‘brûler’. Brûler. S’exiler. Partir, disparaître de ce pays, effacer le passé.” Furthermore, all translations from the film, unless otherwise noted, are direct transcriptions of the film’s subtitles in English. 2 The original French follows: “Comme d’autres l’ont fait avant nous. Et comme d’autres le feront après nous.” 3 All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. The original French reads as follows: “Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” 4 I use “his” here simply because the harraga phenomenon is overwhelmingly a male one. Interestingly, both the novel and the film analyzed in this paper highlight female harragas as well as the women left behind by the male clandestine immigrant. 5 Indeed, scholar Katarzyna Pieprzak has written that “clandestine migration has produced a new terrain in Moroccan literature” (Abderrezak 2016, 56–57). The correlation between the political, social, cultural, and economic phenomenon, then, of clandestine immigration, especially throughout the Mediterranean, and the increase in instances of fictional representation must not be lost. 6 The original French follows: Cette histoire serait des plus belles si elle était seulement le fruit de l’imagination… Mais elle est véridique, d’un bout à l’autre, les personnages, les noms, les dates, les lieux, et par ce fait, elle dit seulement la misère d’un monde qui n’a plus de foi, plus de valeurs, qui ne sait plus que s’enorgueillir de ses frasques et de ses profanations. Le lecteur la lira comme il lui plaira, peut-être des deux manières puisque aussi bien les gens du livre ne savent jamais distinguer le réel de l’imaginaire. 7 The original French reads as follows: Une maison que le temps ronge comme à regret. Des fantômes et de vieux souvenirs que l’on voit apparaître et disparaître. Une ville erratique qui se déglingue par ennui, par laisser-aller, par peur de la vie. Un quartier, Rampe Vallée, qui semble ne plus avoir de raison d’être. Et partout dans les rues houleuses d’Alger des islamistes, des gouvernants prêts à tout, et des lâches qui les soutiennent au péril de leur âme. Des hommes surtout, les femmes n’ayant pas le droit d’avoir de sentiment ni de se promener. Des jeunes, absents jusqu’à l’insolence, qui rêvent, dos aux murs, de la Terre promise. C’est l’univers excessif et affreusement banal dans lequel vit Lamia, avec pour quotidien solitude et folie douce. Mais voilà qu’une jeune écervelée, arrivée d’un autre monde, vient frapper à sa porte. Elle dit s’appeler Chérifa, s’installe, sème la pagaille et bon gré mal gré va lui donner à penser, à se rebeller, à aimer, à croire en cette vie que Lamia avait fini par oublier et haïr.

138  Mary Anne Lewis Cusato 8 The original French follows: C’est aussi de cette manière que les tourbillons entrent dans la maison. Rien, absolument rien, dans ma façon d’être ne laissait entrevoir qu’un jour j’ouvrirais ma porte et ma vie à de tels bouleversements. J’ai ouvert parce qu’il en va ainsi, on ouvre lorsque quelqu’un frappe à la porte… [plus loin] Il y a de même le pressentiment et ses pulsions sous-jacentes, la force subtile des choses cachées, les appels d’un autre monde, l’envie soudaine de braver le grand mystère. Tout cela pousse plus vite que la peur ne retient. A dire le vrai, j’ai ouvert machinalement. Je suis ainsi, une femme d’élan. Machinalement, peut-être pas, l’espoir de revoir mon frère, de l’entendre un jour toquer à la porte, ne me quitte pas. Tous les bruits me le rappellent. La torture ne prendra jamais fin. Sofiane, je le sais, est parti pour ne jamais revenir. [16–17] 9 The original French follows: “…un monde à elle, bien loin du nôtre, où ne manquent ni fées ni princes charmants” (18–19). 10 The original French appears as follows: “Mostaganem, ville portuaire algérienne, A 200 kilomètres des côtes espagnoles”. 11 The original French is as follows: “Je m’appelle Rachid. Non, ce ne sont pas mes pieds que vous voyez. Ce sont les pieds d’Omar, mon meilleur ami. Mon frère…” 12 The original French is as follows: “Il a décidé de nous quitter. Comme ça, sans prévenir. Ce jour-là a été pour nous une journée de malheur.” 13 The original French follows: Ce type pressé, ce n’est toujours pas moi. Lui, c’est Nasser, mon autre meilleur ami. On a grandi dans la même cité. Nasser, c’est le beau gosse du quartier. Lui, Omar et moi, on avait décidé de ‘brûler’. Brûler. S’exiler. Partir, disparaître de ce pays, effacer le passé. 14 The original French follows: “Comme d’autres l’ont fait avant nous. Et comme d’autres le feront après nous.” 15 Note that in Allouache’s film, just as in Sansal’s novel, reconstruction, rootedness, preservation of memory, and history are associated with female figures. If both Sansal and Allouache seem critical of the (predominantly male) harraga, they are equally emphatic regarding the important role women play in both preserving and creating nation. 16 The original French follows: Imène, ma chère sœur. Enfin, je pars. Trois fois qu’ils me rattrapent. Cette fois, ils ne le pourront pas. En écrivant, j’ai un mauvais pressentiment. Je ne comprends pas comment ça s’est installé dans ma tête. Mon pays est devenu une tache noire qui a grossi jusqu’à envahir mon cerveau. Tu te rappelles ce que je t’avais déjà dit quand tu m’as empêché de partir. Si je pars, je meurs. Si je ne pars pas, je meurs. Alors, je pars sans partir et je meurs. C’est plus simple.

Works Cited Abderrezak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Allouache, Merzak, dir. Harragas. 2009. Performed by Lamia Boussekine and Nabil Asli and Samir El Hakim. Algeria: Ultime Razzia Productions. DVD.

Alien-Nation and the Algerian Harraga  139 Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso. Bensmaïa, Réda. 2003. Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prendergast, Christopher, and Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson. 2004. ­Debating World Literature. London: Verso. Sanai, Layla. 2014. “Powerful Exposé of Islamism Marred by Weak Storytelling.” Review of Harraga by Boualem Sansal. The Independent, December 01, 2014. Accessed October 14, 2016. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ reviews/harraga-by-boualem-sansal-book-review-powerful-expos-of-islamismmarred-by-weak-storytelling-9896557.html/. Sansal, Boualem. 2005. Harraga. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Part III

Circulated Objects

8 Cosmopolitanism and Orality in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. Katherine Hallemeier

As its title suggests, Foreign Gods, Inc., by Okey Ndibe (2014), is a novel invested in thinking through how perceived cultural difference is commodified in a globalized marketplace. The novel’s protagonist, Ike, finds himself clinging to the idea that the sale of the so-called foreign god, Ngene, may be good for both the god and humanity, even as this righteousness barely ameliorates his self-disgust in seeking to profit from the god’s theft and sale. Ndibe’s novel, this chapter proposes, thus resonates with a wellknown debate in cosmopolitan criticism of the last twenty years centered on the relation between culture and capitalism, whereby the circulation of cultural objects is alternately celebrated for its cosmopolitan potential to affirm human connection across difference and observed to provide a sheen of cosmopolitan ethics to an unequal status quo. As Ike’s sale of Ngene leads to disastrous results, the novel sides with the latter position, staging a scathing critique of a version of cosmopolitanism that celebrates the circulation of cultural objects as evidence of cosmopolitanism’s possibility. At the same time, the novel is self-reflexively aware that its critique may, in turn, become grounds for valuing the novel as differently cosmopolitan, whether by virtue of its recognition of human differences outside the logic of a capitalist marketplace, or for its foregrounding of transnational experience. The fiction thereby stages how critiques of cosmopolitanism can multiply cosmopolitan readings in ways that ultimately drive marketability. Just as Ike feels ambivalent as to whether the sale and purchase of the socalled foreign god will be a cosmopolitan good, so the reader is invited to feel some ambivalence as to whether and how any cosmopolitan good may follow from the sale and purchase of Foreign Gods, Inc. Even more intriguingly, the reader is invited to consider why the impulse to celebrate the circulation of particular cultural objects as cosmopolitan remains compelling even when it is manifestly clear that these objects relentlessly circulate in an unequal capitalist marketplace. Ike’s own life experience of being Nigerian in the United States, after all, has taught him how perceived difference readily becomes the grounds for economic and social marginalization, and he is averse to those arguments that would uphold his immigration as a sign of cosmopolitan promise—yet, in a way that is not

144  Katherine Hallemeier fully accounted for by his desire for profit, Ike remains fixated on the equalizing cosmopolitan myth that the circulation of cultural difference may become a source of equality. As I will demonstrate, Ndibe’s novel suggests how this myth persists at least in part because the so-called global marketplace is not only so very unequal but also highly provincial. Ike’s desire for Ngene’s circulation is heightened precisely because of his experience of how many forms of difference are so often excluded from the marketplace on the basis of perceived illegibility. Ndibe’s novel, I argue, draws attention to the ways in which cosmopolitan criticism focused on the global circulation of culture has tended to focus on objects already delimited as commodities—as objects of interest that are presumed to be legible as such. Foreign Gods, Inc. resists cosmopolitan readings that would celebrate its representation of legible difference, critique of capitalism, or cross-cultural circulation. Yet I demonstrate that it nonetheless calls for a reading that is cosmopolitan by virtue of its attentiveness to forms of perceived difference that have been persistently devalued as illegible objects of indifference in US academic discussions of cosmopolitanism, namely, non-commodified oral vernaculars. A reading centered on these forms, Ndibe’s fiction suggests, may challenge the self-replicating dynamics of a cosmopolitan criticism that is parochial not least in its attachment to written forms of authority.

Cosmopolitanism and Circulation Foreign Gods, Inc. is a heist. The protagonist, Ikechukwu Uzondu, conspires and finally succeeds in stealing what he thinks of as the statue—but others conceive as the body—of the war god Ngene from his hometown of Utonki in order to sell the god to a New York City art dealer named Mark Gruels, who operates a business called Foreign Gods, Inc. The decision to steal the god is not made easily. Ike, who works as a cab driver in New York, is initially disgusted by the “idea of a few wealthy individuals buying up so-called Foreign Gods and sacred objects” (Ndibe 2014, 59). He also feels “shame and guilt” that stealing the god would constitute a betrayal of his uncle Osuakwu, the chief priest of Ngene (62). Ike’s finances are “dismal” (63), however, and the guilt of betraying his uncle is counterbalanced by the guilt of having not sent remittances to his mother and sister in Utonki in years. Ike is consequently able to ease his conscience by obsessively rereading an article in New York magazine authored by Gruels, which argues that “in a postmodern world, even gods and sacred objects must travel or lose their vitality” (62). By bringing Ngene to Gruels’s gallery, Ike convinces himself, he will be making him part of what Gruels characterizes as “a visible and powerful cultural current and force” (69). He will ensure that Ngene becomes global, even if only among a wealthy elite: “It had fallen to him to show the world to Ngene, stuck too long in Utonki, and Ngene to the world” (169). There is furthermore the possibility, enigmatically proposed

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  145 by Ike’s friend Jonathan, that Ngene will “enter the oppressive system and fight the power. Lead the revolution from the inside” (61). Disgust and guilt are thus uneasily alleviated by the sanitizing of global capitalism so that the circulation of cultural objects is positioned as a means of resisting inequality; Ike continues to feel “deep down” that this justification for his theft is “a lot of mumbo jumbo” (62). Ike’s ambivalent position between righteousness and disgust points to a central tension in established discourses about the relation between cosmopolitanism and capitalism. While Jonathan is vague about what may be potentially revolutionary about introducing Ngene to an audience outside of Utonki, cosmopolitan thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah have developed fuller accounts of the arguably transformative potential of cultural exchange. In his influential Cosmopolitanism, Appiah (2006) opposes, for example, the repatriation of objects from the British Museum to Nigeria on the grounds that their global circulation challenges essentialist notions of culture and identity: Some of the heirs to the kingdom of Benin, the people of Southwest Nigeria, want the bronze their ancestors cast, shaped, handled, wondered at. They would like to wonder at—if we will not let them touch— that very thing. The connection people feel to cultural objects that are symbolically theirs, because they were produced from within a world of meaning created by their ancestors—the connection to art through identity—is powerful. It should be acknowledged. The cosmopolitan, though, wants to remind us of other connections. (135) The alternative connections that Appiah suggests may be promoted by thinking of culture in terms of its “connection through humanity” include those that are premised not on shared identity “but despite difference” (135). That such connections can be fostered in order to “develop habits of coexistence” in “human community” is, for Appiah, part of the ethical potential of cultural exchange (xix). As Bruce Robbins (2012) has argued, however, Appiah’s argument for cosmopolitanism evidences a certain liberal “blindness to history” that occludes how imperial capitalism continues to shape which individuals and institutions have access to that which is theoretically the patrimony of humanity (41). Celebrations of cosmopolitan understandings of cultural exchange, Robbins notes, are easily enmeshed in defenses of globalized capital: “free-market individualists … are all too eager to declare themselves free of any and all belonging” (18). In the very act of positioning commodified cultural exchange as cosmopolitan, this discourse can sustain the inequalities it purports to transcend by functioning as “capitalist propaganda, flattering the consumer as well as the commodity” (18). While this same propaganda can have the effect of upending “civilizational self-flattery”

146  Katherine Hallemeier by valuing the products of “supposed primitives,” it also undermines “the effort to regulate financial markets” in “progressive” ways that would challenge the capitalist structures that violently hierarchize humanity and so impede humane coexistence (18). Ike may rehearse Gruels’s argument that bringing Ngene to market will enhance Ngene’s power, but he cannot deny the fact that his actions will enhance Gruels’s profits. Appiah (2006) argues against defining cultural patrimony in relation to particular cultural groups, as is proposed in the 1994 Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, on the grounds that this may unintentionally replicate the corporatist structure of international capital and result in “a cultural landscape consisting of Disney Inc. and the Coca-Cola Company, for sure; but also of Ashanti Inc., Navajo Inc., Maori Inc” (130). Ndibe’s novel, in contrast, emphasizes that ongoing colonial histories mean that leaving Ngene in Utonki does not risk the development of Utonki, Inc., while removing him from the village does enrich Foreign Gods., Inc. More urgently still, the human costs of the god’s sale clearly outweigh (in incalculable ways) the god’s unexpectedly low purchase price: as a result of the theft, Ike’s uncle is devastated, his mother is injured in fights that follow the god’s disappearance, and Ike himself is financially ruined and socially isolated. The novel ends with Ike regretting the theft and sale of Ngene and refusing Gruels’s propitiating offer of extra cash. Foreign Gods, Inc., then, examines how perceived cultural difference is commodified and how cosmopolitan understandings of the global cultural marketplace potentially obscure inequalities in the name of fostering cosmopolitan ethics. The novel finally refuses the postmodern perspective which results in the commodification of Ngene, offering, to borrow Appiah’s (1991) terms, a postcolonial critique of a worldview that perceives “the incorporation of all areas of the world … into the money economy” (344). It also insists, however, that cultural exchange cannot readily be disentangled from the homogenizing effects of a capitalist marketplace. In Ndibe’s telling, cosmopolitan representations of the global circulation of culture promise not insight into forms of human community that cross boundaries of perceived difference but the perpetuation of (neo)colonial, neoliberal systems of valuation. At the same time, the fact that Ndibe’s novel shares a name with Gruels’s gallery signposts that Foreign Gods, Inc., too, shows Ngene to the “world” of a global reading elite, but that to buy into the argument that the circulation of Ndibe’s story somehow enhances the cultural capital of, say, a cosmopolitan worldview, would be to echo Gruels’s dubious claims. If Foreign Gods, Inc. elicits enough interest to be circulated in the (so-called) global marketplace, Ndibe suggests, this may have as much to do with factors such as its author’s institutional affiliation (Brown University) and its reviewers’ credentials (Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s blurb appears on the cover) as with the content of the work itself. The novel calls attention to its own status as a publication of Soho Press, Inc. and is ambivalent about

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  147 its potential effects in relation to its readers. The book’s sale and purchase may promote some version of cosmopolitan community, be it by challenging essentialist notions of identity or by calling into question the primacy of capitalist values; it undoubtedly circulates via a status quo in which prize-winning Anglophone African novels are disproportionately published by North American and European presses. Ndibe’s heist here presents itself as an instantiation of the tension between cosmopolitanism and capitalism: valuing perceived cultural objects exclusively in terms of their price in the “global” market is surely parochial and potentially violent, as Ike’s later regret for stealing Ngene highlights, but the cultural work of circulating alternative value systems does not transcend the neocolonial dynamics of that market. The evoked dynamic is one that Graham Huggan (2001) described in The Postcolonial Exotic: “a pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism” that is “a result of the spiraling commodification of cultural difference, and of responses to it, that is characteristic of the (post) modern, market-driven society in which many of us currently live” (32). Huggan argued that one means by which postcolonial writers negotiate the drive to commodify perceived difference is by manipulating conventions of the exotic within institutional parameters for decolonizing ends (32). Yet Ndibe seems to suggest in a later scene that, in the twenty-first century, it is precisely such strategies that have become so marketable: nothing sells better than a work of art that promises a “revolutionary” worldview that “resists” its own commodification in an unequal marketplace, except perhaps a work (like Foreign Gods, Inc.) that simultaneously explores its status as a commodified object. Ngene flies off the shelf because, once taken from Utonki, he begins to emit a distinctive stench of the moribund that, though it seems to protest his sale, finally makes him all the more desirable to his Japanese buyer. The dynamic does not so much defy Huggan’s thesis as illustrate what is meant by the “spiraling” commodification of cultural difference.

Cosmopolitanism and Commodification Even as Foreign Gods, Inc. attends to how perceived difference is valued in the postcolonial, postmodern cultural marketplace, it is just as attentive to how, often, it is devalued. This focus on difference and devaluation, I suggest, is one way in which the novel offers clarifying insight into why Ike remains drawn to the equalizing myth that equates capitalist exchange with cosmopolitan potential. In an early scene, Ike taxis a man he has picked up outside the United Nations Plaza, whom he presumes to be a European diplomat. The man, who will later reveal his name to be Giles Karefelis, finally sets aside his paperback and responds to Ike’s attempts at conversation: “I will write a book someday,” he [Ike] said. “You will?” the passenger asked quickly. “What about?”

148  Katherine Hallemeier “About Foreign Gods.” “Foreign, did you say? Foreign what? It’s hard to understand your accent.” Ike brushed off the hurt. “There’s a gallery called Foreign Gods, Inc. They buy and sell gods. That’s what I plan to write about.” The passenger guffawed. “Why, that’s a neat idea.” Ike felt elated, awake. “It’s going to be interesting.” “Where?” (Ndibe 2014, 19) The scene affirms Robbins’s critique of cosmopolitan discourse that suggests the celebration of perceived human difference can function as a veneer for maintaining an unequal status quo. Giles’s interest in “foreign gods” is only piqued at the word “gallery,” which promises a venue in which Giles may perform his socioeconomic status. (It’s not a surprise that, when Giles makes a later appearance at Gruels’s gallery, he will be on a first-name basis with his fellow customers (312).) The same concept, voiced by Ike-the-­ cabdriver, just doesn’t register with Giles, even as Ike’s accent is only illegible to the passenger when it is not referencing an already established cultural venue. Notably, Giles’s interest hinges on how the perception of foreignness is contextualized; implicitly, what determines whether writing (such as Ike’s proposed book) about perceived difference is valued by moneyed consumers, and so transformed into a commodity that will circulate among them, is whether or not it is writing authorized by the already powerful. Thus, while Ike’s conversation with Giles highlights the unequal, institutionalized circumstances that contribute to producing Ndibe’s fiction as a desirable commodity, it also suggests an alternative reception history. After all, the novel’s title associates it not only with Gruels’s gallery but also with Ike’s planned book, and Giles’s response to that book is one of indifference and, indeed, strategic misunderstanding and contempt. This reaction is attributed to Giles’s experience of Ike’s accent as inhibiting, rather than promoting, understanding and communication when Ike’s words reference his own creative ambitions; perceived difference, when devalued as illegible, becomes the object of indifference rather than interest. Such a reception history could also apply to Ndibe’s novel, whose status as a work of “African literature” could potentially delimit its potential market value in the country where it was published, perhaps especially given its picaresque style and prominent code-switching. One critical response to such indifference, of course, is to call for its end and look forward to a more inclusive marketplace, where value is not calculated solely in terms of profits. Such is Tope Folarin’s (2016) recent argument that the contemporary literary scene is one in which major US and British publishers favor African manuscripts that are similar to those already proven to sell. Folarin argues for editors who are open to fiction that radically departs from the form and subject matter of literary giants such as Chinua Achebe or, more recently,

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  149 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The call is for an expanded understanding of what writing counts and is prominently marketed as African literature. Ndibe’s novel, however, is somewhat skeptical of arguments premised on greater inclusivity via the circulation of commodified cultural objects as specific to a particular ethnicity, nation, continent, or other imagined community. As we have seen, in Foreign Gods, Inc., the cultural marketplace is not stuck on one form of perceived difference, but is always changing to market the next “new” thing. By the time Ike gets Ngene to Gruels, the so-called African gods are no longer desirable, until they are. Cultural objects that may seem to resist commodification because of their origins or status, or that promise to foreground communicative limits, are in this telling all the more readily made available for immediate consumption under the umbrella enterprises of African Culture, Inc. or African Literature, Inc. With the right institutional support and social currency, local “accents” may readily enhance cultural value. For further evidence of this dynamic, one need only turn to the enthusiastic praise of the novel’s reviewers, who laud Ndibe’s “boundless ear for the lyrical turns of phrase of the working people of rural Nigeria” and his “excellent ear for dialogue” (Ndibe 2014). (Were Ike to write his book, it is easy to imagine it being marketed in similar terms, albeit with a few admiring references to his previous career as a taxi driver.) This is to say that in Ndibe’s work, the transformation of indifference into interest is not necessarily a sign of an openness to human difference constitutive of cosmopolitan community; it may instead register a self-contained elite affirming its status as cosmopolitan via the selective consumption of commodities that are authorized by institutions as cosmopolitan. The cultural and literary marketplaces, however, continue to be premised on the ongoing devaluation of work that is not (yet) read in these terms. Giles’s indifference is thus presented as less of a problem that can be overcome than as a sign of the capriciousness of the market in cosmopolitan literature, or more generally of the distribution of economic power that shapes those markets. It is at this juncture that the novel’s scrutiny of its own status as commodified literature broadens to include institutionalized forms of writing that include academic discourses about cosmopolitanism. When Gruels derides Ike’s “accent,” it is not the first time Ike is “hurt” by such derision. Having graduated cum laude in economics from Amherst College, Ike has worked as a cab driver for thirteen years after prospective employers informed him that “if he wanted a job in the corporate world, he’d have to learn to speak English” (Ndibe 2014, 33). The decision that he doesn’t “speak English” is clearly arbitrary: “I took English courses at Amherst—and made straight A’s” (33). He is only misunderstood when it is strategically advantageous for his interlocutors to misunderstand him. These experiences lead Ike to argue against his Sierra Leonean friend’s evaluation of the United States as a place of opportunities. (The friend, Usman Wai, speaks with a “broadcaster’s baritone” that has not affected

150  Katherine Hallemeier his employment opportunities; the way he speaks English has not been deemed “a terrible disease” by employers (52, 55).) It also leads to a scathing appraisal of writing that would position his life as one of cosmopolitan possibility: We’re supposed to be living in this new global setting—a village, many call it. In college, I took classes where the buzzwords were ‘synergy,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘affinities,’ ‘multivalency,’ ‘borderlessness,’ ‘transnationality,’ what-not. My sister lives in Onitsha, near my village, but she has Internet access. A gallery somewhere in this city buys and sells deities from Africa and other parts of the world. Many American companies are selling stuff to people in my village. They’re certainly selling stuff to me, to lots of people who speak the way I do. But I apply for a job and I’m excluded becomes of ‘my accent,’ quote, unquote. It’s worse than telling me I’m a foreigner, I don’t belong. Then academics rush in to theorize me into an exile. (55) The rhetoric that Ike excoriates resonates with cosmopolitan discourse that celebrates not just the circulation of cultural objects but also the movement of people as evidence of an existing or possible cosmopolitan society. So, for example, discourses of vernacular cosmopolitanism consider whether and how migrant subjects engender transnational communities (Werbner 2006, 496). Based on his lived experience, however, Ike rejects this discourse for overlooking the ways in which the “new global setting” is not an even playing field. In his case, multilingualism does not index a condition of “transnationality,” but of ongoing exclusion from economic power.1 His sister may have Internet access, but his family suffers hunger when he doesn’t send remittances home. Discourses of “borderlessness” occlude under what conditions individuals are allowed to cross borders. Ike firmly rejects the celebration of an unequal marketplace via appeals to the “global,” even as he embraces similar arguments to attempt to justify the theft of Ngene. The contradiction shows that, for Ike, the prosperity of which he dreams requires access to the “global,” which is to say, to a parochial elite that regulates such access capriciously. Having attempted to gain such access through the lottery of higher education, as well as gambling at casinos, Ike looks to the market in cultural objects as a venue in which his perceived cultural difference may be an asset rather than a liability. Jean and John Comaroff (2000), following Susan Strange, have described the neoliberal economy wrought by “globalized markets, electronic media, and finance capital” as one that breeds “casino capitalism”: a commitment to “venture enterprise” that attempts to access “the new forms of wealth” that may attend “sudden infusions of commodities” (298). Ike, by plotting Ngene’s theft, attempts to harness this enigmatic form of wealth, to master what the Comaroffs describe as its “capriciousness … the mysterious forms it

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  151 takes … its slipperiness … [and] the opaque relations between means and ends embodied in it” (298). The novel makes it clear that Ike is embarking on another gamble, even as Ike, despite his explicit knowledge that stories about the “global” occlude and thereby perpetuate his own lived experiences of exclusion and marginalization, remains faithful to such stories as a means to wealth. (Similarly, he returns to the casinos, despite the fact that he always leaves them poorer.) In Utonki, he scorns his mother’s faith in the prosperity gospel of Pastor Uka—who promises fabulous wealth will follow from one more tithe—but the pastor offers an opportunity to participate in a different kind of market that promises access to wealth. Ike differs from his mother only in the object of his faith. His faith is reinforced, what is more, by his experiences of precarity; the prospect of perceived difference being valued is so compelling in part because it is so often devalued. Even as Foreign Gods, Inc. foregrounds its potential to generate interest and profit by virtue of its perceived difference, then, it also acknowledges that this difference may also delimit this potential. The novel’s capacity to promote a cosmopolitan ethic, finally, is not ensured by the mere fact of circulation or inclusion in the global marketplace, or even by a particular mode of reading that highlights how a given work celebrates human difference, resists neoliberal values, or registers transnational experience. ­Cosmopolitan criticism, Ndibe’s novel suggests, by linking cosmopolitanism so closely to that which is legible and valued across time and space, depends inordinately on a capricious marketplace that presents too narrow a view of both cultural forms and lived experienced, however compelling that view might otherwise be. The novel’s intervention in cosmopolitan discourses, however, is not only one of critique. Ndibe’s fiction also considers how cosmopolitan habits of coexistence that celebrate difference and challenge capitalist hegemony might be pursued by attending to an aspect of literature and life that is, within US-based cosmopolitan criticism at least, often rendered illegible and devalued: namely, oral forms and non-written authority.

Cosmopolitanism and Orality As Ike considers two iterations of cosmopolitan society that are premised on the circulation of art and the movement of people, respectively, he definitively rejects only the latter. Gruels’s defense of the former version of cosmopolitanism, by contrast, proves hard to shake: “in some curious way, the story transported him, kept him spellbound” (Ndibe 2014, 61). R ­ easons for the article’s bewitching power arguably include the contextual circumstances already discussed: participation in the art market is compelling for a dispossessed man who hopes to prosper from it, and, much as the invocation of “Amherst” is meant to attest to qualifications for a better job, the social and economic status of both Gruels and the magazine his article appears in enhances the argument’s perceived authority. As the novel progresses, however, another reason suggests itself for explaining the peculiar

152  Katherine Hallemeier power that surrounds Gruels’s defense of global culture, namely, that it is written in a form that seems influential and accessible to Ike. By returning again and again to the power of writing, the novel suggests that the circulation of cultural commodities, including gods, hinges at least in part on the mystified authority of the written word. Ike does not extend his disdain of academic celebrations of movement and hybridity to the art market not least because his sense of his own authority is overwhelmed by that of New York magazine. His prioritization of written authority persists as he accedes to Gruels’s requirement that every god sold in his gallery be supported with proper “authentication”: “Nothing beats seeing things on paper—photographs, books, documents. If there are mentions in one or two scholarly texts, that’s terrific” (11). Writing, which is readily commodified, takes priority over whatever “authentication” may be afforded by Ike’s uncle’s stories of Ngene’s powers. As Gruels states, “I don’t buy stories, I buy things” (8): “Not just stories your uncle told you, something. We have a process of authentication, and it’s fairly rigorous. The gallery’s policy is to insist on things that are written down” (10). Ndibe highlights how the grease in the wheel of imagined cosmopolitan exchange is frequently writing: writing that evidences “authentic” cultural difference, and writing that compellingly celebrates the circulation of such difference as cosmopolitan. One potential effect of this prioritization is of course to grant greater authority to documented aspects of the cultures and histories of colonial or former colonial powers: the oral authority of Ngene’s chief priest is voided by the promise of a “booklet” that describes the “story of the first British missionary who arrived in Utonki” (11). Ndibe’s novel consequently sharpens its representation of the parochial nature of the “global” cultural marketplace: not only is this market the purview of an institutionalized elite, but also this elite imagines that marketplace in terms that marginalize an entire world of cultural production. In this light, literary critical discussions of cosmopolitanism that overwhelmingly focus on and take the form of writing are central to, rather than resistant to, a parochial understanding of cultural exchange itself. Put in other terms, Ndibe’s fiction remains committed to binding the circulation of cultural forms to a cosmopolitan ethic that attempts to oppose cultural hierarchies without producing capitalist propaganda, and it offers a distinctive methodology for doing so. Critical of a cultural landscape dominated by Foreign Gods, Inc., or of one inclusive of Utonki, Inc., the novel questions how readings of cultural exchange may better affirm a shared and diverse human cultural patrimony, without de facto assigning power over that patrimony to those with the most power to buy and sell cultural objects. Consequently, as Foreign Gods, Inc. engages with contemporary debates about cosmopolitan culture, its contributions to these debates move beyond staging the slippery line between cosmopolitanism and capitalism, and toward self-reflexively representing how cosmopolitan cultural exchange is conceived and promoted by essays such as this one.

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  153 Whether the cosmopolitan potential of cultural exchange is being critiqued or defended, the novel suggests, the cultural objects at the center of this analysis tend to be closely associated with written authorities, if they are not themselves written works. By in contrast foregrounding the authority of Igbo oral stories and rituals in his fiction, Ndibe draws attention to the notable absence of such authorities in academic discourses of cosmopolitan culture. He consequently flags how these discourses, which have disproportionately focused on written literature and been circulated through writing, perpetuate a parochial privileging of writing over orality. Foreign Gods, Inc. thus suggests a more cosmopolitan view of the global cultural marketplace itself: namely, one that challenges the devaluation of orality while simultaneously resisting its commodification. In so doing, the novel calls for a cosmopolitan criticism that attends not only to the fact of circulation or the legibility of cultural forms across time and space but also to the form and scope of cosmopolitan criticism itself. Ndibe’s critique of the minimization of oral authority presents a challenge to the reader of a novel that both revels in and is in part marketed through its representation of oral cultures. In its privileging of orality, the novel struggles against a reading that would reduce its stories simply to a thing that can be possessed and comprehended as writing. In this struggle, it aligns itself with many works of modern African fiction, including that which is perhaps its clearest literary precursor, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola ([1952] 1994). Writing apart from the realism of Achebe or Adichie, Ndibe recalls Tutuola’s fiction through the exuberant collision of epistemic forms. In Tutuola, picaresque stories adopted from Yoruba oral literature produce ambiguous, multiple meanings that juxtapose with precise records of British currency. The market is a place of both ghostly, unruly creatures who disrupt the business of commerce and of objectified things that promote it. Tutuola’s famous description of the “complete gentleman” encapsulates this tension: As this gentleman came to the market on that day, if he had been an article or animal for sale, he would be sold at least for˝2000 (two thousand pounds). As this complete gentleman came to the market on that day, and at the same time that this lady saw him in the market, she did nothing more than to ask him where he was living, but this fine gentleman did not answer her or approach her at all. But when she noticed that the fine or complete gentleman did not listen to her, she left her articles and began to watch the movements of the complete gentleman about in the market and left her articles unsold. (18) As the parenthetical clarification of the currency symbol suggests, Tutuola imagines a reader who will potentially speak what is written, even while playing with how things are written. At the same time, the subjunctive in

154  Katherine Hallemeier the first sentence highlights that British currency is but one force at work in Tutuola’s imagined cross-cultural marketplace. Ndibe adapts Tutuola’s picaresque structure, as well as his approach to language and markets, albeit with a focus on the proverbs common to Igbo oral literary forms. We are dutifully told details of Ike’s financial dealings down to the nearest naira and dollar, alongside accounts of his financial prospects as divined both by Pastor Uka and Osuakwu. The latter’s prognostics derive from reading four lobes of a kola nut offered to Ngene and are expressed in the pithy phrases associated with aphorisms or proverbs: “Four, for the four market days— Eke, Oye, Afo, Nkwo. Four, the sign of prosperity. It means that hunger will never dog you; your journey will always be filled with success” (Ndibe 2014, 183). Like Tutuola, Ndibe forges an interlanguage to produce a work that attempts to bridge written and non-written forms of literacy. As the fraught reception history of Tutuola’s fiction indicates, the views of the market associated with and expressed through Yoruba oral traditions have not necessarily taken priority in criticism, which has tended to objectify the fiction as an anthropological curiosity, wherein orality is reduced to a sign of authenticity, but not necessarily authority, within the written work available for purchase. Indeed, Tutuola’s book in many ways stands as an exemplar of the postcolonial exotic. 2 Teju Cole (2012) encapsulates this argument in his (rather playfully ironic) account of a conversation with V.S. Naipaul: “I [told him I] found the work odd, minor. There was something in Tutuola’s ghosts and forests and unidiomatic that confirmed the prejudices of a European audience.” Yet, for all that Foreign Gods, Inc. seems to risk a similar reception—as indicated, for example, by reviewers’ praise for its insight into rural Nigerian speech cadences—by taking pains to suggest how such a reception capriciously minimizes the authority of oral forms, it also invites a reading that endeavors not to subsume the oral to the written but to think through how orality binds with the celebration of human differences and the multiplication of forms of valuation and circulation that are resistant to capitalist hierarchies and hegemony. In other words, it invites a more cosmopolitan reading of the novel and the marketplace in which it circulates that does not assume the primacy, so to speak, of written receipts. The task of reading a novel apart from its apparently manifest status as a written object has been central to scholarship addressing, for example, the fiction of Tutuola and Ben Okri, if not that of more recent publications by Adichie and Cole. That attentiveness to orality is necessary for tracing vernacular forms of cosmopolitan cultural exchange is made resoundingly clear, however, in Ato Quayson’s (2014) analyses of the interplay of local cultural scripts and global capitalist discourses in Oxford Street, Accra. Specifically, Quayson’s reading of tro-tro (lorry) slogans on the streets of Accra provides an implicitly cosmopolitan methodology for acknowledging the “discursive multi-modality” of particular cultural expressions (135). 3 In Quayson’s reading, “many of the slogans and mottoes of tro-tros and

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  155 other vehicles point to forms of discursive multi-modality” (136) that, among other things, produce a kind of “semiotic stacking” characterized by “citational density” (143). Because of this operative logic, tro-tro slogans are most effective and memorable, Quayson suggests, when they can be “recognized as part of a larger citational nexus in which writing has been installed in the ambiguous space between literacy and orality” (144). A tro-tro slogan such as “All the World Is a Stage” cannot be read solely as a citation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It; instead, its meaning accrues through its embeddedness “within the highly sophisticated practice of quotation that marks all local-language rhetorical forms in Ghana,” both oral and written (144). Reading is necessarily rendered variant and processual, dependent upon the acknowledgment of “the intermeshed vitality of lived experience” (144). Tro-tro slogans do not become cosmopolitan solely because they circulate through a diverse cityscape; they are cosmopolitan because this circulation is part of a “multi-nodal, multilingual, and variously inspired scriptural economy,” and Quayson’s reading does justice to this cosmopolitan dimensionality (145). Quayson’s ethnography—which draws extensively on oral sources (9)—evidences how an anthropological perspective, which Appiah (2001), for example, urges cosmopolitan readers to set aside (224), may be one means of undoing habits of cosmopolitan criticism that maintain colonial hierarchies of written and oral forms. Quayson’s (2014) vision of a cultural landscape in which local proverbs “jostle” with translocal messages is not reducible to writing that is simply symptomatic of the “depthless surface” associated with postmodern “late capitalism” (132–33). It is not, in other words, a landscape that is dominated by a Foreign Gods, Inc. or one where the inclusion of Utonki, Inc. would be a desirable end. Instead, it is a vision wherein cultural phenomenon such as the tro-tro slogan is “a naturalized aspect of the public sphere of discourse without any threat of its appropriation or domination by any person or group of persons” (145). That tro-tro slogans are produced by and contribute to this public sphere is an insight that takes on particular importance, perhaps, given that tro-tro slogans have, in the past forty years, come to extend “the message and ethos of prosperity pronounced by Accra’s mega churches” and reflected in the city’s corporate advertisements (130). While the content of tro-tro slogans has increasingly participated in a broader “discourse of enchantment” that emerged following years of IMF-enforced structural adjustment, the collective form of the slogans remains in tension with the notion of individual self-making central to that discourse. In bringing Quayson’s analysis of a public form of writing to bear on Ndibe’s novel, I do not argue that the novel transcends its commodity status. The novel’s copyright is clearly claimed by the author, and this essay conforms to citation practices that do not violate copyright laws that protect both Ndibe and Soho Press, Inc. Similarly, I do not argue that Ndibe’s novel directly compares with the scriptural economy described by Quayson

156  Katherine Hallemeier that bridges written literacy and orality and that depends upon a particular cultural context. The novel does, however, recognize and invite the recognition of the authority of the kinds of oral scripts that are discounted in the supposedly global marketplace inhabited by Gruels and his customers. The transcription of the vernaculars spoken by, for example, Ike’s Jamaican friend Big Ed Thelwell interrupt the novel’s standardized literary prose, as well as its market logic: “This thing you’re buying and selling—it have a name or not?” “Anything that people would pay me good money for,” Ike said, letting out a nervous laugh. “Fine with me—so long you’re not selling people for make the money.” “No!” “And so long you’re not selling the ancestors.” (Ndibe 2014, 49) In such passages, in which vernacular transcription denotes worldviews resistant to if imbricated in those of postmodernity, the novel opposes Gruels’s privileging of writing as a source for authenticating the nature of Ngene and reflects a reality in which oral forms accrue such authority. That Ngene’s values are multiple, that they include those values promoted in Osuakwu’s public discourse, are affirmed when Ike, in the end, does not so much possess Ngene as he is possessed by him. When he suffers “storm-triggered spells,” his paternal grandmother tells him that he is being “favored” by the god (17). Osuakwu affirms this reading when he recalls that, though his “dream was to snatch one of the white man’s jobs,” the dream was disrupted when he started “fainting” when it rained: “Ngene had called me” (196). This story, which privileges the unquantifiable, unruly, and unmonetizable effects of Ngene, has implications for evaluating arguments that equate the exchange of or interest in cultural objects with cosmopolitanism. Namely, such arguments may themselves be understood as a form of possession or a discourse of enchantment whereby, to adapt Quayson’s (2014) words, “commerce is dressed in the garments of faith [and] the laborer’s appetite works for him and hunger drives him on firmly into the bosom of the capitalist circuit” (157). Oral sources, in other words, authorize a view of the market that sees it not only in terms of the circulation of commodities but also as a site of multiply articulated beliefs as to whether and how particular objects and accents ought to be thus circulated. Ndibe’s novel, as I have read it, finally urges a cosmopolitan reading of its pages that in fact differs from the one presented here, which neither offers a rigorous historical account of the oral literatures and cultures on which Ndibe draws nor cites particular oral sources as authorities (on, say, the global marketplace). This essay is manifestly committed to writing as an object and mode for identifying and discussing cultural work as

Cosmopolitanism and Orality  157 cosmopolitan, and it is published in a collection on cosmopolitan literature that authorizes primarily written works as cosmopolitan. By representing a cosmopolitan cultural market that exceeds the one in which orality is systemically devalued, however, Ndibe’s novel suggests that this essay represents but one option for the present and future form of cosmopolitan cultural criticism. Ndibe’s fiction focuses attention on forms of cultural exchange that have been marginalized in accounts of cosmopolitan literature. It thereby forwards a reworking of vernacular cosmopolitanism that explicitly attends to the authority of oral vernaculars, as well as a vision of cosmopolitan scholarship that does not rely disproportionately on commodified written sources.

Notes 1 My reading is informed by Combined and Uneven Development by the Warwick Research Collective (2015), which offers a full consideration of how discussions of multilingualism and translation in comparative literature have often assumed that “the ‘world of world-literature is a ‘level playing field,’ a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can circulate, intersect and converse with one another” (22). 2 For a publishing history of Tutuola’s fiction, see Gail Low’s “The Natural Artist” (2006) in Research in African Literatures. 3 Quayson’s book includes a chapter on literary representations of Accra. While this chapter highlights how writers of African literature draw on “the resources of orality,” he concludes that the effect of this tendency is “an occult zone of polysemy between myth and realism in different configurations” (238). Ndibe’s novel certainly produces such a zone, but my focus on the effects of orality in the novel center not on its contribution to a social imaginary generally but to an understanding of the relation between cultural marketplaces and cosmopolitanism particularly.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter): 336–57. Accessed December 28, 2018. www.jstor.org/stable/1343840. ———. 2001. “Cosmopolitan Reading.” In Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, edited by Vinay Dharwadker. New York: ­Routledge, 199–225. ———. 2006. Cosmopolitanism. New York: W.W. Norton. Cole, Teju. 2012. “Natives on the Boat.” New Yorker, September 11, 2012. Accessed December 28, 2018. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/natives-on-the-boat. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. 2000. “Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12, no. 2: 291–343. Project MUSE. Folarin, Tope. “Against Accessibility: On Robert Irwin, Chinua Achebe, C ­ himamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers.” Los ­Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/accessibilityrobert-­i rwin-chinua-achebe-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-imbolo-mbues-behold-­ dreamers/#!

158  Katherine Hallemeier Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic. London: Routledge. Low, Gail. 2006. “The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Postwar Britain.” Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4: 15–33. Ndibe, Okey. 2014. Foreign Gods, Inc. New York: Soho Press, Inc. Quayson, Ato. 2014. Oxford Street, Accra. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 2012. “Cosmopolitanism, New and Newer: Anthony Appiah.” In Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 31–46. Tutuola, Amos. (1952) 1994. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1953. Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Werbner, Pnina. 2006. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3: 496–98.

9 Animated Plastic and Material EcoCosmopolitanism in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Jungha Kim

Karen Tei Yamashita’s literary worlds are often characterized by deterritorialization, expressed through her unique deconstruction of geographical borderlines, through the discursive displacement that her thematically diverse and formally heterogeneous works impose onto established disciplinary boundaries, and through the new ontological, epistemological, ethical issues that her characterizations of human and nonhuman beings raise. An Asian American writer whose literary epicenter is not limited to minority politics within the United States or East-West relations across the Pacific, Yamashita’s work prefigures the recent transnational turn in American literary studies in which the centrality of America is deconstructed (e.g., hemispheric studies), and common themes in Asian American literature, such as Orientalism, immigration, racism, are revisited through a more global lens (e.g., transpacific studies).1 As Rachel C. Lee notes, Yamashita’s work “walks a fine line between decentering the theme of Asian identity and globalizing Asian tropes” (107) and rejects facile categorization or reterritorialization into new discursive boundaries. This is exemplified in Yamashita’s (1990) novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, in which the narrative voice is that of an eccentric, nonhuman ball. Originating as piece of debris from a massive layer of plastic generated by the world’s waste, this small plastic ball becomes attached to a boy in Japan named Kazumasa Ishimaru, and the two go on to experience adventures in a magical tale of eco-apocalypse in the Amazon rain forest. ­Notably, when Kazumasa decides to leave Japan, his destination is Brazil, not the United States, and on this foreign soil, he is exposed to and swept away by ungraspable, destructive powers of nature and global capital instead of being faced with the tasks of assimilation and resistance within the state. With a talent for detecting potential damage to railway system, a supernatural power given to him by the ball’s attachment, ­Kazumasa is a subtle parody and a magical mutation of the familiar archetype in the context of Asian American cultural productions, the Chinese ­A merican railroad worker (Lee 113). 2 As a formal counterpart to this transnational tweaking of Asian American tropes, the novel’s ingenious mixture of soap-operatic melodrama and magical realist narrative is, one might argue, a postmodernist

160  Jungha Kim playful response to the realist impulse that shaped early Asian American literary criticism. Critics like Ursula K. Heise, on the other hand, view it as a more complicated sign of cultural globalism. ­Yamashita’s formal flexibility and hybridity is, Heise writes, a unique combination of “North American multicultural writing, Latin American magical ­realism, [… and] the literary techno-postmodernism that flourished in both the United States and Japan from the 1980s onward” (99). What is remarkable in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is not, however, the reaffirmation of Yamashita’s unique brand of elastic crossings across myriad boundaries, but that this trespass of borders is mediated through the activity of nonhuman agencies and takes on a fantastical tone. Having hitherto not received due critical attention, the two nonhuman ­characters—a hybrid plastic ball narrator “I” and massive plastic field called “the ­Matacão”—play a significant role in Yamashita’s narrative strategy and cosmopolitan imagination. As the writer weaves in and out of each character’s bizarre and noisy episodes on the Matacão in the style of the primetime “Brazilian soap opera,”3 I argue, the form of memory enacted by the plastic “I” functions as an omniscient narrative eye that looks back on the farcical fuss over the Matacão and frames it as belonging to a long gone human past. In this double frame narrative in which an eco-­catastrophic soap opera is embedded within the memory of plastic debris, the novel’s own version of cosmopolitanism reaches toward the connectedness of animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman interactions and communications. Transmutable in form (a piece of compressed garbage, an animated ball, an omniscient voice), this plastic mutant is also transtemporal. The ball’s unexpected arrival and apparent magnetic properties—as seen by its attachment to Kazumasa—were a result of the prolonged interaction between human waste and geological forces. Its ghostly return to the earth after death, which ironically signals its birth as a narrator at the beginning of the novel, situates the whole narrative within the frame of memory. With a nonhuman narrator as an active actant who confounds markers of ethnic or gender identity and crosses spatiotemporal parameters, the novel signals its divergence from the varied borders and dualisms that characterize much of ethnic literature. Instead, Yamashita brings to the fore the global, in particular the cracks in the global system as embodied in the miniature-Earth plastic ball, with a focus on translocal networks and transhuman affiliations that emerge from planetary crises. In this dystopian tale of global predicament told by a postethnic, posthumanistic voice after the fact, Yamashita envisions a new mode of cosmopolitanism that is constituted through a shared sense of risk among human and nonhuman agencies—a mode that can travel across time and space and enable cross-temporal and cross-species affiliations. As seen in recent critical efforts to disassociate cosmopolitanism from its European genealogy,4 marginalized experiences in the globalized world provide a significant instance for theorizing different possibilities of

Animated Plastic  161 transnational identity and solidarity and examining “the costs and contradictions of globalization” (Koshy 2011, 594). Susan Koshy argues that the experience of minority subjects offers alternative visions of cross-cultural exchange by “registering the disruptions and asymmetries of intercultural encounter while sustaining an openness to its transformative possibilities” (594; emphasis added). If the claim for the recognition of minority identity in the nation has been a political foundation in ethnic studies, the dynamic and “scale-jumping” (from small to large, from national to global) properties of the minority and their multidirectional energies are often obscured but constitute an important ground of minority cosmopolitanism: “[the minority’s] centripetal capacity to intensify affiliations of race, ethnicity, and culture and its centrifugal capacity to extend these affinities outward into inventive affiliations” (594; emphasis added). In Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Yamashita provides a vibrant field of multifarious nonhuman actants in which impersonal matters or things appear to possess minority cosmopolitan sensitivity and responsiveness to the predicament of globalization—cosmopolitanism not as a given entity awaiting immediate signification, but as a potentiality awaiting realization in the ever-shifting movements of relational energies. With their own mode of expression, orientation, and transformation, nonhuman beings inhabit as/within an excess, vitality, relationality, sometimes crashing into each other, sometimes creating unpredictable affiliations. From this angle, one might say that Yamashita formulates her own version of cosmopolitanism as a new materialist 5 who believes that “the world’s phenomena are segments of a conversation between human and manifold nonhuman beings,” and “we inhabit a dimension crisscrossed by vibrant forces that hybridize human and nonhuman matters” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 4–5). In her unique literary crafting of collectivity, Yamashita extends the scope of cosmopolitanism beyond its humancentric genealogy to reach toward the landscape of clamorous agencies and their affiliations to come.

The Matacão Enchantment In the novel, the tremendous plastic plane called the Matacão is a narrative core and a central setting that entices the characters and brings them together: [S]trange events far to our north and deep in the Amazon Basin, events as insignificant as those in a tiny northeastern coastal town wedged tightly between multicolored dunes, and events as prestigious as those of the great economic capital of the world, New York, would each cast forth an invisible line, […] leading us to a place they would call the Matacão. (15)

162  Jungha Kim The Matacão is a strange mixture of the world’s garbage and unknown geological forces. It originates from “enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth” (202). Having been gradually pressed and pushed into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle over the past century, the deposits became liquified and moved to “virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon Forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty” (202). As a reminder and remainder of the destruction of the planet by humans, its form fundamentally transfigured by nature’s dynamic force, the Matacão testifies to, as Molly Wallace (2016) notes, “the slower effects of an ecocatastrophe that has been happening, quietly and relentlessly, over the course of a century” (142). Transformed from its original inanimate objectness of the world’s waste into an animated thing, the Matacão enchants the whole narrative space in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. The metamorphosis of human waste into a tremendous, impenetrable plastic field exerts a magnetic power on the characters and draws them to its mysterious center. To borrow an insight from Jane Bennett (2001) on the affective state of enchantment, the ­Matacão tosses the characters onto “a mood of lively and intense engagement with the world […] a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance” (The Enchantment 111). It fascinates them, derails them, and thrusts them into unexpected possibilities and consequences with dramatic vicissitudes. To its slick shiny surface, which “seem[s] to glow in the dark on moonlit nights” (17), crowds come to “gasp, grovel, get a tan, pray, relax, study, wonder, hang out, make love, worship, meditate, or pay homage to its existence” (95): scientists to study the origin of this rigid, plastic mantle; travel agencies to promote and sponsor big events; and tourists to see the Ringling Brothers Circus, the Peking Acrobats, the Shakespearean Summer Festival, and the World Hockey play-offs. A young fisherman Chico Paco also journeys to the Matacão to set up a shrine for his friend Gilbert who is suffering from a strange illness. The story of the magical attachment of his altar to the Matacão—which is because, as it later turns out, they both are made of trash-turned-to-plastic—quickly spreads throughout the world. Before long, people from everywhere head to the “place of worship and the destination of pilgrimages” (51), soon to be called an “international monument” (113), to give birth, hold prayer meetings, and fast. The Matacão hence becomes “a stage for life and death” (102), and the ordinary pilgrim Chico Paco from a small fishing village emerges as a spiritual evangelist of the religious revivalist pilgrimage fad and soon starts worldwide religious broadcasting. The eccentric thingness of the Matacão, its magical magnetism, proves the agential powers of the natural-cum-artifactual object. Instead of simply existing as lifeless and now-defunct trash, the plastic mutant expresses its lively thing-power—it is shiny and magnetic, provokes commercial and spiritual possibilities, and unsettles otherwise tranquil, ordinary lives. Its solid, virtually indestructible body with the slick and shiny surface is

Animated Plastic  163 extensive and enchanting enough to entice human life to “adapt itself to the vast plastic mantle” (101; emphasis added). If thing-power is a force exercised by what is not specifically human (or even organic) and an assemblage of matter-energy “not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (Bennett, The Force 351), the lure of the Matacão is also not something that can be understood through a human-centered lens of intentionality or impersonation. Rather, the Matacão is a relatively stable thing in which a constant flow of matter-energy has been happening over the course of a century, and its allure lies in the thing-power that this temporary materiality exerts on human lives. It is when the Matacão enters the system of commodity that its spectacular magnetism reaches its climax and begins to operate differently. The theatrical metamorphosis of the gigantic plastic field into versatile and malleable raw materials, ready to be reshaped into commercial products, not only accelerates the spread of the Matacão enchantment but also enables interpenetration and incorporation between human lives and nonhuman materials. When the technology of cutting, molding, and shaping the impervious mantle is developed, the possibilities of its uncanny ­transformation are found to be almost boundless: “The remarkable thing about Matacão plastic was its incredible ability to imitate anything […] Matacão plastic was so true to reality […] [It] managed to recreate the natural glow, moisture, freshness—the very sensation of life” (142). From steel harder than diamond to silk-like thin sheets, from the construction industry to fashion, from calorie-free plastic foods to facial masks for plastic surgery, the material and commercial possibilities of the Matacão were infinite: In the next few years, Matacão plastic would infiltrate every crevice of modern life—plants, facial and physical remakes and appendages, shoes, clothing, jewelry, toys, cars, every sort of machine from electro-­ domestic to high-tech, buildings, furniture—in short, the myriad of commercial products with which the civilized world adorns itself. (143) Here, the particular mode of materiality in which the Matacão resides is a series of flexible raw material-turned-commodities that are elastically combined with other things and humans. As Wallace notes, “having come, presumably, from the exploitation and transformation of previous natural resources, this new substance becomes a natural resource in its own right, subject to new mining and generating new revenue and industry and global consumer trends alike” (143–44). Although Wallace views the Matacão-­ turned-wondrous-natural-resource as “submitting passively to the infinite whims of global consumer culture” (144), what motivates the uproarious plastic consumerism is, first and most of all, the Matacão’s marvelous capacity to be malleable, mutable, and applicable to various dimensions of

164  Jungha Kim human lives. In the vibrant Plastic Age in which plastic can mimic and become anything, infiltrates everyone’s daily lives, generates unprecedented commodities, and thus enables the entirely new ways of living, the ­Matacão does more than attract people around its glamorous surface—it now possesses the power to imitate other beings and assume myriad shapes, creating new connections and combinations between human activities and the nonhuman world (i.e., Danish furniture made of Matacão teak, facial masks applied permanently to people for everlasting youth). In the midst of the Matacão enchantment, another pole to pull and disorient the far-flung characters is another commodity—the feather. As Min Hyung Song (2011) points out, together, the Matacão and the feather are “more than clever devices allowing a host of unusual characters to meet at a site of feverish environmentalist and sociopolitical concern. Instead, they are important tropes for imagining the relationship between nature and artifice” (559). Discovered near the Matacão by local peasant Mané Pena, who “had wandered the forest like the others—fishing, tapping rubber and collecting Brazil nuts” (16), the feather turns out to have an invigorating and intoxicating power: The feather, [Mané] claimed, was better than smoking or drinking. Of course, it was not as good as sex, but what feather could compete with that? It had worked wonders on his sleepless children and was completely natural. It was like those copper bracelets everyone used for rheumatoid arthritis: if it didn’t help, it sure didn’t hurt. (18) Mysterious as it is, the thing-power of the feather is, as Mané tells skeptics, like “invisible waves, a force you can’t see” (79). As the feather gains popularity, on the Matacão it becomes “commonplace to see people walking and talking with feathers slipped comfortably above or behind their ears.” Now the tourists who come to visit the Matacão begin to carry feathers, classified and sold according to the types of consumers’ ailments or temperaments, and it is not unusual “to see people in bars, offering each other feathers and causally stroking their ears with them on animated conversations” (79). After he discovers the mysterious power of the feather, Mané’s life also undergoes a dramatic change—now known as the “feather guru” (79), he becomes an international celebrity who writes books and gives lectures, accosted by feather worshippers and marketing groups. He feels that this change is “being like one of those actors on TV who slipped from soap opera to soap opera and channel to channel, being reincarnated into some new character each time” (18). In this Plastic Age, locating new deposits of the Matacão plastic becomes a lucrative task. American entrepreneur J. B. Tweep and his New York-based global company GGG aggressively lead the search for Matacão deposits with Kazumasa and his ball (made possible by the plastic ball’s

Animated Plastic  165 magnetic attraction to the Matacão), bulldozing over any obstacles that might hinder their search: Kazumasa saw, smelled, felt and tasted everything. He saw the beauty of the land, smelled the stink of its decomposition, felt the heat of the great forest fires, tasted the sweat of human labor. And still we moved on, searching for plastic. (144–45) GGG also dominates the feather market by preemptively commodifying it: People were beginning to talk about ‘The Feather,’ and GGG was touting it like a sensation akin to Coca-Cola. GGG public relations people were promoting their product as one of those projected to become a part of American life, like coffee and orange juice at breakfast or potato chips and dip. (78) As soon as they enter the commodity system, the thing-powers of the plastic field and the feather—invisible waves, a force you can’t see, to reiterate Mané—immediately link the tiny coastal town in the global south with the economic capital of the world, New York, and amplify their versatile and commercial magnetism—the Matacão enchantment. In his reading of commodity-fetishism in Marx’s Capital, Jacques D ­ errida focuses on its haunting effects: a contagious “ghost dance” when a wooden object (a table) becomes a commodity. The sudden looming up of the mystical character of commodities occurs when an ordinary table is transformed into a commodity-table and thus enters into relations with other commodities. In this transmutation of the object-table (as a container of use-value) to the commodity-table (as an instance of exchange-value), Derrida sees the effect of the ghost dance: “yes, it puts everything around it into motion” (192). At the very moment of its stepping into the market, Marx writes, the table “not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head” (320). The transfiguration process puts the wooden object-table into motion, into endless signifying chains of commodities. The relationship between producers turns into the spectral movement of commodities; both human producers (and their social relationship) and the wooden table (and its use-value) seem to disappear in this table-turning dance but return “as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn” (Derrida 2006, 193–5). What initiates this haunting effect is the form itself: the commodity-form. Thus, it does not matter which is the ghost and which is being haunted because the haunting effect is born of a relation. Haunting begins when the commodity-form comes into being through its theatricality. Hence, the secret of the commodity-form: the object relationship between commodities is a phantasmagoric form of social

166  Jungha Kim relation between individuals. It is not that the commodity-form is a mere reflection of the social relation between people. Rather, the commodity-­ form itself embodies such a haunting (moving, changing, and transcending) relation to everything: “yes, it puts everything around it into motion.”6 Derrida’s reading of the haunting effect of the commodity focuses on the power of the commodity-form, whereas in the Matacão enchantment it is the hybrid plastic’s thing-power, its morphological mutability as a raw material that motivates the ghost dance of the commodity chain. Though the commodity-form accelerates the plastic material’s pulling force, what makes people flock to the magnetic center of the Matacão and embrace its mutations’ infiltration into their lives is the Matacão-thing’s “incredible ability to imitate anything,” recreating “the very sensation of life” (142). The feather also, with its wondrous powers of invigoration and intoxication, enters the commodity-haunting, but it does so as a sheer commodity without a manufacturing process. As Song notes, the feather has “a use value completely shorn from its source, and as much a finished good as the plastic mined from the Matacão is a raw material” (559). Soon enough, the Matacão plastic succeeds in copying various feathers and replicating their miraculous healing power so perfectly that even the feather guru Mané cannot tell the difference—and hence the thing-capacity of the Matacão ­fi nally extends beyond the recreation of the commodity to include the reproduction and reenactment of the commodity-form’s haunting effect per se.

Memory of the Animated Plastic Ball At the end of the novel, “a cloud of doom settles over the Matacão” (183). In this dystopian vision of disillusionment, the Matacão has become “the center of so much pain and doom” (183). The magnetism of the Matacão that enchanted people now puts them in a trancelike state—some people self-flagellate for spiritual encounters on the Matacão and other overdosed Carnival revelers fall prey to “red shoes syndrome” and are unable to stop dancing. Hallucinating from feather rubbing, feather worshippers and those who were experimenting with new Matacão plastic feathers believed they could fly; their bodies fell out of the sky and the feather enchantment became a nightmare. The stinking corpses of birds, poisoned by insecticides to control the typhus epidemic transmitted by bird feathers, cover the Matacão, and “for countless days and nights, it rain[s] feathers” (202). Meanwhile, the Matacão plastic that has once been impenetrable begins to be invaded by devouring bacteria. “The Matacão, too, was slowly but definitely corroding, as was everything else made of Matacão plastic. ­Buildings were condemned. Entire roads and bridges were blocked off […] [E]veryday, more and more of the Matacão disappeared” (207). The ironic twists in the catastrophic ending are, as Heise points out, “multiple, as the non-biodegradable waste turns out to be degradable after all, the rock-hard plastic turns to dust, and the healing feathers kill” (103).

Animated Plastic  167 In this ironic reversal, another plastic mutant, the plastic “I” attached to Kazumasa, also undergoes a drastic change. The vitality of the tiny ball also diminishes, its energy disperses, and is separated from ­K azumasa in the end: “One day, he [Kazumasa] touched me tenderly and was shocked to find his finger pierce the now very thin veneer of my surface. Within, I had been completely hollowed out by something, by some invisible, voracious and now-gorged thing” (206; emphasis added). The “invisible thing,” of course, literally refers to the bacteria that makes the impenetrable plastic vulnerable and porous. A careful look at the use of the term “thing,” however, turns us to the thingness of the ­M atacão and enables a reading that the voracious thing’s invasion into the plastic mutant is a thing-to-thing interpenetration or a radical intermingling between them. In this eco-catastrophic scenario, nonhuman beings, whether they be the waste-turned-plastic or unknown bacteria, are not the unavoidable consequences or passive evidence of environmental destruction by human. They operate and interact in their own unpredictable ways beyond human’s grasp, within and as effects of contingent encounter or assemblage between the thing-­c apacities. From this perspective, the plastic ball’s separation from Kazumasa and its impending death not only bespeaks the ending of a quasi-­familial kinship between human and nonhuman but also refers to the emergence of a new being (the hollowed-out ball) as an outcome of the thing-to-thing entanglement and thus makes us anticipate what would happen to the now independent nonhuman. At this disunion of the quasi-family, Yamashita bifurcates the novel’s narrative frame into a melodramatic happy ending for Kazumasa and the dead ball’s memory after death. As she writes in the author’s note, ­Yamashita places the narrative within the genre of popular entertainment with predictable conventions and familiar codes: “Brazilian soap opera” in which “most likely, the unhappy find happiness; the bad are punished; true love reigns; a popular actor is saved from death.” Despite some variations due to “the whims of public psyche and approval,” the basic elements that remain the same are “an idyll of striking innocence, boundless nostalgia and terrible ruthlessness.” As the flow of the story shows (Part I: The Beginning, Part II: The Developing World, Part III: More Development, Part IV: Loss of Innocence, Part V: More Loss, Part VI: Return), the plot seems to move toward restoration and harmony. Kazumasa’s marriage to his Brazilian maid Lourdes and the birth of a multicultural family—an image of ­“bucolic bliss” and “a return to pastoral cliché” to borrow Heise’s terms—suit the expected balance and peace. Critics have been skeptical of the novel’s happy ending, but when approached in light of the double narrative frame, Yamashita’s narrative strategy proves more complicated and nuanced. That is, the harmonious denouement completed by Kazumasa’s romance is not the end of this multidirectional plot. Rather, it is a narrative device to foreground the plastic narrator’s posthumous voice as being free

168  Jungha Kim of identity markers and to allow Kazumasa’s story to lose its singularity and fade out in the anonymity of a soap-opera ending: The loss of the ball to Kazumasa was strange, as if he had undergone radical plastic surgery. People no longer recognized him […] In this newfound sense of anonymity, Kazumasa’s old happiness about love and life in Brazil began to return. (211) Now the hollowed-out narrator is left alone and observes the devastation of the Matacão: Kazumasa and Lourdes had not waited to see if the Matacão would follow the ignominious course of the disintegrating ball. The day after my death, Kazumasa and Lourdes with Gislaine and Rubens, anxiously slipped away from the Matacão, filled with a mixed sense of relief and longing. (211) An epigrammatic sentence, “But all this happened a long time ago,” which follows Kazumasa and Lourdes’s romantic embrace on the “rich red soil of their land” (211), is a decisive demarcation that signals the divergence of Kazumasa’s melodrama and the plastic ball’s memory. With this distinction, Yamashita situates the delightful and disorienting fuss around the Matacão within the frame of the long gone telenovela and reveals the narrative present, an indeterminate future, in which the phantom plastic “I” looks back on the story of the Matacão enchantment. In this ambiguous temporal setting, it turns out that the plastic “I”’s storytelling has been performed as an event, a part of a quasi-religious ritual recalling the past, within the theatrical time of a carnivalistic play: But all this happened a long time ago. Now, you may look out across this empty field, strewn with candle wax, black chicken feathers and those eternally dead flowers, discarded jugs of cane brandy, the dirt pounded smooth by hundreds of dancing feet. Press your face into the earth where the odor of chicken fat and blood and incense still lingers and the intense staccato of the drums still quivers long after the gyrating bodies of dancers—spinning until their eyes glaze over in trance, sweat spraying forth from the tips of their hair, from the drenched outlines of swaying spines and laboring loins—are gone. The acrid stink of tobacco churned in human sweat and cane brandy still saturates the morning air. On the distant horizon, you can see the crumbling remains of once modern high-rises and office buildings, everything covered in rust and mold, twisted and poisonous lianas winding over sinking balconies, trees arching through windows, a cloud of perpetual rain and mist and evasive color hovering over everything. The old forest has returned

Animated Plastic  169 once again, secreting its digestive juices, slowly breaking everything into edible absorbent components, pursuing the lost perfection of an organism in which digestion and excretion were once one and the same. But it will never be the same again. Now the memory is complete, and I bid you farewell. Whose memory you are asking? Whose indeed. (212) The ceremony of remembering the tale of the Matacão enchantment has just ended. The entranced dancers in trance have gone, and the odor of incense mixed with the dancers’ sweat and sacrifices’ blood still lingers in the air. Those who remain are the invisible plastic storyteller, the assumed audience “you” who looks out on the crumbling ruins of the Matacão, and the old forest who “pursues the lost perfection of an organism.” I will return to the figure of the rain forest in recuperation later, but here I would like to focus on the relationship between the plastic narrator and the readerly “you,” which provides a strong clue for understanding the mysterious birth of the plastic narrator that is briefly introduced at the start of the novel. After the author’s note, in which Yamashita tells us that the story will unfold within the frame of soap opera, the first page introduces the plastic narrator “I,” who assumes an odd ontological form of memory: By a strange quirk of fate, I was brought back by a memory. Memory is a powerful sort of thing, although at the time I made my reentry into this world, no notice at all was taken of the fact. In fact, everyone was terribly busy, whirling about, panting and heaving, dizzy with the tumult of their ancestral spirits. This was one of those monthly events under the influence of the full moon on a well-beaten floor of earth on what had once been known, many years before, as the ­Matacão. That I should have been reborn like any other dead spirit in the Afro-­Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomblé is humorous to me […] Instead, brought back by a memory, I have become a memory, and as such, am commissioned to become for you a memory. (3; emphasis added) The transformation of compressed garbage into an animated ball and then into a haunting memory demonstrates the choreographic mutability of the plastic narrator—a plastic remnant’s wondrous life or its curious thingpower. Indeed, the ability to vibrate between different states of being, “from trash/inanimate/resting to treasure/animate/alert,” is one of the capacities that thing-power entails (Bennett, The Force 354). The “miniature replica of the Earth,” or a “voice that emerges from the depths of geology” (Heise 2008, 112) could have been reborn as some other lifeless object, but instead it returned as a bodiless but lively memory, “the powerful sort of thing,” by an invocation of an unknown memory after the environmental apocalypse on “what had once been known, many years before, as the Matacão.” What

170  Jungha Kim is remarkable in this passage is that Yamashita presents an obscure being, a memory, who awakens the dead ball and reincarnates it as a memory. Memory is an enigmatic mode of being, which is not necessarily human or does not specifically refer to someone’s memory. It is a memory. During Candomblé, the collective religious ritual, the plastic ball is reborn as a singular being (a memory) by the conjuration of a singular being (a memory). The nonhuman voice’s revival as a memory—the mini-Earth’s ultimate trace of being in the novel—thus signals a new affiliation between formless memories. Where the interspecies quasi-familial kinship between K ­ azumasa and the ball, along with the soap-operatic narrative form, comes to an end, an uncanny memory-being “you” summons and enlivens the dead ball to be an animated memory. As Caroline Rody notes, if what moves this “global voice” free from all the human identity markers is not omniscient knowledge but a desire for a relationship to engage readers in a global community of concern and in an urgent imperative to save the planet (637–8), I argue that it is not just the phantom “I”’s humanized longing for community but a memory-­ to-memory affiliation (not necessarily associated with the human-­centered transmission of memory) that initiates the ecocritical telenovela. By presenting together “you,” a medium and memory who invokes the dead ball at the site of the ruins of the Matacão, and the phantom narrator “I” who responds to the call and willingly becomes a memory for “you,” Yamashita renders a more ontologically generous and heterogeneous picture of ­ecocriticism—a version of eco-cosmopolitanism sensitive to the cracks in and crises of the commercially hyperconnected world that appear in the dynamic processes of human and nonhuman interactions and communications. Indeed, in its morphological resilience, the plastic ball’s thing-power revolves around its alertness to risk. From the beginning, the birth of the ball—detritus from the uncanny plastic by-product of human garbage— was itself a symptom of a global environmental crisis. Its unexpected appearance on the planet was accidental, as was its attachment to Kazumasa, and the ensuing events in Japan and Brazil are also led by the ball’s sensitivity to different levels of public danger. The ball’s ability to detect deterioration in railroad tracks earns Kazumasa a living in Japan, while later in Brazil its magnetic attraction to the plastic locates undiscovered deposits of Matacão plastic, the symbol of the postmodern danger of global environmental destruction (Rody 629). From the perspective of this peculiar genealogy of the crisis-ridden metamorphosis, the ball’s reincarnation as a memory demonstrates that remembrance is not exclusive to humans and that, whatever its expressive form is, memory is an urgent call to be alert to predicaments of globalization and to the risk of forgetting endangerment. On what form the nonhuman’s memory takes, and what differences the remembrance of the hollowed-out narrator make, Yamashita does not provide tidy answers. The narrative present, the theatrical time and space of Candomblé ritual in which the ball is invoked, is somewhere in an unknown future, and only the scents of incense and blood that linger after the

Animated Plastic  171 ceremony are depicted briefly. What matters to Yamashita is that memory can be a mode of temporary being in which the constant matter-energy of the plastic momentarily stays and that the memory-being makes a difference to the textuality of the novel. Placed between the start and the end of the Matacão enchantment, the rebirth of the ball as a memory immediately turns the hitherto coherent soap-operatic narrative space into a long past and thus tweaks and transforms the otherwise static literary textuality. Put differently, the plastic ball’s constant metamorphosis is itself a material textuality with its own narrative function and discursive involvement in the ecological crisis within and without the literary space. When the ball claims on the last page that “the memory is complete,” the rain forest standing alone, “pursuing the lost perfection of an organism” that “will never be the same” (212), is the last living text with its own material textuality beyond the margins of literary space—materiality as textuality in which the old rain forest expresses its own mode of presence and reparation, testifying to its dynamic enmeshment, in past and present, in the discursive forces of biology and technology, politics, and society. Rendering the old forest as a lively reading material without a given textual entity or interpretive code, Yamashita calls for a new literacy equipped with a considerate and careful reading of material narratives—a call for eco-cosmopolitan hermeneutics sensitive to narrative performances and configurations of meanings of lively matters in the age of crisis.

Notes 1 For a hemispheric reading of Yamashita, see Chuh (2006). Chuh introduces hemispheric studies as follows: While critically While critically mindful of and geared toward negotiating substantial unevenness in political and economic power, hemispheric studies as proposed by such scholars as Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Claire Fox complements ‘other emergent national, regional, and global perspectives in American, Canadian, and Latin American studies’ (7). Such a model attempts to decenter the US nation and critical approaches based on or derived from US centered studies even as it acknowledges the influential material power of the US. (Chuh 2006, 619) For a detailed discussion of the relationship between Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest and transpacific studies, see Lee (1999). 2 As Lee notes, This historical figure has provided grist for the mill in Asian American S­ tudies for nearly three decades. In the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Asian American historians, playwrights, and novelists recalled the labor of Chinese immigrants on the Central Pacific to make a case for national ­belonging […] Great national works such as the Central Pacific […] attest to both the part of America that is the inheritance of the Chinese and their remembered labor in the United States that made these immigrants ‘American’. (Lee 1999, 113–14)

172  Jungha Kim 3 From the author’s note. Not paginated. 4 For example, see Cheah and Robbins (1998) and Breckenridge et al. (2002). 5 As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost note in their introduction to New Materialisms, this new cultural practice disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively humans who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature. Instead, the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened. (Coole and Frost 2010, 4) 6 This discussion of Derrida’s reading of the commodity-fetishism is part of my doctoral dissertation, Trauma of Empire: Violence, Minor Affect, and the Cold War Transpacific.

Works Cited Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32, no. 3: 347–72. Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chuh, Kandice. 2006. “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World.” American Literary History 18, no. 3: 618–37. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2006 (1994). Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. 2014. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kim, Jungha. 2014. Trauma of Empire: Violence, Minor Affect, and the Cold War Transpacific. Diss. University of Pennsylvania. Koshy, Susan. 2011. “Minority Cosmopolitanism.” PMLA. 126, no. 3: 592–609. Lee, Rachel C. 1999. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Song, Min Hyoung. 2011. “Becoming Planetary.” American Literary History. 23, no. 3: 555–73. Wallace, Molly. 2016. “Letting Plastic Have Its Say: or, Plastic’s Tell.” In Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 123–53. Yamashita, Karen Tei. 1990. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.

10 Paying Attention to a World in Crisis Cosmopolitanism in Climate Fiction Paul Tenngart A distinctive feature of climate fiction is that it is overtly and directly about the whole world. Since the central theme of this kind of literature is a prolonged physical event happening in every corner of the world at the same time, climate fiction is global, in the most concrete sense of the word. The crucial setting of these narratives is thus the world as such, but this wide perspective is always combined with a more limited position, different for each particular story. As Ursula Heise points out, climate change art necessarily explores interactions between “local, regional, and global forms of inhabitation” (Heise 2008, 206). Viewed as a whole, climate fiction thus offers a diverse palette of local-global dynamics. Partly as a result of these dynamic settings, the functions, positions, and implications of cosmopolitanism occupy a central role in literary narratives on global warming. Since the turn of the century, climate fiction has emerged as a significant contribution to contemporary world literature. The genre is by no means limited to the Anglophone world. Adeline Johns-Putra acknowledges a significant number of German contributions (Johns-Putra 2016, 4), and Adam Trexler mentions Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic examples in his Anthropocene Fictions (Trexler 2015, 10). The titles referred to in these studies are, however, limited to literary works that have been translated into English, and Trexler points out the need for “cross-cultural insight” and welcomes help from “critics specializing in other languages.” In two articles, Axel Goodbody has acknowledged a range of other ­German novels (Goodbody 2012, 2013), and from my particular perspective, a significant number of Scandinavian narratives, not translated into English, can be added. A lot of work remains to be done to produce an overview of the existence of climate literature across languages and cultures, and—more importantly—to analyze how the threat of global warming is narrated differently in different languages and from different cultural points of view. This ambition would involve identifying a diversity of cosmopolitanisms. How do geographical, cultural, and linguistic differences affect the understanding and depiction of the planetary crisis? In what distinct ways is humankind’s common responsibility for the planet and for future generations displayed in world climate fictions?

174  Paul Tenngart Such an endeavor is of course too vast for a single study, let alone a chapter of this scope. More than anything, the following is to be read as a first step toward a more thorough and nuanced understanding of worldliness in climate fiction, an outline of the centrality of cosmopolitanism in the genre with reference to some of the best-known Anglophone examples and a couple of Scandinavian contributions.

Insights and Networks To substantially understand that the climate is changing due to human intervention requires a special kind of thinking that acknowledges the fact that the world is physically connected through the omnipresent, unified phenomenon of the atmosphere. Wherever human action leads to greenhouse gas emission, it will affect the entire planet, and wherever a local climate calamity occurs, it is a symptom of a global state of affairs. Being concerned with this issue, then, is to show “an overriding loyalty to and concern with the welfare of humanity as a whole,” as a new anthology describes the cosmopolitan stance (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 1). The difficulty of obtaining such a cosmopolitan mind-set and act accordingly is a central theme in many climate change novels. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is set in a small community in rural Tennessee. One day, stay-at-home wife Dellarobia Turnbow finds an enormous population of monarch butterflies in the mountain woods outside town. The vast beauty of the golden animals and their sudden appearance on this insignificant spot of the Earth are given a religious interpretation by the rural community of Feathertown. The appearance of the butterflies is a miracle, and as the first person to encounter this sign from God, ­Dellarobia’s social status is significantly improved. Not being a religious person herself, Dellarobia never takes this explanation seriously, but it is not until she talks to Mexican migrants that she starts to grasp the real reason why the butterflies are there. Lupe and Reynaldo Delgado are exotic elements in Feathertown, labeled “foreign” and associated with a “whole other world,” and their bilingual conversation with Dellarobia is made possible through a child interpreter, translating from Spanish and English (Kingsolver 2012, 95–103). The Delgado family has been forced to leave their home in Michoacán due to a flood that destroyed the village and made the monarch butterflies disappear. The sudden spell of beauty in the ­A merican town is not a miracle, Dellarobia finds out, but an effect of a natural disaster. The butterflies’ instincts are fundamentally disturbed and they will not survive for very long in the Tennessee woods. It requires experience from more than one place on Earth to arrive at this conclusion. The migration experience of the Delgado family has resulted in a wider frame of reference, enabling them to compare and acknowledge a larger pattern. Like most of the other town residents, Dellarobia has lived in rural Tennessee all her life, but unlike most of the others, she has a welcoming attitude

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  175 toward the Mexican migrants and is genuinely interested in their different background. It is this perceptive mind-set, her ability to open up and absorb diverse experiences from different parts of the world, that makes her grasp the reality of climatic change. A similar encounter across geographic and cultural borders takes place in the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, the first part of the Science in the Capital-trilogy. On her way to work at the National Science Foundation in central Washington, D.C., scientist Anna Quibler notices that there are new tenants on the ground floor of the large office building. She finds out that the former travel agency has been replaced by the Embassy of Khembalung, a tiny island country in the Bay of Bengal. Anna takes an immediate interest in the Buddhist monks arranging the new establishment and offers to show the newcomers where to find the best lunch restaurant in the area. During lunch, she learns that the island of Khembalung is severely affected by rising sea levels due to global warming. The whole culture is radically threatened. Setting up an embassy in the United States is the islanders’ desperate attempt to make the world community do something about the accelerating effects of climate change. In her strong interest in the foreign newcomers Anna shows an open-minded, international attitude from the very start, but through the direct encounter with the monks her abstract inclination is transformed into an actual, personal contact with the world. Indeed, learning about how Khambalung was founded by Tibetan migrants escaping the Chinese invasion in the 1950s only to find themselves in the middle of the border conflict between China and India in 1960 and the India-Pakistan war in 1970, Anna receives a substantial lecture on world history from the monks. The first chapter of the novel is adequately titled “The Buddha Arrives.” Through Anna Quibler’s encounter with the Khembalung monks, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy on the difficult struggle to make climate change the central issue of US politics starts off with an account of how the outside world suddenly arrives in the American capital. With this arrival, Anna’s life is cosmopolitanized, and so is the urban landscape of Washington (Robinson 2004). In Liz Jensen’s thriller The Rapture, the cosmopolitan mind-set is depicted in a much more dramatic—and fantastic—way. A British teenage girl, Bethany Krall, institutionalized for the murder of her mother, has visions of specific climate disasters, predicting exact dates and locations. When these visions one by one turn out to be true, her therapist decides to take action, especially since the catastrophes are getting more and more disastrous, and—more importantly—successively come closer to the British Isles. Bethany can be interpreted symbolically as a hyperbolic version of the climate change whistle-blower. Her paranormal visions have the same mysterious ontology that the idea of global warming had—and perhaps still has—for many people. Since nobody wants these pessimistic future forecasts to be true, they are easily dismissed as metaphysical nonsense only a certain circle of gloomy, self-important killjoys believe in, despite the

176  Paul Tenngart fact that these visions continually are confirmed step by step. This ostrich attitude is kept intact until the disaster comes to the doorstep and strikes locally and personally. By then it’s too late: the crescendo of Jensen’s novel is a graphic depiction of how a North Atlantic tsunami, caused by methane gas leaking through the ocean floor and foreseen by the clairvoyant teenager, destroys London. What Jensen’s novel is symbolically representing, then, is a general inability to think globally unless and until planetary phenomena distinctly affect your own immediate surroundings and your own personal circumstances. The human capacity to de-territorialize and depersonalize the mind comes across as the most crucial factor in the struggle to prevent and reduce future calamities (Jensen 2009). However, personal insights as such will not, these novels clearly point out, lead to necessary action. Individual convictions of the climate crisis need to be connected to networks of people sharing a cosmopolitan attitude. In Flight Behavior, Dellarobia’s notion of the butterflies being more than a wonderful gift is not fully confirmed until she comes in contact with ­Professor Ovid Byron, a biologist from the University of New Mexico setting up camp in Feathertown to study the disturbed migration pattern of the monarch butterflies. Through Byron and his team, the uneducated stay-at-home wife distances herself from the locally rooted community and gradually finds a place in the mobile world of successful scientists. Ovid Byron is described as genuinely cosmopolitan. Being highly educated and experienced, he adds an exotic air of fine manners and eloquence to the Turnbow household when invited to dinner (Kingsolver 2012, 114–19). He is born somewhere in the Caribbean, which makes his identity difficult to point down: he definitely comes “from other lands” Kingsolver (2012, 114), but he is also described as “African American, but not totally” ­(Kingsolver 2012, 107). He speaks with a foreign accent, “like a reggae singer” ­(Kingsolver 2012, 105), and his looks are connected to Bob M ­ arley as well as Barack Obama. His personal trajectory toward the world of science is that of the privileged cosmopolitan: “But life,” he says to the geographically, culturally, and socially entrapped Turnbow family, “has given me opportunities to wander north, you see, looking for things that interest me a lot” (Kingsolver 2012, 119). This position is distinctly shown in his name, combining two of the best-known poets in world literary history, one from Ancient Rome and one from British Romanticism. On their first encounter, Ovid Byron also manages to give Dellarobia’s name an international validity by pointing out that she must be named after the ­Italian Renaissance painter Della Robbia, whom the Tennessee wife has never heard of ­(Kingsolver 2012, 105). This transformation of Dellarobia’s name signifies a first step toward a new identity and foreshadows her move from a locally rooted community to a cosmopolitan network. In the opening chapters of The Rapture, therapist Gabrielle Fox finds no way of dealing with the clairvoyant visions offered by the violent and hostile teenage girl. None of her colleagues take her warnings seriously,

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  177 and—more poignantly—her predecessor in treating the disturbed girl has left her employment at the psychiatric hospital, disgraced and deemed mentally instable. Gabrielle has no channels by which to communicate her warnings and no social contexts in which to discuss the paranormal visions until she meets a successful physicist, Frazer Melville. Through their romantic relationship, Gabrielle reaches Frazer’s contacts among the international elite of leading scientists—a Greek geologist, a Dutch meteorologist, a Chinese volcanologist. Gabrielle and Frazer eventually form a transnational group of resistance, fighting the all-empowering refusal to do anything about the acute climate catastrophe. Being a successful scientist herself, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Anna ­Quibler already has a strong national network of leading American scientists. Working for the National Science Foundation she indeed decides what kind of research is to be carried out. Even so, her capacity to act upon her reaction of the monks’ predicament is significantly strengthened by the fact that her husband, Charlie, works for Senator Phil Chase as his environmental policy advisor. Charlie Quibler and Senator Chase are genuinely cosmopolitan. In the opening chapters of the novel, they are working hard on a bill that they hope will make the US government accept UN demands on mitigating greenhouse gas emission. Chase is the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has been to “a lot of places” and even visited Khambalung. He is also “a very helpful guy” (Robinson 2004, 69). Anna has, then, an intimate contact with the most powerful of American cosmopolitans, and the Khambalung ambassadors are extremely lucky to have come across exactly her of all the people crowding the streets of Washington. When she invites them home for dinner to meet Charlie, their diligent cosmopolitan strategy seems to eventually pay off. They established their embassy with help from other nations vulnerable to rising sea levels (Holland, Fiji, and Tuvalu), and through this establishment, they reach Anna, Charlie, and Senator Chase. Their network is growing in width and power, increasing their capacity to reduce the disastrous consequences of climatic change.

Destructive Transnationalism In Kingsolver’s, Jensen’s, and Stanley Robinson’s novels, cosmopolitanism has a fundamentally constructive position, paving the way for knowledge and necessary action against global warming. In other narratives, however, an international approach to life is depicted not only as a means of receiving insights and establishing collaboration but also as one of the central problems causing climatic change, or a hurdle that needs to be overcome in our attempts to reduce its effects. In his Det som inte växer är döende (What doesn’t grow is dying), ­Swedish novelist Jesper Weithz presents a story about a prosperous couple finding themselves in the middle of a global natural disaster. Due to severe complications with her pregnancy, Lotte needs to leave Sweden to

178  Paul Tenngart seek expert medical treatment in Sao Paulo. She and their daughter are supposed to take a flight directly to Brazil, but her husband Henrik must go via London to take care of a business situation before joining them in South ­A merica. When the effects of global warming lead to floods, demonstrations, transport strikes, and attacks on airports, the family reunion is delayed and Lotte’s condition becomes critical. Henrik and Lotte are stranded in different parts of the world. The fact that the couple is about to travel all the way to a clinic in Brazil for Lotte’s treatment clearly illustrates their position as privileged citizens of the world: they have the knowledge, the contacts and the resources to come up with and realize this transcontinental idea. And the fact that Henrik needs to take the detour via London strongly confirms this status. He owns a big company with coworkers, clients and investors in many countries. The best place for him to meet his close assistant Jonatan is at London’s King’s Cross station, where “the whole world” seem to have gathered, “but only in passing, on their way to somewhere else” (Weithz 2012, 13. My translation). That Henrik and Jonatan choose to drink tea at King’s Cross due to their ambition to always learn “the habits of your host country” sums up their cosmopolitan lifestyle and attitude (Weithz 2012, 17. My translation). Henrik is sympathetically portrayed. He cares for his family, he wants to build a boathouse that will “become one with nature” (Weithz 2012, 8. My translation), and he buys organic coffee and organic hazelnut spread. His international living, however, has forced him to become a frequent flyer. He is constantly in the air: The time zones tore him apart. Wherever he was in the world, he remained in another time. Lotte’s time. He could sit in a taxi in Mumbai, look at his watch showing 04.27 and think 22.57, almost time to sleep. Could wake up in summer damp Toronto. Flown in via Newark and after that a couple of hours’ sleep in a luxurious hotel suite. The digits on the telly claimed that it was a quarter past nine in the morning although it really was just after midnight. Toronto didn’t understand. Forty-five minutes later he entered a seminar as Keynote Speaker and could not understand that all the people had gathered in the middle of the night, to listen to him. (Weithz 2012, 14. My translation) When this account of his jetlag lifestyle is followed by Henrik trying to order an organic coffee at King’s Cross, the irony isn’t lost on the reader. What does his well-intended attempt to buy an environmentally friendly hot drink amount to in comparison with the tons of carbon dioxide emissions his everyday life perpetually produces? His coffee gesture is further diminished by the fact that his request is turned down. Due to delayed

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  179 transport, presented as a recurring and well-known problem, there is no organic coffee available at the café. The significance is clear: organic coffee is at odds with the cosmopolitan lifestyle of constant and rapid movement across the globe. In a world controlled by the jet engine, climate-friendly agriculture and trade hopelessly lag behind. When the effects of global warming personally and painfully strike Henrik and his family, the blame is on himself and his fellow frequent flyers. Another irony, more satirically presented, occurs in Ian McEwan’s Solar. With a fresh scientific and financial interest in solar energy, British physicist Michael Beard is invited to a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary convention on climate change mitigation in Svalbard. Reluctantly and skeptically, he learns about climate art projects and is forced to participate in snowmobile excursions. The convention comes across as pointless, a self-indulgent and self-congratulatory gathering of cosmopolitan do-gooders, putting on a show of caring for the world. This is hardly the way the world will be saved. On the contrary, bringing all the participants together to this remote place, flying them in from all over the world, only contributes with more carbon emissions, speeding up global warming. But Beard has no ethical interest in developing alternative energy sources. He is only in it for the money and the personal recognition. Beard belongs to quite a different transcultural context: the international elite of science. He has already received the Nobel Prize in physics and has a huge impact on the worldwide scene of scientific innovation and investment. Solar energy is an opportunity for him to make an even bigger name for himself, to make people admire him even more. The hierarchical system of stardom, bureaucracy, and conservative power structures in world science gives Beard the opportunity to develop solar energy instead more ethically driven scientists. And Beard is not the right man for the job. His expensive and carelessly designed endeavor eventually fails, and the chance to replace fossil fuels before it’s too late goes down the drain. McEwan’s novel thus conveys two kinds of destructive transcultural lines of action: the ethically and ideologically driven mobilization is nothing but yet another meaningless addition to human emissions, and the international scientific system spoils the opportunity to bring about a necessary change by putting the wrong person in charge. Our chances to react adequately to the challenges of global warming are slim. The future looks dismal (McEwan 2010). A more concrete example of negative international collaboration is shown in the Norwegian series Okkupert (Occupied), partly created by the best-selling author Jo Nesbø (Okkupert 2015–2017). When the first season begins, an environmentalist party has won the Norwegian national election and its leader, Jesper Berg, has just taken office as the country’s Prime Minister. One of Berg’s first decisions is to cut off all production of oil and gas in the North Sea. The plan is to replace fossil fuel with thorium-based nuclear power, an emission-free technology under development. Since all the European countries are fundamentally dependent on Norwegian oil,

180  Paul Tenngart Berg’s decision leads to an acute energy crisis in the European Union (EU). The political leaders of the EU enroll Russia to occupy Norway and force Berg to resume the country’s fossil fuel production. This conflict shows not only the restrictive consequences of international energy trade but also the potentially devastating effects of supranational control and transnational collaboration. In order to fight the global climate crisis, a national perspective comes across as much more constructive than an international one. If Norway’s national concerns and decisions were respected, Berg’s radical environmental policy would perhaps set a constructive example, forcing other states to replace their use of fossil fuel and leading the way toward solving the global climate crisis. But the Norwegians aren’t allowed to follow their own hearts and minds. The world leaders burst in to fight for the short-term, common interest of all Europeans.

Possible Solutions Everything international is not positively charged in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. When the Turnbow family is Christmas shopping, for example, the parents search the bargain shelves in the local store for cheap plastic toys made in China. The social critique of economic globalization is evident: all the underprivileged Tennessee family can afford are products made by equally underprivileged workers on the other side of the planet (Kingsolver 2012, 167–76). This critique of course also concerns the environmental consequences of the internationalized world order of trade. The globalized capitalist system fuels the atmosphere with enormous amounts of carbon emission in order to produce and distribute affordable rubbish. This economic globalization is contrasted with the life-changing effect Ovid ­Byron’s cosmopolitan presence has on Dellarobia. She yearns for getting out of the geographically and socially narrow conditions of Feathertown, and with the help of Ovid she eventually manages to leave her husband and the suffocating community behind to start a new life in a university town. On the last pages of the novel, she is getting prepared to enter a wider world while the flood rises higher and higher on the fields surrounding their family home. This way, the story of natural disaster ends on a hopeful note. The personal trajectory of Dellarobia comes across as a small step toward a solution: if many people go through similar processes of cosmopolitanization, there might still be a chance for us to save the planet. A similar change takes place in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, albeit on a much higher level of impact. The appearance of the ­K hembali monks in Washington, D.C., not only cosmopolitanizes Anna Quibler’s thinking and opens up a channel into American politics. More im­ hembalis portantly in the long run, Anna arranges a lecture in which the K explain the Buddhist view on science and knowledge that has a fundamental impact on Frank Vandervaal, a leading American scientist. Shaken by the monks’ alternative take on the role and function of science, Frank sees

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  181 the light: to have a substantial impact in a time of global crisis, science must be cosmopolitanized, steered toward one common goal and executed with passion. The only solution to the acute climate disaster is to organize “all the scientific bodies on Earth into one larger body, a kind of UN of scientific organizations” (Robinson 2004, 321). The united scientists need to sidestep the existing political system and fight the all-empowering “free-market religion” (Robinson 2004, 323). “Business as usual won’t work” ­(Robinson 2004, 320). Frank concludes, “There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. […] Free-market fundamentalists are dragging us back to some dismal feudal eternity and destroying everything in the process” (Robinson 2004, 210). In the third part of the trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting, Frank’s struggle eventually pays off when his ambitious efforts contribute to rewriting the landscape of American science and national politics, paving the way for Senator Chase, who becomes the first environmentalist president in American history (Robinson 2007). Kingsolver’s and Robinson’s stories express the same kind of solution to the climate crisis. People must be taught to lift their minds from their immediate, local circumstances and see the bigger picture. They need to learn the art of “paying attention to the real world” (Robinson 2004, 269), which will only come about through direct encounters with people from elsewhere. The globalized economic system of free-market capitalism, on the other hand, prevents this shift of attention, pacifying people and limiting their ability to act and think beyond personal short-term conditions. This distinction between cosmopolitanism and globalization mirrors scientific models on the possibilities to mitigate and adapt to climate change in different future societies. In the future scenarios called “shared socioeconomic pathways” (SSPs), for example, five different possible conditions are distinguished. SSP1 (“Sustainability”) illustrates the most efficient way to tackle climatic change. This kind of future society faces the lowest challenges of both mitigation and adaptation due to “effective and persistent cooperation and collaboration of local, national, and international organizations and institutions, the private sector, and civil society.” SSP3 (“Regional ­R ivalry”), on the other hand, depicts the most difficult pathway. This future society is characterized by “[a] resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts” that “push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues.” The other three SSPs convey different kinds of combinations of the two more univocal pathways. SSP2 (“Middle of the Road”) is a “business as usual” scenario with continued use of fossil resources. SSP4 (“Inequality”) is a future scenario in which increasing inequalities and uneven technological and economic development lead to low challenges to mitigation but high challenges to adaptation. SSP5 (“Fossil-fueled Development”), finally, is characterized by a high economic growth and increasingly integrated global markets. ­Challenges to adaptation are low. Due to a low global environmental concern, however, challenges to mitigation are high (O’Neill et al. 2017: 170ff).

182  Paul Tenngart Even though it is not unproblematic to compare these scientific scenarios with literary fiction, it is easy to detect similar basic principles in the two kinds of future narratives (see Nikoleris, Stripple and Tenngart 2017). The huge problems in adapting are summed up by the words rivalry and inequality, combining an attitude of competition, nationalism, and intolerance with a distinctly uneven division of resources and opportunities. The societal forces described in these scenarios are very similar to the anti-­cosmopolitan stance the protagonists of Flight Behavior and Forty Signs of Rain struggle with. The highest challenge for mitigation is summed up by rivalry and fossil-fueled development, in which the latter is an increased “business as usual,” where existing economic structures are given free hands to race forwards. SSP5 neatly confirms Frank Vandervaal’s notion that economic mechanisms are unable to deal with catastrophe. The overarching narrative of Robinson’s Science in the Capital-trilogy is a development toward the societal conditions described in SSP1 (Nikoleris, Stripple and Tenngart 2017, 313), and if the personal development of Dellarobia Turnbow is just an individual example of a larger process toward global awareness, the Ovid Byrons of the world may eventually reduce the destructive forces of rivalry, inequality, and the fossil-fueled capitalist highway. Flight Behavior and Science in the Capital belong to the most optimistic end of climate fiction. They both communicate hope and point to a constructive way forward. The majority of climate narratives are far more pessimistic, which corresponds with a less positive—and sometimes more complex—view of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. In McEwan’s ­Solar, environmentalist cosmopolitanism does not come across as a potential solution to the climate crisis. As the narrative unfolds, the impact of idealism is rapidly shaken off through the satirical episode in Svalbard, where Michael Beard is unable to properly communicate with the sound artists, ice sculptors, and choreographers. The only possible way to deal with global warming, it seems in this novel, is to follow the business-as-­ usual-highway of capitalist globalization. Our only option to deal with the acute climate crisis is to make alternative energy sources profitable for investors, and this is indeed what Beard sets out to do with his attempt to efficiently produce solar energy in a newly established plant in New Mexico. Due to greed, pride, and other personal flaws, Beard’s new technology of artificial photosynthesis fails. In the hands of a more suitable leadership, Beard’s project might have been successful. Beard has in fact stolen the idea from one of his assistants, Tom Aldous. Being a much more passionate and idealistic physicist with an honest interest in global warming, Tom shares many personal traits with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Frank Vandervaal, and it’s only due to a bizarre case of bad luck that his ideas fall into the lap of Beard. Tom’s untimely and sudden death is not, however, the only reason Beard is given a chance to make a strong contribution to mitigating global carbon emissions. Without his position as a Nobel laureate and member of many international scientific boards, he wouldn’t be successful in raising

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  183 the money to develop the new technology. A passionate, earnest, uncompromising, and noncompetitive scientist like Tom Aldous would not stand a chance in the all-empowering reality of international finance. Earnest collaboration and idealist intervention are thus not options in the bleak world of Solar, and the possibility to act constructively within the existing system of international capitalism is highly uncertain, almost as impossible. In Liz Jensen’s The Rapture, the mechanisms of finance and economic globalization are not the problem. Here, the crucial obstacles are rather indifferent and passive attitudes, religious zeal and the rigid nature of international science. Resistance to “business as usual” comes far too late. Gabrielle Fox and her international group of climate whistle-blowers are unable to prevent the tsunami hitting the coasts of Great Britain, and their warnings don’t lead to London being evacuated in time. This failure has partly to do with the fact that the international elite of scientists does not take the call for action seriously. Only a very limited number of leading experts think Fox is worth listening to. Mostly, the sphere of international science proves unhelpful, stuck as it is in a limited, Western attitude to evidence and truth. Indirectly, Jensen’s novel illustrates the culturally biased notion of cosmopolitanism: it is not global, but an international attitude rooted in a privileged Western position. It is “a badge of privilege,” forming a prerogative to define the world and how it works (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 3). In Okkupert, the consequences of international cooperation are not univocally depicted. The intervention into Norwegian domestic affairs from the EU and Russia is clearly linked to the mechanisms of a globalized economy. Decisions and events in the United States and the Middle East have made the European countries strongly dependent on Norwegian oil, and the aggressive act is made out of desperation to maintain business as usual. When the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jesper Berg, is forced into exile, however, he gathers an international network to help him fight the occupation from abroad and eventually return to Norway. This struggle requires a politically driven international collaboration unconnected to financial objectives. But Berg’s international collaborators are not only motivated by environmental aims. His resistance is also made possible by a strong anti-­ Russian sentiment in certain European countries. And Berg’s final return to his chaotic homeland, in the last episode of season two, has claimed several casualties and a ruthless manipulation of innocent people. In the ­Norwegian series, then, there is no distinct constructive way forward in a time of acute climate crisis, and internationalism is depicted as a double-­ edged sword.

Global Warming and Isolation Cosmopolitanism not only affects the efficiency of fighting global warming, the cosmopolitan lifestyle is also affected by the crisis. A recurring theme in

184  Paul Tenngart these stories is that climatic change has a strongly limiting effect on the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. The kind of society in the SSPs with the least potential to successfully deal with the challenges of climate change—the “rocky road,” characterized by conflict, nationalism, and ­intolerance—is often depicted in the literary narratives as a consequence of global warming. If we combine the ideas in the SSPs with the climate stories, then, we end up with a vicious circle: suspicion, protectionism, and isolation thrive on global warming, creating attitudes and structures that are very disadvantageous for both mitigation and adaptation. In Saci Lloyd’s youth novel The Carbon Diaries 2015, in which the ­British Brown family is trying to adapt to new laws prompted by the effects of climate change, the lives of the family members are crucially circumscribed. In the diary of the sixteen-year-old Laura Brown, the reader learns that her older sister, Kim, is practically prohibited from spending her vacations abroad. The British government has introduced a system of carbon dioxide allowance, in which each household is given “200 Carbon Points per month to spend on travel, heat, and food” (Lloyd 2008, 5). The return trip to Ibiza that Kim is planning is worth 100 points, which would give the whole family “hardly nothing to survive on for the rest of the month” (Lloyd 2008, 39). When Kim ignores the regulations and goes to Ibiza anyway, the family is in deep trouble. Trips abroad are impossible. The British people have to stay on their island. This new state of affairs has a devastating effect on Laura’s father, who is fired from his position as the head of the Department of Travel and Tourism at a university. Since no one is able to go anywhere, his whole discipline is dead (Lloyd 2008, 74). The climate changed future world of The Carbon Diaries 2015 is a world of immobility, isolation and significantly reinforced national borders. In Liz Jensen’s The Rapture, the anti-cosmopolitan effects of climate change are less colloquially and more dramatically narrated. The never-­ ending grip of “merciless” temperatures results in a global economic clash making many British expatriates return to their native UK (Jensen 2009, 3, 10, and 23). Global warming also fosters a religious revival called “the Faith Wave,” with a significant growth of fundamentalist Christianity (Jensen 2009, 10). The British people experience a “compassion fatigue” and a wave of resentment toward illegal immigrants and asylum seekers (Jensen 2009, 5), and when the huge statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, Cristo Redentor, collapses and crashes into the mountainside in a storm caused by climatic change, the mix of religion and intolerance evolves into a worldwide battle: “Anti-Muslim rioting flares across the world, countered by anti-Christian demonstrations and the burning of crosses: a war of ideologies, sparked by a falling chunk of stone” (Jensen 2009, 84). Lloyd’s and Jensen’s novels are both set in a near future in which the social fabrics are similar to present-day societies. They can be categorized as apocalyptic stories, describing the actual event of the catastrophe. In post-apocalyptic narratives, set in societies evolved after a radical break,

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  185 the disastrous effects of global warming on cosmopolitanism are more fundamental. A well-known example is the series The Handmaid’s Tale from 2017, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel from 1985. In Atwood’s original story, there is no mention of climate change. The fatal decrease in human fertility that initiates the US coup d’état and leads to the foundation of a whole new society and the constitution of Gilead is an effect of human pollution but not carbon emissions and global warming (Atwood 1985, 141). The theme of climate change is added by the writers of the TV series, bringing the narrative up-to-date with contemporary environmental anxieties. By its leaders, the Commanders, Gilead is presented as an environmentally ideal state able to adapt to a climate changed world and strongly mitigate the sources of global warming. While Mexico is having huge problems with new weather patterns, “just like the rest of the world,” Gilead can boast of having “transitioned to a completely organic agricultural model” and “reduced its carbon emissions by 78% in three years.” The new society of Gilead, the Commanders say, is created for the sake of future generations. Their aim is to “save the planet” (The Handmaid’s Tale 2017, episode 6). Gilead is a totalitarian and strongly nationalist state. Any oppositional act or word is brutally stopped, the country’s borders are completely closed, and the citizens trying to escape to Canada are shot on the spot. All kinds of communication with the outside world have been made impossible, except for the Commanders, who try to keep up international trade to avoid the currency to “fall off a cliff” (The Handmaid’s Tale 2017, episode 6). The constituting founders of Gilead are dealing with the challenges of climate change by isolating the country from international interaction and establishing a totally new, reactionary society. Foreign nations view them as “fucking freaks” (The Handmaid’s Tale 2017, episode 6); The Gileads’ planetary objective to save the earth thus results in a nationalist attitude of turning their backs on the rest of the world. Another illustrative, but less spread, example is Swedish author Nils ­Håkanson’s novel Ödmården. The story takes place in the late twenty-­ second century, when floods, rising sea levels, and storms have divided Sweden into small, self-dependent regions. The novel’s untranslatable title refers to one of these regions and describes its isolation: mården refers to the dominating mammal in the area, the marten, and öd is a regional word for “estate,” with a distinct connotation to the Swedish word for “deserted,” “öde.” In Ödmården, there are no vehicles, no houses, and no monetary system. Apart from a brief spell thanks to an archaeological find, there is neither any electricity. The Ödmården people’s only communication with the outside world is made by foot, through running messengers and through walking to the nearby market. In fact, the locals do their very best to avoid outside contact, since the Dutch pose a constant threat, having fled their sunken native soil to invade Scandinavia. The Ödmården people live in caves, continuously in conflict with the Dutch and with each other, surviving on the meagre offerings of the marsh landscape and the adjacent

186  Paul Tenngart forest. The regional isolation is epitomized by the novel’s narrative style. Written as a first person testimony, the prose is a strange mix of dialectal colloquialisms and old Swedish spelling and grammar found in randomly survived books. Indeed, when the narrator speaks of “OUR world,” he refers to nothing wider than the tiny patch of flooded land called Ödmården (Håkanson 2017, 46. My translation). The reality of the Ödmården people is strongly immobile and rooted in their immediate surroundings, and their knowledge, thinking, language, and attention are strictly local.

Climate Cosmopolitanism These narratives on the changing climate not only convey different attitudes to cosmopolitanism but also present different kinds of cosmopolitanism, sometimes in opposition to each other and sometimes potentially merged. David Hollinger’s description of a new idea of cosmopolitanism emerging at the end of the last century in contrast to the old, traditional definition will help us distinguish between different transnational positions in climate fiction (Hollinger 2001). Whereas the older version of cosmopolitanism is a singular, normative ideal available as an option for certain people with a privilege to choose an identity and lifestyle, new cosmopolitanisms occur “wherever and whenever history has set peoples in transnational motion, sometimes very forcibly” (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 1). Rather than a single, normative view of the world, the latter is a plural term for different, particular mandatory positions of “nonelite collectivities” (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 3). Barbara Kingsolver’s characterization of Ovid Byron represents a very positive take on the normative kind of cosmopolitanism. This scientist has very clear ideas about his position in the world and how he can contribute to the greater good. His intentions are thoroughly benign, and his actions turn out to be productive. He is well aware of his privileged position, but he is doing his utmost to use this privilege to the benefit of humanity. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Anna, Charlie, and Senator Chase are also cosmopolitan in the traditional sense. They see themselves as open-minded and tolerant, but they are also strongly convinced that their view of the world is the right one. Through their powerful contacts, they are determined to act upon this conviction. Jesper Weithz’ and Ian McEwan’s normative cosmopolitans are not as sympathetically portrayed. Both Henrik and the participants in the Svalbard workshop come across as naïve and unaware of how the world really works. They don’t have bad intentions, but they are unable to reflect upon their privileges and its consequences. The international attitudes of McEwan’s Michael Beard and the ­European leaders in Okkupert are not presented as cosmopolitan, not even in the liberal sense of world trade being for the greater good of humankind. Their objectives are too narrow and selfish, and their actions predominantly serve themselves and their peers. Jensen’s skeptical scientists, dismissing the value

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  187 of Bethany’s visions, convey a more cosmopolitan mind-set. They really believe that science is an absolute truth, unbiased by cultural and social differences, and that the pursuit of mathematical logic is beneficial for everyone. Despite their nationalism and intolerance, even the Gilead Commanders in The Handmaid’s Tale show a cosmopolitan objective when they claim to serve the planet and future generations. This attitude is strongly normative ­ obbins and and firmly moral, and it poignantly confirms one of Bruce R Paolo Lemos Horta’s descriptions of old cosmopolitanism: it is indeed “an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction” (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 1). Some of these stories, however, also present quite a different kind of transnational experience and mind-set. Kingsolver’s Mexican migrants, who give Dellarobia her first inclination of the monarch butterflies’ connection to global warming, have indeed been forcibly set in transnational motion, and so have Kim Stanley Robinson’s Khembali monks when they establish an embassy in Washington in a desperate attempt to save their flooded island. Meeting these two kinds of migrants, Dellarobia and Frank Vandervaal make direct contact with people subjected to new cosmopolitanisms, and the encounters give them firsthand testimonies of particular, rooted stories from the outside world. Compared to the skeptical scientific elite, even clairvoyant Bethany Krall can be read as an exponent of a nonnormative cosmopolitanism. Being a convicted murderer and an arrested inmate of a psychiatric hospital, Bethany has the least privileged and least mobile of positions, and she hasn’t chosen to have visions of climate disasters. Her visions are images of particular events from all over the world that are forced upon her. When Gabrielle cannot help but take Bethany’s dreams seriously, a nonelite collectivity of global insights is established that none of them has chosen to be part of. And the metaphysical origin of Bethany’s and Gabrielle’s warnings pose a fundamental threat to the normatively cosmopolitan stance of mathematical logic. In Flight Behavior, Science in the Capital and The Rapture the two kinds of cosmopolitanism are combined. The normative, ethical, and privileged ideal of Ovid Byron, Senator Chase, and a few open-minded scientists in Jensen’s novel is merged with particular, unwanted, transnational experiences, making the cosmopolitan stance a human necessity rather than a comfortable and self-righteous choice of identity. The narrative patterns of ­ ellarobia these novels follow the same route: from the Delgado family via D to Ovid Byron, from the Khembali experience via Frank to Senator Chase and his presidency, and from Bethany via Gabrielle to the international group of resistance, the cosmopolitan experience travels upwards in impact from nonelite collectivities to powerful positions by bringing the forced, unwanted cosmopolitanisms into a normative cosmopolitan ideal. Perhaps, then, this dialectical combination could be seen as a third kind of cosmopolitanism, a climate cosmopolitanism that conveys an overriding concern with the welfare of humanity and the rest of the planet, based on direct encounters with different particular traumas and fueled by an acute necessity to act.

188  Paul Tenngart As one of their starting points in the anthology Cosmopolitanisms, editors Robbins and Lemos Horta ask “how much of the concept’s old normative sense is preserved and transformed” by the particularities of new cosmopolitanisms more than fifteen years after David Hollinger’s article from 2001 (Robbins and Lemos Horta 2017, 2). Well, one significant change in the literary landscape since the turn of the century is undoubtedly the rise of climate fiction, and some of these climate narratives suggest one possible answer to this question: in the increasingly acute crisis of global warming, a normative cosmopolitan ideal is more needed than ever, but climate change will remain an elusive abstraction unless it is supported by particular testimonies of concrete, local consequences. When Dellarobia Turnbow decides to leave Feathertown to pursue a more fulfilling life elsewhere, she is not only nurturing a dream of personal development. She is also escaping a home acutely threatened by the rising flood. Cosmopolitanism is not an abstract luxury, but a tangible necessity.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClellan and Stewart. Goodbody, Axel. 2012. “Frame Analysis and the Literature of Climate Change.” In Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. ———. 2013. “Melting Ice and the Paradoxes of Zeno: Didactic Impulses and Aesthetic Distanciation in German Climate Change Fiction.” European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 4: 92–102. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Hollinger, David A. 2001. “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way.” Constellations 8, no. 2: 236–48. Håkanson, Nils. 2017. Ödmården. Stockholm: Bonniers. Jensen, Liz. 2009. The Rapture. London: Bloomsbury. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2016. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-fi, Climate Change Theatre and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WIREs Clim Change 7: 266–82. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2012. Flight Behavior. New York: Harper. Lloyd, Saci. 2008. The Carbon Diaries 2015. London: Hodder Children’s Books. Macfarlane, Robert. 2005. “The Burning Question.” The Guardian, September 24. McEwan, Ian. 2010. Solar. London: Jonathan Cape. Nikoleris, Alexandra, Johannes Stripple, and Paul Tenngart. 2017. “Narrating Climate Futures: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Literary Fiction.” Climatic Change 143: 307–19. Okkupert. 2015–2017. Created by Karianne Lund, Jo Nesbø and Erik Skjoldbjærg. TV2 Norge, Viaplay and Yellow Bird. O’Neill, Brian C., Elmar Kriegler, Kristie L. Ebi, Eric Kemp-Benedict, Keywan Riahi, Dale S. Rothman, Bas J. van Ruijven, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Joern Birkmann, Kasper Kok, Marc Levy, and William Solecki. 2017. “The Roads Ahead: Narratives for Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Describing World Futures in the 21st Century.” Global Environmental Change 42: 169–80.

Paying Attention to a World in Crisis  189 Robbins, Bruce, and Paolo Lemos Horta. 2017. “Introduction.” In Cosmopolitanisms, edited by Bruce Robbins and Paolo Lemos Horta. New York: New York University Press. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2004. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam. ———. 2005. Fifty Degrees Below. New York: Bantam. ———. 2007. Sixty Days and Counting. New York: Bantam. The Handmaid’s Tale. 2017. Created by Bruce Miller. Daniel Wilson Production, Inc., The Littlefield Company, White Oak Pictures, MGM Television and Hulu Originals. Trexler, Adam, and Adeline Johns-Putra. 2011. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism.” WIREs Clim Change 2: 185–200. Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Weithz, Jesper. 2012. Det som inte växer är döende. Stockholm: Natur och kultur.

List of Contributors

Mary Anne Lewis Cusato is Assistant Professor of Modern Foreign Languages at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she also serves as Assistant Director of the Global Studies Institute. She holds a PhD in French from Yale University. She teaches French language at all levels as well as courses on the French-speaking world outside of France, with an emphasis on francophone North Africa. Her most recent publications appear in such journals as Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, The Journal of North African Studies, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Expressions maghrébines. Her book project, “Marketing the Maghreb,” examines the relationships among marketing strategies, reading and interpretation practices, and authorial voice in an era of globalization. Katherine Hallemeier is Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Her work on contemporary anglophone fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Studies in the Novel. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (2013). Jungha Kim is Assistant Professor of English at Seoul National University in Korea. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in American Literature, Asian American studies, and trauma theory. Her recent publications include essays on Jane Jeong Trenka in the Amerasia Journal and on Aimee Phan in Contemporary Literature. Suha Kudsieh  is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten ­Island, City University of New York (CUNY). She specializes in comparative and world literatures. Her research on cross-cultural encounters and Middle Eastern literature (medieval–modern) has appeared in The Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif, and Thamyris. Her work has also appeared in two edited volumes: Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam (Brill, 2016) and Travel Writing in the Mediterranean (Legenda, 2011).

192  List of Contributors Mukti Lakhi Mangharam  is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her book Literatures of Liberation: Non European Universalisms and Democratic Progress (Ohio State University Press, 2017) explores local traditions of democratic liberation in Indian and South African literatures. She has published widely on postcolonial and world literatures in journals including ELH, Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Diacritics, ARIEL, and Safundi. Ana Cristina Mendes is Assistant Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her areas of specialization are cultural and postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on the representations and reception of alterity in the global cultural marketplace. Her latest publications include the coedited special issue “New Directions in Rushdie Studies” (2017) of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, articles in Interventions, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Modern Asian Studies, and the coedited volume Transnational Cinema at the Borders (Routledge, 2018). She serves on the board of the Association of Cultural Studies and is a research affiliate at the ­A msterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS). Aleksandar Stević is Assistant Professor of English at Qatar University and has previously taught at the University of Belgrade; Hampshire College; and King’s College, Cambridge. His essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century fiction have appeared in such venues as Comparative Literature Studies, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Modern Literature. He is a contributor to A History of Modern French Literature (Princeton UP, 2017) and a translator of several books from English into Serbo-Croatian, including, most recently, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Paul Tenngart  is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Romantik i välfärdsstaten (2010), Den komplexe Baudelaire (2012), and Livsvittnet Majken Johansson (2016), and his work on literary translation has appeared in the Journal of Literature and Art Studies and the Journal of World Literature. His contribution to this volume is made possible by the research network “Narrating Climate Futures” at Lund University and is financed by the research program “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures,” funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. Philip Tsang  is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He specializes in twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. He is completing a book manuscript titled “The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature,” which explores the paradoxes of communal imagination in the work of

List of Contributors  193 Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Twentieth-­C entury Literature, and The Henry James Review. Vladimir Zorić is Associate Professor in Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include the tropology of exile in law, literature, and the humanities, and, recently, the construction of the Habsburg Monarchy and Central Europe in South Slavic literatures. He is the author of Kiš, legenda i priča (Kiš, Legend and Narrative, 2005) and The Rhetoric of Exile: Duress and the Imagining of Force (2016).

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes Abderrezak, Hakim 123, 127 Aboulela, Leila 70, 71, 73, 77–83 Africa 70, 71, 73–5, 87–9, 93–5, 98–101, 123, 124, 127, 135, 147–50, 153 African diaspora 90–1, 95 Afrocentrism 91, 98, 99 Agathocleous, Tanya 79 Ahmad, Salman 35, 37, 41–50 Albrow Martin 57 Algeria 123–6, 129–37 Ali Pasha, Muhammad 72 alien-nation 127–37 Allouache, Merzak 123–6, 131–7 Anderson, Amanda 74, 75, 108 Anderson, Benedict 58, 107, 125, 127 Appadurai, Arjun 56, 66n5, 82 Appiah, Kwame, Anthony 33, 34, 72, 76, 77, 82, 105, 145, 146, 155 Aravamudan, Srinivas 3 Balibar, Etienne 55, 57, 65n2 Beck, Ulrich 2–3, 14 Beckett, Samuel 29 Belgrade 19–27 belonging 4–5, 33, 34, 36, 49, 54, 58–62, 76–81, 93–5; 124–7, 145, 150, 171n2 blasphemy 44–5 Bernhard, Thomas 23 Bhabha, Homi 67n9, 75, 79 Bhatt, Chetan 40 Bilgrami, Akeel 34, 35, 39, 50 Bogdanović, Bogdan 13 19–30 Brennan, Timothy 2, 33, 35, 82 Britain 59–60, 70–9, 81–3, 88, 94, 96

British–Asian 53–4, 56, 59–60, 65, 66n8 Calhoun, Craig 5 Camus, Albert 16 Canetti, Elias 18, 19, 24, 26 capitalism 1, 4, 8, 35, 49, 60, 61, 82, 143–7, 150–2, 154–6, 180–3 Caribbean 87–8, 91, 92–4, 96, 98, 99 cartography 110 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4–5 Christianity 17, 22, 38, 40, 92, 184 citizenship 2, 3, 5, 7, 14, 28, 29, 33, 35, 40 51n2, 55, 101 climate fiction 173, 188 colonial governance 113–4 colonialism 14, 38, 39, 49, 50, 70–4, 78–80, 82, 89, 91, 95, 109, 124, 137, 152, 155 commodification 143, 147 commodity-form 165–6 communism 19, 20, 23, 96 community 1, 2, 6, 33, 34–8, 46, 49, 50, 55, 58–9, 60, 65, 71, 74, 93, 95, 102n2, 125, 136, 147, 170 Compton, Max 35 Connor, Steven 59 Constantinople, siege of 17 Consumerism 60, 71, 77–9, 82, 163 cosmopolis 13–18, 20, 22, 26, 27–30 cosmopolitanism 1, 13–14, 15–23, 25, 27–30, 33–4, 36, 41–3, 46, 48, 50, 53–60, 70–2, 74, 76–9, 81–2, 87, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101; actually existing 3, 8, 54, 65; climate 186–8; critical 6, 14; comparative 33–4, 36, 37; cosmopolitan detachment 2, 74;

196 Index cosmopolitanism and patriotism 14, 15; cosmopolitanization 2; ecocosmpolitanism 170–1; emancipatory 1, 34–6; hegemonic 8, 13, 33, 36, 41, 49; limits of 1–3, 7–9, 54, 55, 65; imperial 106; non-Western 3; normative vs. descriptive 5–6; positive vs. negative 71, 77, 82; old vs. new 3–5; practical 6; prison house of 1, 3, 7; rooted 5; strong 41, 101, 102n2; Sufi 34, 41–50 Craps, Stef 89, 90, 96, 103n10 cultural difference 143–4, 146–7, 152 Defoe, Daniel 75 Democracy 25, 35, 39, 49–50, 55 Derrida, Jacques 165–6 Deterritorialization 159 Diogenes the Cynic 2, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27 disaffiliation 87, 92, 93, 95 disidentification 106–8, 112 Doniger, Wendy 38 Dor, Milo 13, 19–30 Egypt 70–5, 77–80, 82, 83 Eliot, George 2–3 empire 17, 20, 22, 59, 61, 67n12, 81, 83n2 English 59, 70, 73, 81, 88, 100 Englishness 59, 107, 109–11, 120n5 Enlightenment 1, 34, 40, 49, 87, 89, 101, 103n11 Escobar, Arturo 61, 67n12 Eurocentrism 4, 29 Europe 1, 2, 4, 14, 22, 28, 29, 40, 49, 50, 59, 70–5, 78, 79, 88–91, 93, 96, 98–100 European Union 1, 180 exclusion 21–2, 29, 35, 39, 42, 47, 48, 50, 54, 74, 101 Fanon, Franz 71, 76, 91, 98 Ferrante, Elena 7 Flâneur 14–15 Fukuyama, Francis 105 genocide 89 Gieryn, Thomas F. 62 Gikandi, Simon 74, 109, 110 global marketplace 143–4, 146, 150–1, 156 global novel 7 global warming 175–9, 182–8

globalization 1, 2, 16, 33, 35, 54, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 81, 82, 95, 124–5, 161, 170, 180–3 Goodlad, Lauren 106 Goyal, Yogita 89, 90, 97 Harraga 123–38 Heise, Ursula K. 160, 166, 167, 169, 173 Hensley, Nathan 106 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 2 Hindu nationalism 37–40, 46, 48, 50 Holocaust 21, 87–9, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102n6, 102n7 Huggan, Graham 147 humanism 15, 26, 30, 39, 87, 90, 97 Huyssen, Andreas 56 hybridity 59, 64, 74, 76, 77 identity 41, 48, 50, 64, 66n9, 92, 105, 126–7, 129 imperial archive 111 India 36–42, 45–50, 51n3, 61, 67n13, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112–15, 175 Ingram, James 2, 17, 29, 35–6, 92, 93, 95, 101, 102 n2, 102n11 Iqbal, Muhammed 42–4, 46, 47, 51n4, 51n5 Islam 17, 22, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45–8, 51; Islamic terrorism 37; Islamism 128–31; Islamophobia 53; radical Islam 53 Israel 88, 93, 94 Jaffrelot, Christophe 40 Jameson, Fredric 106 Jensen, Liz 175, 176, 177, 183, 184, 186, 187 Jews 88, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102n6, 103n10, 103 n11 Jihad 41 Kabir 38, 39, 49 Kant, Immanuel 3, 16, 72 Kincaid, Jamaica 65, 91 King, Richard 38 Kingsolver, Barbara 174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 186, 187 Kipling, Rudyard 106, 111–15 Kirsch, Adam 7 Kiš, Danilo 92, 96, 97, 102n5, 102n7 Konstantinović, Radomir 23 Koshy, Susan 161

Index  197 Lachmann, Renate 21 Leavis, F.R. 109 Lefebvre, Henri 55 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 29 Maghreb 123–4 Mann, Thomas 15 Mantel, Hilary 89. 90, 102 Marx, Karl 4, 49, 66n4, 165 Massey, Doreen 55–6, 66n4 McEwan, Ian 179, 182, 186 Mehta, Uday Singh 74 Middle Passage 88, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99 Mignolo, Walter D. 14, 33, 36, 49, 50 migration 1, 8, 54, 56, 59, 64, 66n7, 87, 94 Milošević, Slobodan 20, 24 modernity 48, 54, 61, 65, 73, 78, 89 Modi, Narendra 35–40, 50n1, 51n2 Mohsin Hamid 56, 61, 67n14 multiculturalism 2, 54, 59, 60 multilingualism 150, 155 Muslims 38–41, 45, 47, 48, 50n1, 56–9, 61 Naqvi, H.M. 56, 61 nationalism 2, 34, 35, 36, 39–41, 46, 48–50, 58, 70, 77, 102n5, 107, 110, 117, 125, 127, 131, 134, 181, 182, 184, 187 nation-state 2, 16, 23, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 57–9 Nazism 19, 23, 25, 27, 28, 88, 93, 97 Ndibe, Okey 143, 144, 146–9, 151, 152–7 neoliberalism 35, 53–6, 61, 65, 67n10, 73, 77, 79, 82, 150 New Labour 59–60 new materialism 161 nonhuman beings 159–61, 167, 170 Nussbaum, Martha 3, 5, 14, 15, 72, 102n2 Okkupert (series), 179, 183, 186 Ondaatje, Michael 105–10, 112, 114–20 orality 151–7 Pakistan 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45–8, 53, 56, 57, 61–3, 67n13, 175 Pamuk, Orhan 7 Pan-Arabism 71, 73 Parks, Tim 7 Patell, Cyrus 6,

Pekić, Borislav 23 Phillips, Caryl 87–103 pluralism 1, 3, 36–9, 50 polis 2, 14, 30, 33 Pollock, Sheldon 3 postcolonialism 49, 53, 54, 58, 60, 64, 66n8, 74, 83n2, 89–92, 123 Prakash, Gyan 56 Prendergast, Christopher 124 Quayson, Ato 154–6 Quran 38, 44, 45 race 35, 44, 59, 64, 67n11, 72, 73, 83n2, 89, 92, 97, 110, 111, 161 racism 35, 67n11, 74, 89, 99, 159 relativism, cultural 33–4 Robbins, Bruce 5, 6, 33, 72, 76, 82, 106, 107, 145, 148, 174, 183, 184, 187, 188 Robinson, Kim Stanley 175, 177, 180–2, 186, 187 Rumi 42, 51n4 Rushdie, Salman 53, 115 Sahota, Sunjeev 53–8, 60–5 Said, Edward 58, 72, 102n3, 120n8 Salih, Tayeb 70, 71, 73–7, 79, 81–3 Sansal, Boualem 124–31, 133, 134, 136, 137 Sarajevo, siege of 27–30 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 40, 51n2 Schmitt, Carl 16–17 Schoene, Berthold 6 secularism 39, 40, 50, 54, 60, 65 Shah, Bulleh 42, 44, 45, 47 Sheffield 53, 57, 58, 60, 63 siege 13, 15–20, 22–30 Sinhala 116 Siskind, Mariano 6 slavery 61, 72, 73, 87–9, 91, 93–5, 98, 99–101, 102n9 Smith, Zadie 60 Sontag, Susan 29 sovereignty 16–17, 82 Sri Lanka 115–7 Sri Lankan civil war 116 stoicism 3, 17 stranger 3, 5, 76, 90 Sudan 70–4, 76–83 Sufism 33, 34, 36–50 Tagore, Rabindranath 106, 107 thingness 162, 167

198 Index tolerance 38, 47, 53, 54, 57 totalitarianism 16, 20, 25, 185 transnationalism 3, 7, 8, 14, 17, 35, 42, 53–9, 61, 66n6, 66n7, 67n9, 79, 82; destructive 177–80 trauma 87–92, 94–7, 99, 101–102 Trexler, Adam 173 Trump, Donald 35, 53, 59 Tuan, Yi–Fu 55 Tutuola, Amos 153, 154

Waldron, Jeremy 81 Walkowitz, Rebecca 6, 79, 82, 100 Wallace, Molly 162–3 Weithz, Jesper 177, 178, 186 Weltliteratur 124–5 West 1–4, 27, 28, 41, 42, 54, 62–4, 71, 73–5, 78–82, 89, 92, 93 World War II 22, 23, 59, 81, 100

universalism 3–5, 20, 21, 27, 34, 35, 37, 48–50, 72, 87–90, 95, 97, 101

Yamashita, Karen Tei 159–71 Yugoslav Wars 22, 23, 25 Yugoslavia 1, 13, 19–22, 31n2, 96

Velmar Janković, Svetlana 23 Virilio, Paul 16

xenophobia 3, 26

Zapatistas 49