“I Was in No Mood for People Who Tried to Lay Claims on Me”: Community, Hospitality, and Friendship in Teju Cole’s Open City
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.45.2024.170-191Keywords:
Community, friendship, hospitality, openness, alterityAbstract
This article examines community, friendship, and hospitality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, drawing on Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and Of Hospitality. I aim to show how the representation of migratory experiences in this novel revolves around the contrast between operative communities based on immanence, fusion, and essentialist concepts such as race and ethnicity, and inoperative and elective communities characterized by openness and exposure to alterity. I examine how friendship and hospitality prove to be the necessary force in the novel to transform New York and Brussels into truly “open cities” hospitable to people of different races.
Downloads
References
Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W.W. Norton, 2006.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris, Station Hills Press, 1988.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1988.
Cole, Teju. Open City. Faber and Faber, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford UP, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, Routledge, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins, Verso, 2005.
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford UP, 2000.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 2008.
Fongang, Delphine. “Cosmopolitan Dilemma: Diasporic Subjectivity and Postcolonial Liminality in Teju Cole’s Open City.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 48, no. 4, 2017, pp. 138–54, doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.48.4.10.
Gehrmann, Susanne. “Cosmopolitanism with African Roots. Afropolitanism’s Ambivalent Mobilities.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 61–72, doi: 10.1080/13696815.2015.1112770.
Guarracino, Serena. “Writing ‘so raw and true’: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” Between, vol 4, no. 8, 2014, pp. 1–27, doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/1320.
Hallemeier, Katherine. “Literary Cosmopolitanisms in Teju Cole’s Every day is for the Thief and Open City.” A Review of International English Literature, vol. 44, no. 2–3, 2013, pp. 239–50, doi: 10.1353/ari.2013.0023.
Habila, Helon, editor and introduction. The Granta Book of the African Short Story. Granta Books, 2011, pp. vii–xv.
Johansen, Emily. “History in Place: Territorialized Cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Open City.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2018, pp. 20–39, doi:10.3138/diaspora.20.1.006.
Mózes, Dorottya. “Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2020, pp. 273–98, ojs.lib.unideb.hu/hjeas/article/view/8688/.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, Minnesota UP, 1991.
Oniwe, Bernard Ayo. “Cosmopolitan Conversation and Challenge in Teju Cole’s Open City.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, pp. 43–65, doi:10.5070/F7391029817.
Rogers, Andrew P. “Lived Theologies of Place: Finding a Home in the City.” Ecclesial Practices, vol. 6, 2019, pp. 125–46, doi:10.1163/22144471-00602004.
Vermeulen, Pieter. “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 1, 2013, pp. 40–57, doi:10.2979/jmodelite.37.1.40.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Fatma Akçay
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain publishing rights and grant ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies right of first publication.
Simultaneously, all articles and reviews published in ES Review until nº 43 are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) while those published from nº 44 onwards will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), by which others are allowed to share and use their work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
In addition, ES Review allows authors to arrange additional contracts for the non-exclusive publication of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. In such a case, authors are required to approach the editor(s)/publisher to request permission.
