Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper examines the novella Every Day Is for the Thief (Teju Cole, 2007/2014) as exemplary of the transmodern turn in literature and, specifically, of what Rosa María Rodríguez Magda has termed “narratives of fracture” (2019). It explores the theoretical shift ushered in by Transmodernity and the repercussions this may have for texts like Cole’s –literary works that address the shortcomings of the Eurocentric world-system and scrutinize the implications of globalization for paramodern cultures– using Enrique Dussel’s terminology (2012). By focusing on the text’s approach to genre and intermediality, conflicted narrative voice, and depiction of transnational fluxes, I seek to chart the ways in which the narrative exposes and undermines Western epistemic domination, while pushing new ways of seeing and thinking aligned with the transmodern paradigm.

This article analyzes Teju Cole’s Open City as a political novel, arguing that Open City functions as a national allegory critical of the United States. This stance is facilitated by its portrayal of the protagonist Julius as suffering not a dissociative fugue but a dissociative amnesia, which I arrive at by using the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) V and a rereading of Ian Hacking to revise prior interpretations of Julius as flâneur-fugueur. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, I read Julius’s amnesia-like repression of his past crimes as allegorical of his adopted nation, the USA, which tends to forget its responsibility for its own historical injustices. By selectively forgetting these injustices and traumas—even as they happen—the USA behaves with the same dissociative amnesia as Julius. Open City reflects the psychopathology of the USA on the scale of the individual and the city. Within the palimpsests of history scattered materially throughout Manhattan (and within the repressed memories of society and the individual) resides the location of national allegory in Open City.

This essay revisits Eileen Julien's seminal essay, 'The Extroverted African Novel' (2006), by way of twenty-first-century fiction by Nigerian writers. Since 2006, new Nigerian publishers have been publishing ambitious literary fiction that is arguably neither 'extroverted' nor 'introverted' but 'multifocal'. The essay sketches the trajectory of literary publishing in Nigeria in light of questions about the forms of local immediacy afforded by different genres and media. It considers how the multifocal fictions of Sefi Atta, Teju Cole, Emmanuel Iduma and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, among others, figure literary publishing in Nigeria. Their novels suggest that these writers' real investment in various readerships on the continent, as well as beyond it, goes hand in hand with their experience of literary singularity in the medium of print. In sum, locally published fiction can court multiple kinds of publics, and it may be more accurate to conceive of 'extroversion' as dependent on a text's reception than as fixed in its form.

While Teju Cole's 2011 novel Open City has been received as an exemplary cosmopolitan performance, a careful reading of the novel's engagement with memories of suffering and of its evocations of aesthetic experiences shows that it interrogates rather than affirms an aesthetic cosmopolitan program. Through its use of a flat, nearly affectless tone, it renders visible the inability of contemporary calls for aesthetic and memorial cosmopolitan practices to engage a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality. As the novel progresses, its apparent celebration of the exemplary cosmopolitan figure of the flâneur makes way for the decidedly less glamorous figure of the fugueur. By mobilizing this marginal figure from the history of psychiatry, a condition marked by unwanted restlessness and ambulatory automatism, Open City exposes the limited critical purchase of the imaginative mobility and intercultural curiosity celebrated by cosmopolitan defenses of literature and art.

This article sets out to explore configurations of literary musicality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), showing how intermedial relations between literature and music are linked to the novel’s exploration of transcultural histories of violence. Supporting but also displacing the larger verbal narrative, intermedial references in Open City produce a surplus of meaning, an unruly remainder. They do so by introducing musical frictions that resist and undermine the structural coherence of the text and gesture toward something nonlinear and latent. Modelled on the form of the fugue, the novel’s contrapuntal structure reveals the disjunctions, latencies, and elisions within hegemonic orders of knowledge and destabilize established notions of community, memory, and cosmopolitanism. To afford a fuller understanding of what we call the novel’s “intermedial poetics,” our essay will first provide a brief definition of the concept of intermediality, showing how references to music in the novel are connected to concepts of latency and atmosphere. Following this, we will investigate configurations of literary musicality in Open City. We argue that the contrapuntal structure of the novel clashes with the protagonist-narrator’s contrapuntal reading of urban spaces and histories, asking readers to rethink conventionalized notions of black diasporic subjects.

Through a reading of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), this article argues that the exposure of black migrants constitutes the principal organizing conceit of global literary culture and knowledge production. The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian emigre named Julius, is faced with ceaseless scrutiny as he traverses urban spaces in the US, Europe, and West Africa, meeting other migrants. In staging Julius’ encounters with others, the novel allegorizes a structure of racialized subjection continuous with the modern history of western epistemology and glaringly present in the contemporary. Yet it also provides grounds for a recursive ethic of opacity, which Julius eagerly endorses. The article surveys critical studies of race, migration, infrastructure, and world literature, in addition to Cole’s writings on photography. The aim is not only to uncover the logics of racialization at play in the enactment of culture, but also to conceive of culture itself as a historical infrastructure of privation and control.

This article reads Teju Cole's award-winning novel Open City (2011) as an extended allegory for the operations of a 'technological unconscious' recently theorized by critics including Nigel Thrift, David Beer, Alexander Galloway, and Katherine Hayles. Cole is widely recognized for being an innovative social media activist; and yet Open City has almost uniformly been labeled an 'antiquarian' text, the highly lettered account of a Nigerian-German flâneur (Julius) who 'aimlessly wanders' New York in search of his racial identity. Yet an emphasis exclusively on Cole's 'antiquarian' style risks missing his novel's formal engagement with the technological present. Drawing on Lev Manovich's account of the flâneur as a figural precursor to the Internet user, I argue that the twenty-one short chapters that serialize Julius's 'aimless wandering' also chart his gradual slotting into an implicitly preferred racial identity category, as Julius is repeatedly hailed by African and African American persons and objects eager to gain his attention. Carefully yoking Julius's flânerie to the protocols of now-ubiquitous systems for user tracking and content personalization notably deployed by Internet browsers like Google, Open City subsequently shows how Julius's 'aimless' desire for serendipitous and diverse social encounters yields, instead, a subtly curated journey through New York cued by his perceived racial indicators. In this way, the novel presents the 'Open City' as a metonym for the 'open' Web in order to lay bare the ideology of 'openness' itself, giving the lie to pervasive cultural investments in the Internet as a 'postracial' global mode of production, and illustrating race's systemic drag within a current phase of tech-intensified capitalism whose putatively neutral proxies reiterate global class formations along racial lines.

Based on writers’ or academics’ forewords and reviews in the French press over the last two decades, this article is a brief examination of the reception of the publication and republication of Baldwin’s work in France. It first sketches out the different “Baldwins” created by the French publishing world: the canonical author, the incisive writer of racial oppression and resistance, yet also, thanks to Cynthia Fleury, Baldwin the philosopher, the “universalist.” It then accounts for the paratextual elements of the publication and republication of his writings that delineate the context of his French reception, notably how he is read as answering France’s twenty-first-century woes. The last section addresses Raoul Peck’s and Teju Cole’s responses to Baldwin’s thought, political intervention, and early writing. This survey of Baldwin’s contemporary French reception traces how his voice has been repurposed for a particularly French cultural and national context. Indeed, emerging from these dialogues with Baldwin’s work are the current polemics among activists and scholars in colonial and postcolonial studies as France continues to struggle to address the legacies of colonialism and the “racial question.”

Though some critics trace the lineage of contemporary Anglophone autofiction to 1970s France, the novelistic devices of Ben Lerner and other similar writers prove more interesting if we consider them as translations of Roberto Bolaño's ironic approach to autobiography, which in turn descends from Jorge Luis Borges's use of metaphysical conceits as a prophylaxis against the embarrassing nature of the First Person. By highlighting the resonances between Borges's statements on the unstable relationship between \"life\" and \"literature\" and Paul de Man's writings on autobiography, I argue that reading English-language autofiction in a post-structuralist key amounts to reading it as Hispanophone literature.