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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.
List of contents
Introduction, ALEKSANDAR STEVIĆ AND PHILIP TSANG. Part I: Cosmopolitan Hegemons. 1. Cosmopolis Besieged: The Exilic Reunion of Bogdan Bogdanović and Milo Dor, VLADIMIR ZORIĆ. 2. Building Bridges: Constructing a Comparative Sufi Cosmopolitanism in Rock and Roll Jihad, MUKTI LAKHI MANGHARAM. 3. Whose are the Streets? Sunjeev Sahota’s Fiction of Failed Cosmopolitan Conviviality, ANA CRISTINA MENDES. 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. Part II Subjects of Displacement. 5. Unbelonging: Caryl Phillips and the Ethics of Disaffiliation, ALEKSANDAR STEVIĆ. 6. Why Is the Patient "English"? Disidentification as Cosmopolitanism in Michael Ondaatje’s Fiction, PHILIP TSANG. 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. Part III: Circulated Objects. 8. Cosmopolitanism and Orality in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc., KATHERINE HALLEMEIER. 9. Animated Plastic and Material Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, JUNGHA KIM. 10. Paying Attention to a World in Crisis: Cosmopolitanism in Climate Fiction, PAUL TENNGART. Notes on Contributors. Index.
About the author
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 currently working on 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.
Summary
The essays collected in this volume explore how contemporary literature imagines living between identities and locales—Nigerian and American, Turkish and German, Sudanese and European—in order to ask broad questions about the meaning of cosmopolitanism.
