Cosmopolitan Place, Postcolonial Time, and the Politics of Modernism in Teju Cole’s Open City

This paper sets out to address larger questions about the relationship between postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism from a stylistic analysis of the spatial and temporal dynamics of Teju Cole’s Open City. While cosmopolitan place is projected as stable, time is a more open category in the novel, both in terms of the order of narrative discourse and the temporal explorations into the colonial past that the focalizer/protagonist repeatedly offers. This allows for the often invisible postcolonial actors that both uphold the city in the present and enabled its material manifestation in the past to constantly seep into the text. Its eventual construction of postcolonial coevalness does not derive from a modernist sense of vertigo but from a cosmopolitan awareness that eventually manifests itself in spatiotemporal co-presence. Such insight into the destructive forces of historical movements is the condition of possibility for what Homi Bhabha has referred to as a vigilant global ethics of ambivalence, but always also gravitates towards political hesitation and communal aversion of which recent cosmopolitan novels have been accused.