Cosmopolitanism and Place

Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

E. Johansen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137402677
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Cosmopolitanism and Place considers the way contemporary Anglophone fiction connects global identities with the experience in local places. Looking at fiction set in metropolises, regional cities, and rural communities, this book argues that the everyday experience of these places produces forms of wide connections that emphasize social justice.

CHAPTER 1

ALTERNATIVE COSMOPOLITANISMS IN THE METROPOLIS

In Stephen Frears’ 2002 film, Dirty Pretty Things, set among illegal and other forms of contingent labor in London, there is a short but significant scene between the two protagonists, the Nigerian Okwe (Chiwetal Ejiofor) and the Turkish Senay (Audrey Tatou), who meet working at the same London hotel and become (platonic) roommates. In this scene, Okwe prepares dinner for the two of them, leading Senay to ask whether “in Africa, it is the man who will cook and clean?” Later, as the two eat their dinner, Okwe wonders about the Muslim Senay’s decision to drink wine, to which she responds that she does “not want to live like [her] mother.” This conversation takes place in the two-room apartment over the top of a grocery store that the two share. This scene—like much of the film—emphasizes the close quarters of metropolitan life for marginalized subjects—whether for legal, racial, or economic reasons. This conversation demonstrates the ongoing negotiation undertaken by Okwe and Senay, brought about by necessity, that leads them to question and challenge both their accepted views of their and others’ cultural origins and their immediate reality. A scene like this demonstrates the complicated and contestatory interactions that characterize the interactions across difference that occur in the metropolitan city’s cramped quarters. Indeed, Okwe’s and Senay’s burgeoning friendship in this scene catalyzes both of their actions later in the film where both find ways to disrupt the city’s hierarchies to their own interest. Okwe, in particular, who is initially depicted as an observer to the city—present but not engaged—is challenged by his affiliation with Senay to take a far more active and critical role in London life. While the film is, in some ways, a romanticized vision of migrant life—Okwe and Senay are suggested, to overcome the everyday violence they experience with the chaste romantic love they feel for each other—it points to the complex ways metropolitan inhabitants come to terms with difference.

This scene where dinner is prepared and consumed, prompting Okwe and Senay to reconsider their understandings of and connections with those who are different from themselves in a variety of ways, points to a useful way of thinking about cosmopolitan difference and ties. This is a moment of contestation—however small scale— and emerges out of close quarters and the necessity of understanding those who share those quarters with you. It is about banal, everyday interactions in a London that seemingly exists below the threshold of global or cultural visibility. Moreover, these are interactions that lead to foregrounding questions of responsibility to the self and global others in their emergence out of affiliative and sympathetic relationships. Notably, both Okwe and Senay leave London at the end of the film, looking to form attachments to other places. What we observe, in moments like these conversations between Okwe and Senay, is one way of developing metropolitan forms of territorialized cosmopolitanism, here inspired by and emerging from the material proximity of the city and the negotiations it demands from subjects who hold a variety of cultural values.

This chapter explores some of these same ways of developing metropolitan territorialized cosmopolitanism, proposing that, through a variety of place-based and place-making strategies, transnational fiction set in metropolises reconfigures the possible forms of metropolitan cosmopolitanism. This, therefore, also helps to teach readers to see the way similar strategies might be at work in nonmetropolitan places. These strategies for small-scale everyday cosmopolitanism, and their spatialized intersection with global inequalities, are at the foreground of the three novels I discuss in this chapter: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. These novels critique models of cosmopolitanism that uncritically celebrate hybridity and the exchange of commodified cultural products by highlighting the various ways these models elide the everyday realities of metropolitan life. These novels caution against the forms of global connection celebrated in large cities through an emphasis on the manufactured and uneven desire for difference manifested in metropolitan claims to cosmopolitanism; the material barriers that limit free and flexible intra-metropolitan movement; and the labor that necessarily supports cosmopolitan cities.

All three novels address the cosmopolitan possibilities that are most clearly and popularly identified with the metropolis: possibilities defined by the consumption of cultural products and the attendant sense of sophistication. Further, these texts require (or teach) the reader to develop a cognizance of the way these possibilities and limits are gendered, racialized, and, most particularly, classed. “Being worldly, being able to navigate between and within different cultures, requires confidence, skill and money” (Binnie et al., 8); these novels, however, also point to ways of navigating between and within different cultures that are not solely dependent on money. All three novels in their different ways present new ways of thinking about the global metropolis and how the cosmopolitan is territorialized in its various places.

REPRESENTING THE GLOBAL METROPOLIS

The relationship between Okwe and Senay, and the depiction of London more generally in Dirty Pretty Things, queries one of the predominant images of the modern cosmopolitan metropolis, which is of an almost unimaginably diverse place where cross-cultural contact occurs on a constant basis. So, this image goes, one cannot help but be cosmopolitan in the midst of such all-encompassing heterogeneity. One way in which this cosmopolitanism is marked is through the demographic presence of difference. By this standard, for instance, Toronto might be viewed as one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. According to 2006 Canadian census data, effectively half (49.9 percent) of Toronto residents are foreign-born, making it more ethnically diverse than cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or London. While demography is certainly not the only (or the best) measure of the likelihood of a city’s residents holding cosmopolitan worldviews, this data makes a simplistically clear case for Toronto’s role as (potentially) the world’s most cosmopolitan city.

But what does this diversity mean in the everyday experience of Toronto? This volume of foreign-born residents in the largest city of one of the first “officially” multicultural countries in the world would suggest that this is reflected in the material experience of the city. Yet the arrangement of the city reflects a sense of difference confined by clear boundaries from the rest of the city—the ongoing legacy (and practice) of active and passive systems of segregation. For instance, the border between the Spadina Ave.-area China Town and the perpendicular Queen St. shopping area is striking. Turning right on to Spadina Ave. from Queen St. marks a disorienting change. All of a sudden, one is greeted by red dragon statues and signs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—a marked shift from the monolingually English signage of the corporate logos of Queen St. Similarly, statues mark the Spadina Ave. entrance to Kensington Market—a busy and vibrant semi-outdoor market, central to Toronto’s immigrant history¹—signaling a boundary between the market and China Town. While Kensington Market is a landmark Toronto neighborhood and, thus, certainly not an invisible presence, the statues (which do not label themselves as the entry point to the market) work to suggest a notion of insider/outsider status, as well as marking a spatial boundary. China Town and Kensington Market do not blend into one another so much as they exist adjacently; proximity, here, does not suggest intermingling—at least not at the level of the visible.

Moreover, enthusiastic celebrations of the multiplicity of Toronto (and other metropolises) and its therefore inherent cosmopolitanism found in travel brochures, municipal literature, and the popular and critical imagination mask the ways in which this difference in the city reflects, and is even predicated on, real racial, gender, and socioeconomic global, regional, and local inequalities and hierarchies.² Thus, the cosmopolitanism reflected by a demographic understanding of Toronto, and one that, no doubt, exists at the level of interpersonal interaction and communication seems separate from the material existence and presence of difference. This suggests, then, that there are (at least) two ways of understanding Toronto’s cosmopolitanism: the large-scale, demographic vision that suggests that statistics reflect interactions, and the smaller-scale, quotidian version signaled by everyday interactions and movements that are less immediately visible on the city’s physical presence.

Edward Soja offers a similar way of looking at metropolitan multiplicity, emphasizing the physical multiplicity present in Los Angeles—and, implicitly, in other global metropolises— as the signal and widely distributed attribute of late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century place.³ He says that

seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles. Coming together here are especially vivid exemplifications of many different processes and patterns associated with the societal restructuring of the late twentieth century. The particular combinations are unique, but condensed within them are more general expressions and reflections. (193)

The simultaneously unique and universal qualities of Los Angeles, therefore, provide possibilities for considering the same trends in other spaces throughout the globe. Soja describes the heterogeneity of Los Angeles, stating “there is a Boston in Los Angeles, a Lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a São Paulo and a Singapore” (193). Not only does this suggest the potential interchangeability of big cities (something with which suburbs are frequently charged) or the presence of people from all over the United States and the globe, but, as illustrated by Soja’s use of spatial references, the ways in which places contain other places. Moreover, the varieties of places within places that Soja mentions highlight that he is not only talking about those gentrified and (seemingly) neutral zones of the creative class. Instead, these places are indexed by their reference to quite specific signifieds. This is not exclusively the expansion of a particular social class, but the kaleidoscoping of other places—neighborhoods, cities, nations.⁴

WALKING THE GLOBAL CITY

Discussions like Soja’s of cosmopolitan cities tend to emphasize a vision of place as presence. Places become cosmopolitan through the presence of diverse groups of people; visible presence signals cosmopolitanism. This, again, tends to recapitulate demographic models as indicators of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, it requires a critical mass; this is a notion of place created by large groups of people, downplaying the possibilities of individual agency and place-making. While I do not want to fetishize the individual as the site of cosmopolitan meaning-making, a vision of cosmopolitan cities dependent on presence eliminates the individual altogether. Indeed, it begins to echo Heideggerian notions of place and its development of meaning in the eternal past. By removing any sense of individual agency from the creation of cosmopolitan places, placing cosmopolitanism becomes yet another “top–down” version. Thinking through individual place-making tactics such as flânerie makes visible the everyday tactics that create the mutating forms of everyday cosmopolitan worldviews that characterize contemporary global life.

Moreover, considering metropolitan place-making strategies enables us to begin to recognize them in nonmetropolitan places. We expect, for a variety of reasons, these place-making practices in large cities, but, as the rest of Cosmopolitanism and Place will demonstrate, these practices are to be found in small cities and rural communities as well—though not without alterations. In other words, these novels—addressing whatever kind of place—teach their readers to interpret all places in different ways. The place-making strategies of these novels not only ask us recognize the territorializing possibilities of cosmopolitan worldviews, but also to look at place differently, to recognize the ways that places are constructed both by large systems and by individual practices. Place-making strategies become, then, not just material practices but interpretative practices made material.

A striking similarity in What We All Long For, Brick Lane, and Transmission is the shared scene where the protagonist walks or moves through the city, engaging with the invisible borders that continue to exist in the global metropolis. These scenes mark different ways of territorializing cosmopolitan identities and also further demonstrate the different approaches to cosmopolitanism found in the texts, made clear in their depictions of wandering throughout the city, suggesting that cosmopolitan place-making is neither straightforward nor necessarily emancipatory. All three texts use this similar narrative scenario to suggest a character’s seeming comfort and familiarity with the global city yet, particularly in Brick Lane and Transmission, this scenario is undercut by the text’s larger criticism of the narrative of the Western city as a site of freedom and fluidity for all. While What We All Long For and Transmission map out or write alternative routes and patterns in the city, Brick Lane uses these walks to mark Nazneen’s growing cosmopolitanism that sees myriad points of responsibility (including, in the face of her initial self-abnegation, to herself⁵), suggesting her ability to write herself into the Western metropolis.

These narrative moments point to the smaller movements that might make up everyday forms of cosmopolitanism. Territorializing cosmopolitanism requires a closer attention to the smaller, everyday forms of place-making that connect the local to the global. Rather than taking the airplane as the quintessential or only cosmopolitan vehicle, these novels propose that we attend to the metropolitan walker, the flâneur, as another cosmopolitan form of meaning making. Walter Benjamin’s theorization of flânerie emphasizes the limited scale of the walkable distance—an emphatically local project where the public spaces of the city become sites of movement and border-crossing, not just the location of commerce and the consumption of commodities. The general principles of flânerie—movement with no particular goal, along unexpected trajectories—might offer a way of understanding everyday cosmopolitan movement in a more territorialized fashion.⁶ For, if the movement typically associated with cosmopolitanism (business and leisure travel, on one hand, and immigration and displacement, on the other) is compelled by capital and its demands, flânerie resists this compulsion through its very aimlessness, positing other ways of engaging physical space.

In its rejection of busyness, flânerie maintains a theoretical and critical engagement with consumer capitalism. While it rejects its fundamental goal (the accumulation of wealth), it does this not by withdrawing from the sphere of capital but by refusing its grounds of engagement. This is analogous to the model of cosmopolitanism I propose throughout whereby the contemporary trappings of cosmopolitanism are refused but the larger realm of global connections continues to be central. Flânerie re-routes—in sometimes limited and temporary ways—the routes staked out by capital, providing a discrepant way of viewing place. Flânerie demonstrates a compelling way of linking material mobility and how the flâneur approaches the world. Benjamin notes that the flâneur “goes his leisurely way as a personality; in this manner he protests against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. He protests no less against their industriousness” (“Paris” 30–31). The leisureliness of the flâneur is both a spatial and contestatory practice; critique is central, not incidental.

This echoes, in some ways, Henri Lefebvre’s illustration, through an examination of the different conceptualization of social space in Western history, of the way that spatial practices produce knowledge. For instance, Lefebvre argues that the planting of rows of cypresses to separate from view the newly distinct peasant and aristocratic homes in thirteenth-century Tuscany led to the development of Renaissance perspective (77–79). A spatial practice (the subdivision of land) produced another spatial practice (perspectivism) that would have larger repercussions in art and architecture (among other fields) that then go on to shape built environments. Like Benjamin, Lefebvre proposes the interconnections between spatial practices and how these enable ways of understanding our connection to materiality. A key distinction between these two practices, however, is between the representation of space and material engagement with place. This distinction is not a hierarchical one, suggesting a preference for materiality over representation, or vice versa. What is significant about both is the connection they make between how we understand the material place in front of us and larger, more ephemeral ideas. Indeed, as Lefebvre’s example suggests, our experience of local practices acts as the catalyst for larger, universalizing concepts. On one hand, this acts as a reminder that those ideas we might consider universal or transcendent are rooted in particular and immanent traditions and practices. On the other hand, this points to the usefulness of thinking about the spatial practices that might shape the variety of ways we conceptualize the universal. For Benjamin, the flâneur’s critique of capital and its subjectivities coalesces around his transformation of the routes allotted to the consumer. Critique is indistinguishable from practice in this instance because the two are so deeply imbricated.

This is analogous with Michel de Certeau’s theorization of walking as a form of writing:

the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian[;] it is spatial acting-out of place[;] it implies relations among differentiated positions . . . The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures.’ There is a rhetoric of walking.

(97–98, 100; emphasis in original)

The “enunciative” nature of walking signals the walker as, at least temporarily or contingently, an agent, not the silent subaltern in the face of global power structures. Further, walking, in de Certeau’s theorization, is a complicated site of resistance. This resistance lies in the “appropriation” of existing topographical systems; for de Certeau, this appropriation seems, at least implicitly, a form of redirecting, even a purposeful mis-use, of these systems.

A similar resistance is at the heart of a territorialized cosmopolitanism, made visible in the way that cosmopolitanism emerges out of the engagement with myriad spatial arrangements, resisting universalizing forms of large-scale movement. When considering the way that cosmopolitanism is shaped by local places, it is important to see this shaping not just as a kind of top–down shaping, where the subject is without agency in any real way in the face of already existing natural and human-created landscapes. Flânerie provides one way of considering the agential possibilities of territorializing cosmopolitanism. If the contours of global and local landscapes are often under the creative purview of large systems—corporate, governmental, biological—flânerie suggests the way that these systems might be enunciated or reimagined by those with varying levels of systemic pow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Alternative Cosmopolitanisms in the Metropolis
• 2. Cosmopolitan Work in the Regional City
• 3. Cosmopolitanism in Rural Places
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index