The “fugitive notes” of Teju Cole’s Open City
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12737671 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paula von Gleich (0000-0002-5910-3245, University of Bremen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 334-351 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-07 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Atlantic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1478-8810 • E-ISSN: 1740-4649 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14788810.2020.1870399 |
| OpenAlex | W3120139893 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 21 |
While Julius, the narrator of Open City (2011), foregrounds walks, intellectual digression, and stories of minor characters, personal traumatic memories paired with traces and remnants of chattel slavery and the slave trade haunt him. My analysis of Teju Cole’s novel focuses on flight as a physical and mental movement that Julius performs, trying to flee from an association with his Nigerian past and the past of the Atlantic world. His compulsive walks and cosmopolitan musings offer only temporary, improvised refuge. The text remains caught in the gendered history and anti-black legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as well as the ways in which Julius is implicated not only as a witness and victim but also as a perpetrator. Gendered anti-black violence, I argue, forms the obscured ground on which Julius’s narration is built, while the novel’s narrative techniques of oversharing and evasion ultimately negotiate its narratibility
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Negotiation · Sociology · Witness · African history and culture studies · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Scenes of subjection
The black Atlantic
Image Matters
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
The Violence of Presence
Listening to Images
Notes from the Kitchen, the Crossroads, and Everywhere Else, too
Cosmopolitan Conversation and Challenge in Teju Cole’s Open City
The Idea of “Third Generation Nigerian Literature”
Cosmopolitan Curiosity in an Open City
Afro pessimism
Unbearable Blackness
Gramsci's Black Marx
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |