Description
Book SynopsisIn Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms, Anna-Leena Toivanen combines mobilities research, postcolonial literary studies, and theories of cosmopolitanism to explore the representations and often complex intertwinements of different mobility practices and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1 Mobility and Cosmopolitanism: Complex Relations, Shortcomings, and Unease 2 Mobilities, Representation, and the Literary Form 3 Outline of the Book and Chapter Summaries PART 1 Trouble in the Business Class 1 Anxious Mobilities of Afropolitans avant la lettre Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story 1 Automobility: Undecidedness in the Streets of Accra 2 Hotels as In-between Spaces 3 Transnational Business Class Travel: Afropolitans avant la lettre 4 Conclusion: Freedom of Movement? 2 The Hotel as a Space of Transit in Sefi Atta’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Short Stories 1 Atta’s Hotel: A Chronotope of Hypermobility, Inequality, and Unbelonging 2 Adichie’s Hotel Room: Adulterous Space between the Domestic and the Public 3 Conclusion: Being in Transit, Longing for Home 3 Uneasy ‘Homecoming’ in Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières de Pointe-Noire 1 Returnee: A Tourist-Native 2 Nostalgia and Loss 3 Returned Gazes, Unbalanced Dialogues 4 Blind Spot behind the Camera: La blanche 5 Conclusion: Problematics of a Business Class Return PART 2 Budget Travels, Practical Cosmopolitanisms 4 New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Novels by Liss Kihindou, Véronique Tadjo, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1 Formal Matters: The Mobile Poetics of Communication Technologies 2 Technological Advances – From Letters to Email and Skype 3 Creating Distance: Communication Gaps 4 Conclusion: Ruptured Dialogues and Unbalanced Cosmopolitanisms 5 Everyday Urban Mobilities in Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs 1 Cartographies of Paris 2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Survival in a New Environment 3 Peripheral Dead Ends 4 Conclusion: Managing the Metropolis through Mobility 6 European Peripheries and Practical Cosmopolitanism in Fabienne Kanor’s Faire l’aventure 1 Peripheries and the Dream of “la grosse Europe” 2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Limits and Potentials 3 Conclusion: Out of Reach? Centres and Cosmopolitan Ideals PART 3 Abject Travels of Citizens of Nowhere 7 Failing Border Crossings and Cosmopolitanism in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North 1 Cosmopolitanism as an Active Engagement 2 Instances of Anti-cosmopolitanism 3 Non-dialogue and Linguistic Nonconformity 4 Parodying the Afropolitan 5 Abject Unbelonging 6 Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism’s Breakdown 8 Arrested Clandestine Odysseys in Sefi Atta’s “Twilight Trek” and Marie NDiaye’s Trois femmes puissantes 1 Erased Identities 2 Tropes of Mobility: Shoes, Trucks, and Boats 3 Sand and Sea: The Slavery Parallel 4 Conclusion: Precarious Journeys 9 Zombie Travels J. R. Essomba’s Le Paradis du nord and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore 1 Tropes of Zombifying Mobilities: Hiding, Confinement, Dehumanisation, and Darkness 2 Not Feeling It: Lost Selves, Lost Emotions 3 Europe and the Failures of Cosmopolitanism 4 Eliminating the Zombie 5 Conclusion: The Poetics of Zombification Coda Bibliography Index
