A Walk to Forget: The Postcolonial Flâneur’s Negating Journey in Teju Cole’s Open City

Abstract

Abstract:Some of the most celebrated modernist novels, including James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), feature a flâneur. As critics like Pieter Vermeulen and Alexander Hartwiger argue, the protagonist of Teju Cole’s 2011 novel, Open City, also engages in flânerie. Building on these accounts and Walter Benjamin’s analyses of the flâneur, I argue that Cole revamps the flâneur for a contemporary global readership. His central character, Julius, does not simply speak urbanely about city life. Instead, he provides a politically engaged reading of society. Cole invites readers to witness the complex paths of a Nigerian immigrant whose walks function as therapy. Julius walks to forget his brutal past. Because of his trauma, existence as a Nigerian in white spaces, and commentary on peculiarities that a Benjaminian flâneur would not address, Julius cannot be as detached as the classic flâneur. In my analysis of Cole’s revision of the flâneur, I initiate a conversation on how the global reader must recognize and contemplate the anticipated representations of trauma, violence, and exoticism in postcolonial fiction. I show that Cole’s novel suggests a need for a critical postcolonial cosmopolitanism that recognizes the persistence of nationalism and brutality in even the worldliest figures.