The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism

While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested.