![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 novel The Motorcyclist, it attempts to illustrate how othered subjectivities interact in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and how these interactions are profoundly shaped by colonial, white-supremacist, and patriarchal power structures. Divisions and hostilities among strangers are contingent on hierarchical and seemingly fixed oppositions in terms of race, class, or gender. Use of the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger helps to demonstrate that these conflicts can be approached in self-critical terms, and that simple binaries of exclusion may be replaced by a more nuanced reading of relational difference.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Miasol Eguíbar Holgado
Miasol Eguíbar Holgado holds a degree in English philology from the University of Oviedo in Spain. In 2011, she followed a master’s degree on American literatures at Trinity College, Dublin and she completed her PhD in 2015, for which she received a pre-doctoral scholarship from the regional government of Asturias. Her research focuses on Afro Canadian diasporic literatures and postcolonial/decolonial speculative fiction. She currently works as an assistant lecturer in the English Department at the University of Oviedo and is a member of the research group “Intersections: Contemporary Literatures, Cultures and Theories”.