The experience of homecoming in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief: An investigation into the othered “cosmopolitan stranger”

ABSTRACT

Starting from the premise that the homecomer is, like the stranger, a subject in a position of displacement and dislocation, this article examines the homecoming experience narrated in Teju Cole’s novella Every Day Is for the Thief in order to delve into the figure of the othered“cosmopolitan stranger”. It thus brings into dialogue the debate about the nature of “Afropolitanism” and the emerging postcolonial approach to this new category of “stranger”. The protagonist’s experience in various sites in Lagos shows him negotiating a conflicting sense of belonging and unfamiliarity that finds expression in the recurrent spatial oppositions throughout the text. Importantly, his responses to the urban fragments explore the idea that cosmopolitan strangers are endowed with a “subjective objectivity”. However, rather than offering a privileged stance that allows him to see things more clearly, his status as an othered cosmopolitan stranger reveals to him his lasting condition of strangeness.

KEYWORDS:

• Homecomer
• cosmopolitan stranger
• strangeness
• Afropolitanism
• Teju Cole
• Every Day Is for the Thief

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish National R&D Programme [project RTI2018-097186-B-I00] (Strangers and cosmopolitans: alternative worlds in contemporary literatures) financed by MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU, and by the R&D Programme of the Principado de Asturias, through the Research Group Intersections [grant number GRUPIN IDI/2018/000167].

Notes on contributors

Ángela Suárez Rodríguez

Ángela Suárez Rodríguez is a PhD candidate in gender and diversity at the University of Oviedo. Her research is funded by a Severo Ochoa Fellowship awarded by the Principality of Asturias and examines contemporary Afrodiasporic narrative written in English and of female authorship. Her dissertation explores the migration experiences represented in a selection of this literature from the perspective of the “emotional turn” in postcolonial and gender urban theory. She is a member of the research group “Intersections: Contemporary Literatures, Cultures and Theories”.