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Precarity and Belonging in the Work of Teju Cole

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Precarity and Belonging in the Work of Teju Cole Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 Black Bodies in the Open City: Precarity and Belonging in the work of Teju Cole Luke Watson (WTSLUK001) A minor dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Arts in English Language, Literature & Modernity Faculty of the Humanities University of Cape Town 2019 COMPULSORY DECLARATION This work hasUniversity not been previously submitted of inCape whole, or in part, Town for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced. Signature: Date: 4 June 2019 1 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 Abstract This dissertation attempts to read Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s fiction and essays as sustained demonstrations of precarity, as theorised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). Though never directly cited by Cole, Butler’s articulation of a shared condition of bodily vulnerability and interdependency offers a generative critical framework through which to read Cole’s representations of black bodies as they move across space. By presenting the ‘black body’, rather than ‘black man’, as the preferred metonym for black people, Cole’s work, which I argue can be read as peculiar travel narratives, foregrounds the bodily dimension of black life, and develops an ambivalent storytelling mode to narrate the experiences of characters who encompass multiple spatialities and subjectivities. Through close analysis of the novels Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007), and essays from the collection Known and Strange Things (2016), principally “Black Body” and “Unmournable Bodies”, I argue that Cole’s work subverts certain tropes in the tradition of black literary cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by James Baldwin, at the same time as Cole self-consciously situates himself within that tradition. It is the insistence on the black body as site of publicity at once desirable and vulnerable, to paraphrase Butler, that allows Cole to make these interventions. A tentative critical consensus on Cole’s work has begun to emerge: his oeuvre is read alongside a cohort of contemporary African and black diasporic writers whose works navigate the tenuous boundary between Western centers and peripheral Africa. It is not my intention in this dissertation to argue against those readings, but rather to offer the concept of precarity as productive framework that allows for readings that other spatio-temporal frameworks may occlude. 2 Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 Contents I. Introduction: Precarious Poetics………………………………………….........4 II. And yet they were quiet: The face and voice of the Other…………………...10 III. You are a black body first: Writing the black body across space……………19 IV. In the grip of rage and rhetoric: The work of violence and anger……………39 V. A moving spot of sun: The city as palimpsest……………………………….59 VI. Conclusion: And so… ……………………………………………………….68 VII. References……………………………………………………………………70 3 Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 Black Bodies in the Open City: Precarity and Belonging in the work of Teju Cole The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten (…) Generations rushed through the eye of a needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories. Teju Cole, Open City I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. Judith Butler, Precarious Life I Introduction: Precarious Poetics Teju Cole’s fiction and essays establish a poetics of precarity. Cole writes vulnerable spaces and subjects, cities and citizens, revealing the ambivalent processes through which identities, cultural affiliations, and political solidarities are wrought and articulated in the neoliberal metropolis. Judith Butler’s theorisation of precarious bodies, i.e. the recognition of mutual corporeal vulnerability as the basis for an ethical encounter with the Other, offers an effective critical framework through which to view Cole’s literary project. Butler is never directly cited in Cole’s work, yet Butlerian language and ideas proliferate in his novels, criticism, and journalism, thus Butler can be read as one of his primary theoretical interlocutors. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), a collection of five essays reflecting on the legacies of the 9/11 attacks on the United States of America, 4 Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 Butler offers a stinging rebuke of the calls to violent retribution that emerged in response to that trauma. Butler proposes that the vulnerability exposed by the 9/11 attacks be recapitulated as an opportunity to reflect on the destruction wrought by US policies elsewhere in the world. The rare moment in which the United States of America is cast as victim rather than agent of violence should cause Americans to hesitate before recasting themselves as perpetrators of violence in the guise of retributive justice. Of particular relevance to my reading of Cole is the second of the five essays, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”, in which Butler argues that grief and the act of mourning reveal irrevocable ties between the self and the Other by foregrounding the interdependency that follows from possessing a body. That some people, some bodies, are more readily grievable than others is only possible because the humanity of those bodies has not been recognised. In this formulation, grievability is a precondition of entry to the category of human, and humanity is distinct from the biological reality of the human body: humanity is a narrative, and it is contingent. In Cole’s work, the cityscape is the surface across which these contingent narratives of selfhood and collective identities are written, erased, and rewritten. Cole’s most sustained demonstration of precarity, and the primary focus of this dissertation, is Open City (2011), his second novel, and the first published outside of Nigeria. Like Butler, Cole writes from The United States of America in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. An elusive, allusive first-person narrative, Open City is told from the perspective of a young Nigerian-American psychiatrist in New York City – and briefly, significantly, Brussels – who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author. Julius, the novel’s faltering narrator, was raised in Lagos and lives in the United States of America; he is a citizen of the metropole and of the periphery. He is serious, articulate, and scholarly, offering erudite reflections on and critiques of music, literatures, visual arts, theologies, and critical theories. Dialogue and narration are written in the same measured voice(s) and raised register, direct speech is not demarcated by quotation marks, and there is no attempt to render the accents and patterns of speech of the diverse people Julius encounters with any degree of accuracy. The many voices of the novel are indistinct and filtered through the singular voice of its narrator. This is the case even when the content of their speech and their characterisation are placed in direct contrast or opposition to that of Julius. An ailing Japanese-American academic, an aspiring theorist from Morocco, an undocumented 5 Luke Watson MA Dissertation 2019 West African immigrant in detention, a Haitian shoeshine, and a retired Belgian surgeon – a cacophony rendered in dubious accord. The effect of this is not simply a narrative disruption of rigid boundaries between the self and the Other, as they are represented; the effect, I will argue, is an ambivalent storytelling mode that constructs a narrative of coherent, reflexive self-hood, then subtly unravels that narrative, revealing it to be illusory. His inability or unwillingness to render and reckon the voices of the Others he encounters disrupts the integrity of the narrative self that Julius constructs. In “Violence, Mourning, Politics” Butler, following Emmanuel Levinas, argues that the “face” of the Other makes a demand of us: you shall not kill. Here the face should not be understood literally but as a metonym for our apprehension of the Other as a distinct, human, entity. Nor should the demand uttered by the face, “you shall not kill”, be taken literally to be speech utterance, but rather an ethical imperative revealed upon our apprehension of the Other. Butler’s significant contribution to the Levinasian concept of the “face” of the Other is to foreground its bodily dimension: it is our recognition of a human body, exposed and vulnerable like our own, that ought to bring an awareness of our duty to do no harm. It is this notion of a shared condition of vulnerable and exposed bodily life that Butler calls “precarious”. In the opening chapters of Open City, the apprehension of the face of the Other and its utterances are literalised. The first chapter of this dissertation, “And yet they were quiet: the face and voice of the Other”, will offer a close reading of conversations and reflections on the sounds of human voices in those chapters to demonstrate the many ways Julius, the novel’s protagonist, fails to meet the ethical demands made of him in his encounters with the Other. Much of the scholarship around Teju Cole’s work, particularly his fiction, attempts to situate it within specific traditions of African and diasporic literature.
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