Madhu KrishnanPostcoloniality, spatiality and cosmopolitanism in the Open City This paper considers the performance of postcolonial spatiality in Teju Cole's 2011 novel, Open City. Arguing against theoretical positions which view the production of postcolonial space as inherently liberatory, the article considers how, through its textual deconstruction of neoliberal visions of cosmopolitanism, Cole's novel produces a reading of postcolonial spatiality as a continuation of the abstract formations of colonial space. The paper begins by exploring the doubly voiced concept of the 'open city' as it functions in the novel, arguing that the titular catachresis gestures towards a vision of space in which the illusion of freedom of movement serves as a mask for the continuation of violence. It then traces the centrality of spatiality to postcolonial studies, suggesting that, despite the importance of geography to the discipline, the study of literary space remains undertheorized. By applying a robust spatial reading to Open City, the article suggests a more nuanced view of postcolonial spatiality in which the performative nature of the literary text opens avenues for greater inquiry into the legacies of fragmentation of subordination which continue to function in an allegedly cosmopolitan present.

This paper examines the construction of national commitment in third generation African literature through a comparative reading of Binyavanga Wainaina’s literary memoir, One Day I Will Write about this Place , Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance , and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins . In each text, the relationship between the individual and his or her nation of origin does not function in singular terms, reflecting the multiply-articulated imagined communities in which individual lives exist and the (re)doubled workings of filiation, affiliation, and disavowal at play in contemporary Africa. Like the nations that comprise the continent, then, the idea of the nation in the contemporary African literary work is both variable and shifting, responding to its immediate circumstances and demonstrating the potency of novel paradigms of belonging. Nationalism, like the nation, thus reflects a deep ambivalence that mobilizes multiple affiliations and, nevertheless, does not preclude belonging and commitment. Rather than dismissing the nation, Wainaina’s, Vera’s, and Nwaubani’s works present a new vision of nationhood and national belonging.

This article considers the intersection of ethics, responsibility, and literature through readings of Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love and Dave Eggers' What Is the What. Examining the ways in which each novel situates its staging of African conflict against the a priori image of Africa, the article focuses on the ways in which each novel demands a readerly engagement based on alterity. Rather than viewing the text as a passive repository of ethical lessons, the article suggests that by leveraging narrative unreliability both novels create a vision of literature as the active site of ethical engagement and conflict.

In her influential study of spatiality, human geographer Doreen Massey (2005) writes that "one of the effects of modernity was the establishment of a particular power/knowledge relation which was mirrored in a geography that was also a geography of power (the colonial powers/the colonised spaces)-a power-geometry of intersecting trajectories" (64). In this comment, Massey brings out the notion that space-its control and its administration-functions not as an auxiliary to colonial conquest, but as a central component (possibly the component) enacted itself through such conquest. Given this observation, it is perhaps unsurprising that the question of imperialism's geographies, both "imagined", in Edward W. Said's terms, and material, have long remained a central concern of postcolonial studies and colonial discourse analysis more broadly. Of particular interest for this special focus of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing is the way in which literature and cultural expression more broadly have formed a key means through which imagined geographies have been constituted, intersecting with and interrelated to the political-economic processes of colonialism and their aftermaths. As John Noyes (2006) writes, literature acts as "one of the many specific praxes which constitute imperialism" (emphasis in original), critical for the way in which it "serv[ed] to organize and coordinate a number of other imperialist functions on a different level" (7), including the structuration of the physical and geographical experience of imperial conquest and domination. If, as Sara Upstone (2009) claims, "the right to space must be seen as key to the very real, often violent, material effects of colonisation" (4), then literature, following Noyes, might be seen as one of the levels on which space was and is produced. Thus, the "long-standing and mutually rewarding relationship between postcolonial studies and the field of human geography" becomes something more than a gesture towards interdisciplinarity in the name of humanistic study, transforming into a site of urgency through the means by which the two disciplines, working together, illuminate "the struggle over geography, a struggle that is not just about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, images and imaginings, about competition for land and territory and the search for fundamental and egalitarian rights to inhabit space" (Soja 2011, ix; italics in original). If a critical consensus has emerged around the puissance of space as a constitutive facet of colonial rule and its legacies, the precise nature and condition of that space as articulated within postcolonial studies is less clear. In his landmark study, The Production of Space, French theorist Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) warns of what he calls the twinned myths of transparency and opacity which plague the study of space. On the one hand

This study explores the mechanisms through which 'African literature', as a market category, has been consecrated within the global literary field. Drawing on archival, textual, and field-based research, it proposes that the normative story of African literary writing has functioned to efface a broader material history of African literary production located on and oriented to the continent itself.