Cosmopolitan Strangers in the Lettered City: Reading World Writing

Abstract

The figure of the stranger recurs in social and literary discourses, its meanings and em- bodiments shifting with contextual changes and serving to highlight the ways in which otherness is constructed. A key concept in all theorisations of cosmopolitanism, the stranger is a long established literary character as well as an object of interest in recent urban studies. Twenty-first century discussions of neo-cosmopolitanism, while building on previous notions, shift the emphasis from the abstract concept of universality and the association with elitism towards a redefinition of the cosmopolitan which foregrounds resistance to the narrative of globalization and seeks a more inclusive critical framework, one which thinks in planetary, rather than global, terms. This article addresses the manner in which the figures of the stranger and the cosmopolitan intertwine in contemporary theory and in creative writing, and the extent to which literary texts are, in Pheng Cheah’s words, a (cosmopolitan) “world-making activity” (2016).