Cosmopolitan Dilemma: Diasporic Subjectivity and Postcolonial Liminality in Teju Cole's Open City

My focus in this essay is to examine how emerging African diasporic writers capture African migrants' subjectivity and positionality in contested metropolises of the West. I will study Teju Cole's Open City and how he engages in the discourse of displacement and the politics of (re)location of African migrant subjects in the diaspora and their complex search for cultural identity. Such movements reveal diasporic subjects being in a transitional state, which is a condition of liminality, of being at the threshold, or in-between sociocultural, economic, political, and ideological contradictions. Subjects constantly negotiate these conflicting ideologies in order to make a life for themselves in the metropolis. I argue that it is this sense of displacement and not belonging anywhere that captures the ways in which migrant subjects struggle to find agency and be part of a new global order—a desire evident in African diasporic literatures.