Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Chapter Three Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism Lawrence Durrell

Taking stock of the apparent signifiers of cosmopolitanism in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the chapter elicits the way the text projects them as a menace to a (would-be) sovereign, and decidedly male, imperial subject. The argument is made that an element of the "uncanny" is at stake in the slippages between a Hellenized Alexandria and an Orientalized one, as well as between Alexandria as a modern city and one that includes a perceived African primitiveness. The chapter posits that the uncanny quality is in part a modernist experiment with Sigmund Freud's work and, more pertinently, a function of the twilight-of-empire setting and early decolonization time of writing of the Quartet. The threatening Levantine hybridity of Alexandria is ultimately made amenable to what the chapter argues is neocolonialism in the form of a pro-Zionist conspiracy that involves Copts and Jews. Thus, the Quartet, rather than being interpreted as a postcolonial text, should be read, against the grain, as a cautionary tale.