In early twentieth century, based on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin drew attention toward the figure of the Flâneur, the indolent stroller who, amidst the streets of Paris, contemplates with disenchantment and apathy the gigantic transformation of the city caused by the Industrial Revolution. With large crowds of people flooding the cities, its bazars, shops and the now rapid mediums of transportation, the new urban spectator saw the imminent alienation in an era now defined by consumer capitalism. It was the end of the nineteenth century.
In Latin America, the recently liberated colonies were now able to consume the literature of their choice. With the disestablishment of the Casa de Contratación de Sevilla or House of Trade –the entity that regulated any form of communication within the colonies and Spain–, the new nations began to import French literature in an unprecedented way, a behavior that would have a direct impact in all the Spanish speaking nations, including Spain, the agonizing superpower.
Globalization and transnationalism had taken, in the last decades of the Romantic era, a heightened meaning only comparable to the impact of electronic media in today’s society, a rupture that redefined the lives and behavior of people. About these ruptures between the old and the new is something many scholars have highlighted before.
In Global Matters, Paul Jay states that «it is a mistake to approach globalization itself as a contemporary phenomenon and that it makes much more sense to take a historical view in which globalization is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism» (3). He further defines globalization as a «complex back-and-forth flows of people and cultural form in which the appropriation and transformation of things –music, film, food, fashion– raise questions about the rigidity of the center-periphery model» (3).
What better place for that «back-and-forth» of people, ideas and commodities than the city of New York, the modern Babel that agglomerates more than eight million people from the most unimaginable places in the World? In it, a new Flâneur has emerged, as it is seen in the novel Open City by Teju Cole.
Heartbroken by the recent separation with his girlfriend, Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student wanders in the streets of New York City, encountering people from different cultures: an African taxi driver, a Caribbean security guard, a Mexican or perhaps Central American marathon runner, an Indian surgeon, a Polish poet (among others) in a city that could easily be referred to –using the name of a play by Calderón de la Barca– The Great Theater of the World.
Julius or, we should say, the Flâneur of the contemporary globalized world, runs into places where cultures meet and clash under the least expected terms. And so he says: «I took a detour and walked for a while in Harlem. I saw the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: The Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa» (18).
It is then obvious that massive migrations or deterritorrialization aim toward the big cities, creating new encounters and the rise of a new culture or perhaps new cultures in a world in constant motion, more so now than ever before. Julius observes this and informs us about it in the vignettes he gives us as he strolls around the streets of New York City. He perceives that culture is no longer a homogenous concept tied to a specific nation or country but something transformed into multiple faces when people of different backgrounds find themselves living in the same place.
Culture or rather the adjective «cultural», Arjun Appadurai tells us, «moves into a realm of differences, contrasts, comparisons that is more helpful… we have moved one step further, from culture as a substance to culture as the dimension of difference, to culture as a group identity bases on difference, to culture as group identity based on difference, to culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity» (12-15).
Julius, the Flâneur, cannot escape from melancholy in every encounter, often reminiscent of his native Nigeria. Like Baudelaire, he cannot avoid reflecting on the issues of his time: migration as one of the major concerns in today’s world and how to tolerate the differences in a society that does not belong to one group but many.
I’d like to piggyback off of what you said about the significance of New York specifically to both Open City and to the concepts of globalization and cosmopolitanism as we have discussed them so far, especially your labeling of New York as “the modern Babel” and its deterritorialization.
The title of the novel itself suggests the connection between New York and transnational topics. From a transnational standpoint, I first took the title to suggest that (pretty obviously) the city is “open” – open to everyone, every culture, every way of life. The experiences Julius has with the people around him on the street reflect this idea; we have the African taxi driver, the Polish poet, etc. In considering the choice of New York as the setting of the book I was reminded of the city’s significance within the history of immigration into the United States; the National Park Service estimates that roughly 12 million immigrants entered the US through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 (http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/index.htm). From this alone New York seems like an excellent setting for a novel commenting on topics of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.
When I typed “Open City” into Google, however, I found a second meaning of the title. “Open city” is apparently also a military term. In that context, an open city is one that an army (for example) has said it is no longer defending, allowing the opposing army to take the city without bombing it (international law in fact prohibits any bombing). This is meant to preserve the physical infrastructure of the city, as well as, arguably, its people and culture(s). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_city – Apologies for the Wikipedia source; it was the clearest I found.)
I found this second meaning of “Open City” to be very interesting in the context of the novel, because it applies on multiple levels. For one thing, we know that Open City takes place post-9/11, an event where cities were attacked from outside the US and infrastructure and more were destroyed. New York was in this case not an open city in the martial sense. However due to the sheer diversity of the individuals Julius encounters, I think the ideal of New York in his narration reflects to some degree the military term. New York’s infrastructure and much of its history are still present and preserved, but it continues to invite and attract outsiders (in this case not opposing armies but people in general), who inevitably bring new backgrounds, cultures and experiences to the city. This doesn’t necessarily homogenize the city, as is apparent by the fact that Julius can still identify that people are from different parts of the world without directly asking them, but Appiah’s cosmopolitanism suggests that people can remain different and exist together in the same space without giving up individual backgrounds and assimilating to someone else’s values and norms. I think that Open City, with its varied meanings, was therefore an excellent title choice for this novel and its content.