Despite differences in literary genre, Teju Cole’s fictional Open City and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s philosophical essay, Cosmopolitanism, read in remarkably similar ways.  The vast majority of both men’s tales dwell on the way that people interact both amongst their peers as well as how they interact as world or cosmopolitan citizens.  Much as Appiah’s essay draws upon his own experiences as a transnational individual–the result of the intercultural exchange of his British mother and a Ghanaian father–Cole’s narrator, Julius, likewise employs his cross-cultural background as the child of a German mother and a Nigerian father as anecdotal evidence of the postmodern phenomenon that has created such a world where, “…conversations across boundaries can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable” (Appiah xxi).  Both Cole and Appiah evoke the inevitability of these “cross-boundary conversations” through many examples of such conversations in both Julius and Appiah’s quotidien lives.  Although Appiah argues that these conversations are inevitable in the twenty-first century, the settings and personal circumstances of both himself and Julius provoke a higher frequency of such conversations for these men than perhaps the average citizen.

The marriage of our narrators’ Western European mothers to their Anglophone African fathers represents a significant aspect of the postmodern world where such marriages result in a new generation of children who exist in, what Appadurai refers to as, a deterritorialized realm.  Such children, like Julius and Appiah, can strictly adhere to neither the cultural traditions of their mother nor their father and thus, instead, inhabit an in-between space that provides them with a vantage point into the intricacies of both cultures.  Appiah reflects the beneficial insight that such a vantage point provides him as he has a clear understanding of different cultural “values.”  That is to say Appiah’s exposure to traditional Asante culture, such as the matrilineal familial structure of abusua, the akiwadeε social taboos such as eating one’s clan animal, and the negative stigmatization of both male and female circumcision, in addition to his exposure to his mother’s Western European heritage enables him to draw parallels between the two cultures without having a natural allegiance to one versus the other.

Similarly Julius transnational parentage provides him with a similar position of straddling a cultural dichotomy.  Even Julius’ childhood in Nigeria which he refers himself to as, “…the Japanese of Africa without the technological brilliance,” and his experiences at a Nigerian military school are interspersed with transnationalism–his swimming lessons at the country club and the presence of other mixed-race children at his boarding school such as the half-Indian student Julius rescues from drowning (Cole 88).  In a purely Nigerian society without the interruption of transnationalism, Julius would not exist in this space and would not be able to use his German swimming lessons to save this other student, but the other student, half-Indian, would not exist to require saving.  Julius and Appiah are not only hybridized individuals in the sense that they exist as the products of intercultural exchange but are furthermore hybridized by the world in which they live.  While Julius grows up in hybridized Nigeria, Appiah spends his childhood in Kumasi, Ghana where his family “…got rice from Irani Brothers…often stopped in on various Lebanese and Syrian families, Muslim and maronite, and even a philosophical Druze…” and where he was constantly in the presence of “…other “strangers…too…the Greek architect, the Hungarian artist, the Irish doctor, the Scots engineer, some English barristers and judges, and a wildly international assortment of professors at the university…” which reveals that even without the transnationalism of his own family, Appiah inhabited a hybridized world, much like Julius in Nigeria (Appiah xix).

As adults Julius and Appiah continue their hybridized lives as they both opt to leave their childhood homes in Africa to attend university in the United States.  This migration, which Cole symbolizes throughout Open City with a bird motif, adds a new social identity to both men. They are no longer African/European hybrids but are now African/European transplants to New Jersey and Manhattan.  Julius ventures to reconnect with his maternal German grandmother living in Brussels, which in itself reveals the great intricacy of hybridization, that a German woman and the victim of Berlin Wall era atrocities, should now inhabit a space already divided between the French and the Flemmish, and–as Julius discovers–a vast myriad of African and Arab immigrants as well.  The further hybridization exposed in Julius’ ventures to Farouq’s wireless café where he converses with the Moroccan clerk about everything from the American leftist movement to the turmoil of the Palestinians while around them individuals talk privately with their family and friends in Brazil, Colombia, Germany reinforces that hybridization transcends all spaces and all people, regardless of their personal background.  Later, he discusses Farouq with Dr. Maillotte, a woman he met on his flight from New York, and his concern that Farouq’s “…specific trouble is about being [in Brussels] and maintaining his uniqueness, his difference…” and later opts to send Farouq a copy of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s novel, Cosmopolitanism, undoubtedly for Appiah’s belief that, “…the deepest mistake…is to think that your little shard of mirror can reflect the whole” which necessitates the individualism that Farouq so desperately defends (Appiah 8).

The fact that Cole actually mentions Appiah’s essay in his novel not only further connects these two men and their work, but also reveals the ever-permeative power, in our postmodern world, for one text to immediately connect to another–that is how small our world has become.  Nor are Open City and Cosmopolitanism close to being the only two works interconnected by the themes of postmodern cultural hybridization.  The entire time I was reading both of these texts, I constantly drew intertextualities to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, another work of postmodern fiction drawing from the real world experiences of those straddling two cultural identities while inhabiting a world inundated with millions more.  As the world nears nine billion people we are becoming pushed closer together into grey areas of cultural and ethnic, gender and race identities and it is our decision whether we wish to entertain the inevitability of cross-cultural conversation as cosmopolitanists or not.