ABSTRACT
Throughout modern world history, “going native” in exotic lands has been an option for adventurers, mercenaries, and even prisoners of war or abducted Europeans. No role-playing of this kind leaves subjects unchanged, resulting in fluid and ambiguous personalities that perform non-binary narrative identities emblematic of the cosmopolitan experience in a different but parallel way to that of postcolonial subjects. In the 20th century, some highly literate people (dis)placed in culturally chaotic situations constructed prototypes of cosmopolitan personalities or (non)identities. Their (dis)locations included endangered colonial or early postcolonial sites, like Rumer Godden’s and Ruskin Bond’s Indias, respectively, but also border/frontier geographies, unstable, disputed territories, as in the Caucasus and Turkey, with the paradoxically nativized text of a radically ex-centered narrator situated on the border of two and more cultural worlds: Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey and Kurban Said. His “mimetic desire” is the central focus of this essay. The extreme, paradoxical case of this persona highlights features of other migrating minds such as those who, like Isabelle Eberhardt, purchased a one-way ticket to transcendence. Those cosmopolitans by destination remain the bearers of values and interrogations that are even more relevant today than they were decades ago.
