ABSTRACT
This chapter argues non-status people in the novel evade fixed signification, as they appear as highly ambivalent figures that embody aspects of glocality in the form of what Ulrich Beck terms 'cosmopolitization', a notion indicating enmeshment with the cultural Other. It also suggests that in the semiotics of the glocal city the asylum seeker functions as an ambivalent signifying construct that allows for the recognition that people may all be strangers. The semiology of the glocal city emerging from the text's various perspectives on its material space and on the refugee as signifier reflects on a diversity of multilateral systems operating in its space. These include multinational companies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organization (NGOs), which contest or circumvent the state's norms of legal citizenship and offer alternative evaluations of humanity, opening up the possibility to 'reorient the politics of the state' and 'forms of solidarity yet to be invented'.
