ABSTRACT
Teju Cole’s Open City employs the figure of the dandy-flâneur to negotiate twenty-first-century urban life. Cole’s flâneur, a black Nigerian immigrant, foregrounds histories of immigration and forced displacement in his writing of the city. Yet whilst this flânerie has the potential to orient us towards the multiple histories of lives making up these cities, Cole’s persistent reification of experience as literary commodity rather leads to the death of the flâneur, the end of social engagement and elision of orientations ‘elsewhere’.
