Becoming a Cosmopolite

Identity Construction and The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian

Abstract

According to Gerard Delanty, the cosmopolitan imagination is “both an experience and an interpretation of the world”; it is “a way of viewing the world in terms of its immanent possibilities for self-transformation” (The Cosmopolitan Imagination 6, 3). As part of a host of new approaches to and understandings of the changing notion of cosmopolitanism, literary representations of the cosmopolitan imagination may shed new light on the ways in which transnational migrants (re-)construct their identity in cosmopolitan spaces as “neo-cosmopolites” and “local citizens of the world.” Through the close reading of Isabella Hammad’s debut novel, The Parisian; or, Al-Barisi: A Novel (2019), my analysis primarily focuses on the intersection of affective cosmopolitanism as an embodied form of “cosmopolitan self‐awakening” (Woods 136) and Bhabha’s (2000) vernacular cosmopolitanism as a translation between cultures and the renegotiation of traditions in the diaspora subject’s cosmopolitan imagination. Investigating the protagonist’s bodily, embodied, and lived experiences in Constantinople, Montpellier, Paris, Cairo, and Nablus, I shall contend that the experience and interpretation of these cosmopolitan spaces, as well as their atmospheric affordances, greatly influence and are influenced by the protagonist’s sensible and lived feelings, affective relationships and sense of self, manifested in an identity performance that leads to the reconstruction of his identity as “the Parisian,” a cosmopolite incarnate.