The experience of homecoming in Teju Cole's

Abstract

Starting from the premise that the homecomer is, like the stranger, a subject in a position of displacement and dislocation, this article examines the homecoming experience narrated in Teju Cole's novella "Every Day Is for the Thief" in order to delve into the figure of the othered "cosmopolitan stranger". It thus brings into dialogue the debate about the nature of "Afropolitanism" and the emerging postcolonial approach to this new category of "stranger". The protagonist's experience in various sites in Lagos shows him negotiating a conflicting sense of belonging and unfamiliarity that finds expression in the recurrent spatial oppositions throughout the text. Importantly, his responses to the urban fragments explore the idea that cosmopolitan strangers are endowed with a "subjective objectivity". However, rather than offering a privileged stance that allows him to see things more clearly, his status as an othered cosmopolitan stranger reveals to him his lasting condition of strangeness.