City: the languages of postcolonial urban space

This chapter looks at how three contemporary novels investigate the subjective and transformative experience of urban migration through narrative and linguistic strategies that register uneven patterns of global displacement and settlement. Their focus is on the mutually constitutive interaction of people and cities through complex, non-linear spatial and temporal arrangements. These arrangements are expressive of the languages in which mobility and urban space are voiced and to the degree of authority invested in different language users as they move across the migratory linguistic landscape with contrasting degrees of ease and entitlement. Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) preface a more detailed examination of Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (2021). Set respectively in Rome, New York and Cardiff, these postcolonial novels share an interest in the historical entanglement of narrative, language, and migration. Their African protagonists inhabit the city as a hierarchical space whose territorialization, demarcated also by language difference, is articulated through a violent syntax of separation, enclosure and confinement. Based on real events, Mohamed’s novel reprises the narrative of a Somali seaman falsely accused of murder. The inexorable journey to his execution is an essay in racial injustice in an urban environment whose fractures are made audible by the protagonist’s inability to cross successfully multiple languages.