Vehicular Cosmopolitanism: The Car in Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists

Saroukhani, Henghameh

Abstract

The kinaesthetic sensibility of recent discourses on cosmopolitanism has tended to universalise and abstract representations of global connectivity. The materiality of culture—understood here as an object-mediated form of cultural exchange—has been neglected in favour of a critical attention to hybrid and vernacular modes of being. Through Bernardine Evaristo’s novel-with-verse Soul Tourists (2005), I rearticulate cosmopolitanism as a specific literary praxis that takes into account the significance of material life. By tracing the novel’s fascination with cars and (auto)mobility, I interrogate how the text assembles cross-cultural and cross-material connections that complicate prevailing notions of cosmopolitanism as hybrid subjectivity. While praised for its progressive ability to reimagine black Britain through a distinctly black European context, Soul Tourists has yet to garner sustained debate concerning the commodified life of objects, like the car, which reconfigure such politicised tactics of belonging. I argue that a focus on the car enables a crucial phenomenological shift whereby the sights, smells and sounds of objects-in-motion reveal unexpected and unexplored outer-national relations between inanimate forms and animate bodies. The vehicular cosmopolitanism of Soul Tourists sets up the car as poesis in ways that unsettle the humanistic assumptions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Citation

Saroukhani, H. (2017). Vehicular Cosmopolitanism: The Car in Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists. Études anglaises, 70(1), 11-27. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.701.0011

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2017
• Deposit Date: Nov 19, 2022
• Journal: Études Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 70
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 11-27
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.701.0011
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1188605