Abstract
This paper interrogates the structural failures and internal contradictions of liberal universalism through an analysis of “cosmopolitan wounds” in contemporary Nigerian migrant literature. By placing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Helon Habila’s Travelers into conversation with the theoretical frameworks of Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, and Judith Butler, the study argues that these narratives perform a decolonial epistemic shift. This shift constitutes a reconstitution of ethical knowing from the position of those whom the dominant cosmopolitan tradition was structurally designed to exclude. The analysis demonstrates how these texts anatomize the racial and historical conditions under which cosmopolitan hospitality fails its own ideals, exposing a necropolitical regime that governs global mobility. Through a reading of the production of racial grammars in Adichie, urban phenomenology in Cole, and the crisis of refugeehood in Habila, the paper contends that Nigerian migrant literature functions as an indispensable site of epistemological production. Ultimately, these works do not merely illustrate theoretical crises but demand a fundamental rebuilding of cosmopolitan ethics grounded in the embodied particularity and lived experience of the migrant subject.
Authors:
Clement Oshogwe Mamudu
Department of English and Literary Studies
Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria
E-Mail: mamudu.clement@iuokada.edu.ng
ORCID ID: 0009-0006-2359-2194