Narrative Representation of Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 2, Volume 77, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 21-39 PDF (986.18 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2022.241776 | ||
| Author | ||
| Ashraf Taha Mohamed Kouta | ||
| Abstract | ||
| In her novel Bird Summons (2019), Sudanese-born writer Leila Aboulela (1964 –) engenders a paradigm of transnational connectivity and interdependence. This paper investigates how Aboulela’s novel, on the narrative level, represents a cosmopolitan community in which people of different cultures and religions do not merely co-exist, but also interact and interconnect. Bird Summons is an artificially linear narrative, linking different cultural contexts, transnational settings, and global thematic reflections. In particular, using multiperspectivity, narrative overlapping, intertextuality, and magical realism, Aboulela introduces a model for rooted and religious cosmopolitanism based on intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The paper examines ways of cosmopolitanising the narrative so that the novel itself might contribute to circulating the spirit of cosmopolitanism by engaging the reader in transnational processes of empathy, solidarity, hospitality, and tolerance. The way to transnational connectedness and openness, however, is not an easy one. The novel highlights some of the underlined conflicts and parochial ideas that may menace this cosmopolitan outlook. As the paper demonstrates, there is a close relationship between the narrative technique of Bird Summons and the author’s vision of cosmopolitanism. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Leila Aboulela; Bird Summons; rooted cosmopolitanism; narrative representation; multiperspectivity; intertextuality; magical realism | ||
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