36 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
psychological realities (especially as regards “double consciousness”)
of black and other minorities living in Europe and the United States.
Importantly, Gilroy also maintains that such realities involve cul-
tural mixing and hybridity: concepts that are also of chief aesthetic
concern to cosmopolitanism.^29
However, there are moments in the narrative when Williams’s
ideas clash with cosmopolitanism more directly than they do with
postcolonial thought. In particular, one could look at his belief in an
ancestral and natural “homeland” for blacks: the “native land” for
Africans, to which he advocates (in the manner of Marcus Garvey),
that black Americans should one day return (p. 78). Such essential-
ist notions of “home” run counter to the fundamental aims of cos-
mopolitanism, which, as Stuart Hall explains, necessitate an “ability
to stand outside of having one’s life written and scripted by any one
community [.. .] and to draw selectively on a variety of discursive
meanings.”^30 The critical depiction of “home” that Hall alludes to
here is visible in a number of Phillips’s works, particularly his essays,
where he argues with a certain degree of cosmopolitan optimism
that in the future there will be “one global conversation with limited
participation open to all, and full participation available to none.
In this new world nobody will feel fully at home.”^31 It is with irony
then that we observe traces of this cosmopolitan sense of homeless-
ness in the only protagonist featured in the novel to have been born
and raised in Africa—he is a clear departure from the kind of con-
fidently grounded African whom Williams romanticizes about in
his letters.
Indeed, in stark contrast to the rooted African male ideal-
ized by Rudy Williams, the anonymous African interpreter in the
opening chapter is a man lost between cultures. One can identify
this confused, if not altogether fully “cosmopolitan” sense of geo-
graphical belonging in a number of the characters that feature in
Higher Ground , The Nature of Blood , and A Distant Shore. But it
is poignantly ironic that the African protagonists of these novels
(the African narrator in Higher Ground , the general in The Nature
of Blood , and Solomon in A Distant Shore ) each originate from a
place to which the designation “home” can no longer be comfortably
applied. In Solomon’s case, this is because his birthplace has been