62 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
cosmopolitan thought does not dismiss the concept of the nation
state as a sociopolitical apparatus that can facilitate its conciliatory
aims (Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis argue that “the state [is] an
institution that can be productively co-opted into the cosmopoli-
tan Project”), it takes issue with some of the ethical ramifications
of nationalism.^84 As Turner succinctly puts it, cosmopolitanism
“does not mean that one does not have a country or a homeland,
but one has to have a certain reflexive distance from that home-
land. Cosmopolitan virtue requires Socratic irony, by which one
can achieve some distance from the polity.”^85 C e r t a i n l y , c o s m o p o l -
itanism shares some of the conciliatory aims of transnational the-
ory; but its critique of exclusiveness goes further than the latter’s
preoccupation with undermining reactionary nationalism. Indeed,
cosmopolitanism also critiques exclusive and fixed notions of home
and belonging. I contend that A Distant Shore ref lects these cosmo-
politan concerns by interrogating prescriptive ideas of belonging and
mutual identity. This is achieved by scrutinizing the very impulses
that drive their development.
One particular trope around which these impulses often gravitate,
and which is perhaps its smallest denominator, is that of “home.”
For Avtar Brah, the concept of home is intimately bound up with
the sociopolitical issues associated with belonging and exclusion in
a given material context. As she writes in her regularly cited work,
Cartographies of Diaspora , the “question of home [... ] is intrinsically
linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion
operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances.
It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the
social regulation of ‘belonging.’”^86 This view of home opens up the
concept from its associations with fixed places, much in the man-
ner that Gilroy sought to expand the fixation of identity politics on
geographical “origins” to encompass more tangible considerations
of material movement and experience. Gilroy critiques the fact that
“modern black political culture has always been more interested
in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in see-
ing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more
appropriately approached via the homonym routes.”^87 I n a s m u c h
as it rejects the notion that belonging is necessarily tied to a fixed