Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 63

geographical space, cosmopolitan thought dovetails with both Brah
and Gilroy’s theorizations.
However, as I note above, cosmopolitanism is also typified by a
motivation to go further and extend this critique to pursue more
actively the cultivation of distance from static modes of belonging
and seeing, and this is where slight differences emerge. Kendall,
Woodward, and Skrbis contend:

Ideally, the ref lexive cosmopolitan feels little or no ethical and polit-

ical commitment to local and national contexts and in fact is likely

to show an irony, almost bordering on suspicion, toward their own

national myths and discourses. This demonstrates a broad willingness

to step outside stable, privileged and established power categories of

selfhood.^88

The logic of this more critical, more cosmopolitan orientation to
essentialist ideas of belonging has been openly endorsed by Phillips.
Speaking again in an interview with Goodman, he states:

[My writing is] an attempt to try to convince myself that it’s not nec-

essary to have a very concrete sense of home. That actually, those of us

who don’t have a concrete sense of home are okay [... ] And I want to

write, and say, that it’s okay to have a multiple sense of home. It’s okay

that home can’t just be summed up in one sentence [.... It is therefore]

time to let go of the necessity to be rooted, because with it comes all

sorts of unpleasantness.^89

The subversion of a static conception of home alluded to here is
a primary preoccupation of A Distant Shore and one that Phillips
employs a number of literary techniques to pursue.
In the novel, we are first introduced to Dorothy, a character
who is, in many ways, worlds apart from the younger Solomon, an
African asylum seeker she comes to befriend. However, the paths of
the two protagonists converge on an emotional and psychological
level when both become “exiles” from their respective countries of
birth: Solomon literally has to flee his home country to escape death,
whereas Dorothy becomes culturally and socially estranged from the
“old England” she thought she had known all her life. Yet, despite
the characters’ patent dissimilarity, Phillips draws our attention