recognize the plenitude of historical and contemporary experiences and
narratives imbricated in a national history. Therefore , to historicize the
nation is to relate its dominant narrative, its national narrative, to other
narratives that refer to both smaller histories and larger ones. (Thomas
Bender 2002: vii; italics mine)In the end, the attraction of exile as migrancy or cosmopolitanism is demystified, just as
the lure of America comes under criticism for its features which are light years removed
from reality. This thus becomes the criticism against the objectification of American
hyperrality to the rest of the world. Just as in the case of London Letter and Other Poems ,
When it no Longer Matters where you Live turns the utopian narrative of American cities
on its head and shows the double deprivation that exiles and migrants of other categories
suffer when they transcend the borders of the marginalized cities of their homeland in the
South to search for fortunes in the North where capital has taken flight.
The above then brings the discussion to the need to review the existing ethics of
cosmopolitanism as a transmutation of exile, an issue which will be given greater
attention in the conclusion of this thesis. Put another way, it calls for a formulation of
African postcolonial aesthetics of cosmopolitanism, in which case, the catalyst for
migrancy will not be precipitated by shadows and mirages that are seductively cast as bait
from cities of global North to the cities of South. In other words, if the level of dystopia
experienced by African cosmopolitans and exiles in the cities of the North can be
comparable, if not worse than their experiences in the homeland, then it is high time one
began to take seriously the collapsing of boundaries between the various categories of
cities, especially, among others, as global and non-global, (post)modern and traditional
(Setha Low 2005:12-18), categorizations that have been used generally, if not totally to
capitalist ends by the West. Therefore, the values of “the potential creativity and
dynamism of all cities” must be espoused in such a way that will encourage the
development of cities of the South so much so that such call for the categorization of all
cities as “ordinary” (Jennifer Robinson 2006: 109) will translate into the realization of
economic balance in which case, the consolation of cosmopolitanism will not necessarily
be precipitated in the South by the chase of elusive, mobile capital to the North. This is
even so when globalization and cosmopolitanism are expected to be defined by