Failing border crossings and cosmopolitanism in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North

This article discusses Brian Chikwava’s novel Harare North (2009) and its representations of unsuccessful border crossings from the perspective of cosmopolitanism. I argue that through the unnamed protagonist’s inability or his own unwillingness to cross different material and symbolic borders, the novel gives articulation to the failure of such cosmopolitan ideals as openness to otherness, acknowledgement of one’s own position in the world, and active engagement in transcultural encounters. Chikwava’s protagonist seems to be constantly on the “wrong” side of any border that he encounters. As such, he is the unwanted abject figure on whose exclusion different normative subjectivities are constructed. By addressing the problematics of border crossings and cosmopolitan ideals in a globalized world which is increasingly interconnected but also marked by the proliferation and multiplication of borders, this article draws attention to the intertwined issues of mobility and the processes of transculturation that mobility should ideally entail. In so doing, this essay criticizes simplistic tendencies to equate cosmopolitanism with transnational mobility and reduce cosmopolitanism to a mere identity position — a feature that can be observed in current discussions concerning Afropolitanism. Chikwava’s novel points at the fact that crossing boundaries and adopting cosmopolitan ethics is not always easy, nor necessarily even desired by those on the move.