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Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to investigate the rhetoric of representation of a North-Afropolitanism, imbued by YAE’s A Novel in the City project, constructing tenets for an identity in-the-making. Partaking in the experience of nomad literature, exile books, globalized identity, and prescribing their effects of polyglossia, cultural fusion, cross-ethnicity, hybridity, transnationality and intermixture, the author sketches an archite(x)tural design of an innovative novel citizen, moving as a Grio story teller/poet in the city, telling tales of many a city while walking the streets, squares, train stations, library halls and wider public spaces of major cosmopolitan cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or again Marrakech and Rabat, all the way show-casing ways of reading literature and dictating diasporic living conditions of a novelist on the move with his tablet textos. Transcribing an exported form of North-Afropolitanism, in particular, the nomad novel experiments with a sub-narrative of postmodernist writing style, extending a North-African-centered logos to affect a malleable cosmopolitan pathos. The paper concludes that due to the many cultural influences that shape their characters as well as their readers, the North African novel writing does not have to be categorically set in Africa and yet consent that their adopted Western genealogies are not fully theirs; hence, the author’s quest for his doubles, beyond his own cultural space, probes onto the main question of home-grown truths, to smoke out physical traces of origins and geographies; while suggesting synthetic approaches to re-read traditions, and histories.