Abstract: This essay situates Teju Cole’s Open City within frameworks provided by critical memory studies. It interrogates how the unreliability of Cole’s first-person narrator dramatizes that memory is processual, the result of narrative processes that construct and reconstruct the past through the needs of the present. The essay argues that the novel’s rearticulation and remediation of traumatic memories and histories are not simply rendered ironic by the revelation of the protagonist’s past but are formally leveled out in manners that mitigate against the recognition of the distinctions and differences of histories and experiences that a critical memory culture requires.
Thomas Heise (Mon,) studied this question.
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