Cosmopolitanism and strange encounters in George Elliott Clarke’s The Motorcyclist

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 novel The Motorcyclist, it attempts to illustrate how othered subjectivities interact in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and how these interactions are profoundly shaped by colonial, white-supremacist, and patriarchal power structures. Divisions and hostilities among strangers are contingent on hierarchical and seemingly fixed oppositions in terms of race, class, or gender. Use of the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger helps to demonstrate that these conflicts can be approached in self-critical terms, and that simple binaries of exclusion may be replaced by a more nuanced reading of relational difference.