Every day is a possibility: Modernity, struggle, and the politics of solidarity in the writing of Teju Cole

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teju Cole’s literary and essayistic work opens interdisciplinary and transnational conversations concerning the work of solidarity politics at least four decades in the making. Opening with a look at his first novel, Every Day is for the Thief (2007, 2014), the author probes aspects of his work in relation to other writers, such as the late writer June Jordan and Suheir Hammad who mobilize and challenge conceptions of solidarity. The author views Cole’s writing as an itinerant politic of navigation through potent and historically contentious landscapes of his native Nigeria, the United States, and Palestine. The author argues that these seemingly distant spatial markers signify broad struggles at the heart of modernity concerning land, human rights, and violent dispossession. The author holds these examples in contradistinction to conditions facing Black lives throughout the African diaspora while examining Cole’s work as mining new possibilities enlivened through familiar terrains of political struggle.