Abstract
This paper aims to identify the disillusionment with metropolitan-centred cosmopolitanism in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men . The immigrants are chosen as the focal point to reveal the dissociation between them and the metropolis. Examining Naipaul’s description of the immigrant population’s metropolitan life, I contend that the cosmopolitan ideology is in stark contrast with the reality of coexistence, intermingling and hybridisation. Mere coexistence of people of heterogeneous cultural, national, religious or other identity formations cannot guarantee the uptake or expression of cosmopolitan openness. Making using of cosmopolitan theories in marketing and sociology and taking subaltern and third world experiences as forces of intervention and interruption into account, the fraudulence and infeasibility of cosmopolitanism as hedonistic consumption of global products and luxurious stylisation of metropolitan life in the novel is highlighted. This study reveals that it is colonial education that builds unreal colonial fantasy of the metropolis and cosmopolitanism on the one hand and leads to disillusionment on the other.
Highlights
This study reveals that it is colonial education that builds unreal colonial fantasy of the metropolis and cosmopolitanism on the one hand and leads to disillusionment on the other
Since it is common sense to associate cosmopolitanism with the metropolis, a site for circulation, transit, exchange and interaction, The Mimic Men becomes the perfect text to identify how Naipaul constructs the relations between the metropolis and cosmopolitanism within the postcolonial context
The biggest development that Naipaul makes in The Mimic Men is that he for the first time reflects on the corrosive, damaging effect of colonial education on the sensibility of students like Ralph Singh and colonial politicians, who enter the elite strata of the society
Summary
Naipaul said in an interview that his 1967 novel The Mimic Men shuttles back and forth between the Caribbean and England, it is “more about London than anything else” Since it is common sense to associate cosmopolitanism with the metropolis, a site for circulation, transit, exchange and interaction, The Mimic Men becomes the perfect text to identify how Naipaul constructs the relations between the metropolis and cosmopolitanism within the postcolonial context. In the perpetual oscillation between the utopian and dystopian representation of London, The Mimic Men challenges the normative conception of cosmopolitanism rooted in the metropolitan culture by inviting subaltern and third world experiences as forces of intervention and interruption
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