Abstract
This is the first of two chapters that address contemporary black British short fiction’s exploration of a ‘cosmopolitan’ vision of community. Jansen argues that Hari Kunzru’s short stories imagine a worldwide community of singular human beings in the Nancean sense of mondialisation. She shows that Kunzru’s stories are particularly engaged in the tour du monde that Berthold Schoene considers typical of contemporary cosmopolitan narration. Set in no less than five different continents, Kunzru’s short stories try and give voice to as many segments of worldwide living as possible. Taken together, the stories imagine a differential, non-essentialist global community of human beings, which is equally aware of the commonalities all people share and their incommensurable differences from one another.
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Jansen, B. (2018). Tour du Monde: Hari Kunzru. In: Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94860-7_10
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