The City as Represented in Teju Cole’s Open City and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s No One Sleeps in Alexandria

Abstract

Living in our global world today of migration and multiculturalism is living without boundaries but with differences. Diversity is thus a key feature of modernism and post-modernism. How do cities embrace these differences? How do we read the city? How does the city affect and define its inhabitants and migrants? How are writers inspired and overwhelmed by the city and how do they interpret their experiences in literary texts? What is the relationship between the city and the text? The aim of this paper is to read the city of New York and Alexandria in the literary works of Teju Cole’s Open City and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s No One Sleeps in Alexandria. The paper will explore how each writer reads his city and translates his experiences in the text. Wavering between two cities, “the city of feelings” and “the city of facts”, Julius and Magd al-Din are wandering as strangers and flâneurs in the streets of New York and Alexandria. The paper follows their experiences of living with difference as they are being exposed to/by the city.