Saroukhani, Henghameh <br/><br/>
Vehicular Cosmopolitanism: The Car in Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists 

 -  2017.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The kinaesthetic sensibility of recent discourses on cosmopolitanism has tended to universalise and abstract representations of global connectivity. The materiality of culture—understood here as an object-mediated form of cultural exchange—has been neglected in favour of a critical attention to hybrid and vernacular modes of being. Through Bernardine Evaristo’s novel-with-verse Soul Tourists (2005), I rearticulate cosmopolitanism as a specific literary praxis that takes into account the significance of material life. By tracing the novel’s fascination with cars and (auto)mobility, I interrogate how the text assembles cross-cultural and cross-material connections that complicate prevailing notions of cosmopolitanism as hybrid subjectivity. While praised for its progressive ability to reimagine black Britain through a distinctly black European context, Soul Tourists has yet to garner sustained debate concerning the commodified life of objects, like the car, which reconfigure such politicised tactics of belonging. I argue that a focus on the car enables a crucial phenomenological shift whereby the sights, smells and sounds of objects-in-motion reveal unexpected and unexplored outer-national relations between inanimate forms and animate bodies. The vehicular cosmopolitanism of Soul Tourists sets up the car as poesis in ways that unsettle the humanistic assumptions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.