Locating Ben Okri’s The Age of Magic in a Cosmopolitan Framework
Locating Ben Okri’s The Age of Magic in a Cosmopolitan Framework

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I explore the implications of the term “cosmopolitanism” and focus on the critical departures Kwame Anthony Appiah’s idea of “rooted cosmopolitanism” makes from the humanistic hue of cosmopolitanism. Appiah avers that cosmopolitan identities (encompassing local and global and everything in between) are based on the awareness of difference, but enabled through the desire to share narratives and stories. While Ben Okri, the Nigerian-British author has been hailed as cosmopolitan ever since The Famished Road (1991) was published, here I analyze his lesser discussed 2014 novel, The Age of Magic, and locate it in a cosmopolitan framework that is closer to Appiah’s own understanding of the term. The lineage of the protagonist, Lao (to Okri’s other fictional works), and of Mistletoe (to the myth of Pan), serves to instantiate the political and aesthetic imports of the cosmopolitan imagination of characters (and of the authorial figure of Okri); this cosmopolitan imagination draws with equal ease on African and European myth, magic, and cultural history. The geographical location in The Age of Magic also serves to exemplify an additional facet of the cosmopolitan aesthetic in question.

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