Diaspora and Belonging in Teju Cole’s Open City

This study examines the themes of diaspora, belonging, and urban loneliness in Teju Cole's novel Open City, focusing on the Nigerian-American narrator Julius's ambivalent negotiations of identity and belonging as he walks through New York and Brussels. Cole's novel has attracted significant critical attention for its meditative prose, its engagement with world literature and music, and its ultimately disturbing narrative revelation, but undergraduate studies that situate it within Nigerian and African diaspora literary traditions while also attending to its formal philosophical character are less common. The study applies diaspora theory and theories of the urban flâneur to a close reading of the novel, examining Julius's status as a post-racial, cosmopolitan subject whose refusal of fixed cultural or national identity is both a privilege of his educated professional position and a form of self-protective emotional distance. Analysis attends to the novel's use of solitary walking as a structuring motif, the fragmentary portrait of African immigrant communities in New York and Brussels as a counter to Julius's own aesthetic detachment, and the suppressed narrative of violence that the final revelation retrospectively complicates. Findings demonstrate that Cole's novel performs the ambivalences of Nigerian diaspora identity with particular sophistication by refusing both nostalgic return narratives and celebratory cosmopolitan transcendence. The study argues for Open City's inclusion in undergraduate Nigerian diaspora literature syllabi across South West Nigerian universities. Keywords: diaspora, Teju Cole, Open City, belonging, urban fiction.