Displacement and Return in Teju Cole’s Open City and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

The urban walker's meditation on memory, displacement, and the layers of historical trauma embedded in city spaces is a distinctive literary mode shared by Teju Cole's Open City and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and a comparison of these two texts reveals how postcolonial and post-Holocaust narrative traditions have arrived at similar literary strategies for representing the experience of diasporic consciousness. This study examined how both texts construct a first-person narrator who moves through cities while simultaneously moving through memory, and how both use photography, digression, and fragmented autobiography to resist the linear narrative of displacement and recovery. A comparative diaspora and trauma methodology drawing on memory studies and postcolonial literary theory was applied. Cole's Julius walks the streets of New York and Amsterdam as a Nigerian immigrant psychiatrist whose cosmopolitanism conceals an inability to form intimate connections, while Sebald's four narrators are European Jewish emigrants whose lives are saturated by the memory of the Holocaust. The analysis showed that both texts share a deeply melancholic narrative mode, a non-linear structure, and an ethical preoccupation with the responsibility of memory. Results revealed that Cole's debt to Sebald is documented and deliberate, making this pairing an ideal case study for examining how postcolonial writers engage with European literary modernism. The study recommends this pairing for advanced undergraduate seminars in comparative diaspora literature at universities in the South West geopolitical zone.

Keywords: displacement, diaspora literature, Teju Cole, Sebald, memory narrative