What might it mean to narrate human and non-human migration together, not in narrowly allegorical terms, but in a way that insists both on the parallels and the interspecies relationships that are involved? How might such narratives propose kinships across the boundaries of kind at a juncture when, as Donna Haraway puts it, “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge”Footnote ¹? To what extent can novels offer kinships of this sort in a way that both acknowledges and resists thinking in terms other than the axiomatic precedence accorded to human suffering over that of plants and animals? What, further, might it mean to think about conflict and migration through an inter-species lens in a novel—Teju Cole’s Open City (2011)—whose narrator, while undeniably erudite and cosmopolitan, is often profoundly lacking in sympathy? In some ways the incidence of non-human beings in recent novels about migration, both forced and elected, can be taken as nothing more mysterious than a sign of the times, when attention to biodiversity loss and climate change manifests textually in awareness of the “natural” world—what is apparently left of it, or what is no longer to be understood as exactly “natural,” so de-natured has it become in the “Capitalocene,” to use the coinage taken up by Haraway and others.Footnote ² Yet Cole’s novel, and also Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees (2022) and Aminata Forna’s Happiness (2018), among others, invite us to think in more nuanced ways about novelistic attempts to consider human and non-human species together in works that foreground displacement. While interspecies relationships are arguably more in evidence in Forna’s and Shafak’s novels, I will focus on Cole’s Open City in this essay. In Cole’s handling of the tension between cosmopolitanism and violence, he poses the problem of refugia, both human and non, in a particularly pointed way and in so doing helps readers think about our common vulnerability at a time of escalating geopolitical conflict.

As several commentators on the novel have stressed, the title references at once the idea of cosmopolitan freedom and capitulation to violent invasion. In its association with cities of refuge, the idea of an open city, or une ville franche, is anchored in a cosmopolitan world view. Yet, as Jacques Derrida points out, this definition of an open city as a place “to which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of injustice” is fraught even in its idealist conception by the tension between hospitality and state sovereignty, not to mention the expansive powers accorded the police to “manage” refugees.Footnote ³ A version of this contradiction is evident in the liberal cosmopolitanism articulated by Kant, for whom all rational beings—which is to say all human beings—share equally in the “common possession of the surface of the earth.”Footnote ⁴ At the same time, Kant also “strictly delimit[s]” the right to hospitality of the stranger entering foreign territory to the right of visitation (Besuchsrecht), which is controlled by “the law and the state police.”Footnote ⁵ In Cole’s attention to the anxieties the figure of the stranger elicits at key historical moments—post-9/11 and WWII—he not only exposes the contradiction at the heart of the liberal cosmopolitan notion of the open city, he places the emphasis in his novel on an even more compromised definition of an open city. As the narrator points out in the Brussels interlude, an open city in times of war means “surrender” to the invading forces in exchange for “survival.”Footnote ⁶

Taking up the contrast between the associations of an open city with cosmopolitanism and refuge and the more bellicose definition that Cole offers in this passage, Madhu Krishnan argues that the novel’s title “gestures towards a vision of space in which the illusion of freedom of movement serves as a mask for the continuation of violence.”Footnote ⁷ Likewise, Werner Sollors takes this explicit association of the open city with Nazi occupation as evidence that Cole’s view of cosmopolitanism is a considerably “darker,” “less optimistic” account than Kwame Anthony Appiah’s in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), the book Julius sends to Farouq, the young Moroccan intellectual he meets in Brussels.Footnote ⁸ More forcefully, Sam Durrant observes that the title of the novel “turns out to name not cosmopolitan hospitality but radical vulnerability, the possibility that the cosmopolitan might truly find herself a citizen of nowhere.”Footnote ⁹ This is, moreover, a vulnerability that, Durrant argues, is “disavowed” by liberal cosmopolitanism’s implication in “the global structures of oppression and exclusion that produce statelessness.”Footnote ¹⁰ For him, the critical power of Cole’s novel lies precisely in its demonstration of the way “refugee experience is encrypted within cosmopolitan consciousness” and in the productive tension between the narrator’s “pathological” cosmopolitan melancholia and the novel’s “politically salutary” exposure of the relation between “cosmopolitan privilege and the destitution of the refugee.”Footnote ¹¹

Building on these arguments, I focus on two additional features of the novel’s critical engagement with cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan compromises with violence in the interest of (the cosmopolitan’s) survival. The first is the attention the narrative gives to non-human species—birds, bees, plants, and parasites—in short, to the problem not only of refuge but of refugia, as it is understood in biological terms as a space for living organisms to survive unfavorable, species-threatening conditions. I am interested in the way Cole’s attention to other species tacitly yokes human and non-human species together under the umbrella of refugia. In so doing, Cole invites readers to think about biological life—both ours and that of our companion species—in a way that at least puts the brakes on an allegorical approach to literary representation of biota. In tracking deadly forced displacements in juxtaposition with the cosmopolitan mobility of the narrator and in comparing across the human-non-human divide, the novel (pre)figures the problem of multi-species survival both current and to come. For Anna Tsing the Anthropocene names the age in which “most of the refugia from which diverse species assemblages … can be reconstituted” no longer exist.Footnote ¹² Fittingly, refugia operates in the novel largely through its absence. That is, rather than depict spaces that sustain humans and other living beings and ensure their survival, Cole repeatedly draws our attention to the lack of such spaces and the need for them.

The second, related dimension of the novel that interests me has to do with what expanding the notion of refuge in this way accomplishes. In yoking together human and non-human migration, Cole also makes the human-centeredness of cosmopolitanism a problem. In light of “today’s planetary-scale renewal of the relation of enmity,”Footnote ¹³ expanding the notion of refuge in the face of threats to the survival of all living species is particularly urgent. This is another way in which the “open city” of the title, with its opposing meanings of refuge and bare survival in the face of violent invasion, resonates with the attention to interspecies relations. Readers are invited to think not only about which humans but also about which species ought to share equally in the “common possession of the surface of the earth,” to cite Kant’s formulation of universal hospitality once again. The problem of species, that is to say, emerges as a companionFootnote ¹⁴ to the novel’s concern with the figure of the (im)migrant or stranger. In reading Cole’s novel in this way, I must disagree with Sollors that Cole’s attention to the “animal world,” should be read as an allegory for “the perception of human migration”—a reading that subordinates the animal to the human.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, Cole’s strategy is better understood as figural, not only with respect to the central figures of flight (birds and human migrants) but also in his treatment of non-human species in the novel more generally.

It may well seem that in distinguishing the figural from the allegorical I am splitting hairs, given that the allegorical is itself figural. Nonetheless, Erich Auerbach distinguishes between figure and allegory in his extended philological study of figures in a way that I find productive for thinking about Cole’s novel.Footnote ¹⁶ For Auerbach, a “figure is something real and historical which announces something else that is real and historical.”Footnote ¹⁷ This insistence on the non-abstract quality of the terms of comparison is key to avoiding the subordination of non-human to human, to thinking interspecies relations without privileging the human actor and without turning the non-human into a mere symbol, an abstraction. In the figural, one thing does not simply stand in for or presage another, the animal for the human. Rather, each term has its own specificity and historical heft. Thus, while Auerbach concedes that “figural interpretation is allegorical in the widest sense,” he adds that “it differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity of both the sign and what it signifies.”Footnote ¹⁸ This cleaving to historicity is a distinguishing feature of Open City, and not only through the narrator’s regular excavation of the layers of human history embedded in the built environment during his peregrinations in Manhattan and in Brussels. The narrator’s comments on other species—whether the bedbug infestation in New York, the problem of other “invasive” species like the Tree of Heaven, or the bird deaths provoked by brightly lit urban structures—are similarly attentive to the empirical. All these figures, moreover, are signs with particular historical resonance in the twenty-first century: figures of flight, of invasion, of the parasitical all speak to contemporary border regimes in the global North. In his treatment of these figures in the novel, Cole insists not only on the historicity of the signs but also on the materiality of the particular non-human species that they signify. Boundaries between species do not merely stand in for borders between humans—including those that operate increasingly within and not only between statesFootnote ¹⁹—an operation that would clearly be allegorical. Rather, species boundaries and the specificity each species is accorded are meaningful in and of themselves. Understanding figure in Auerbachian terms is to repurpose for the current conjuncture of crises—the era of the climate crisis and the era of “exit from democracy,”Footnote ²⁰ as Achille Mbembe characterizes the political crisis we humans and our companion species face—a way of thinking historically about a moment of transition, and in a way that is both proleptic and retrospective, as well as comparative across species.

The historicity marking Cole’s treatment of human and non-human alike is key to the novel’s capacity to make companions of humans and non-human species. Cole thus offers one answer to the question that Amitav Ghosh argues it is essential for “serious fiction” to address if we are to address the climate crisis and challenge human exceptionalism: “What is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel?”Footnote ²¹ By “the modern novel,” Ghosh means the realist novel that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century—the “serious century,” Franco Moretti dubs it—and continues to dominate in the next, largely banishing the nonhuman from the form that is so “radically centered on the human.”Footnote ²² Cole’s novel both is and is not the sort of novel that Ghosh attends to. In realist fiction, Ghosh argues, literary conventions resist the improbable and the exceptional in ways that make it difficult for writers to address climate change without “relegat[ing] a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction.”Footnote ²³ Drawing on Franco Moretti’s analysis of realist narrative form in the nineteenth century, Ghosh points to the peculiar status of the exceptional in realist works that give pride of place to “fillers” and gradualism. Upheavals and unprecipitated events may advance the narrative, but they are largely “concealed” by the amount of attention given to the routine, the ordinary and the everyday.Footnote ²⁴ Yet Cole’s novel eschews the speculative while also managing to attend to the exceptional in terms that do not lead away from realism.

Cole’s realism differs both from the “serious fiction” Ghosh explores in his essay, and from the “planetary realism” Debjani Ganguly identifies in contemporary novels that attempt to reckon with catastrophe—the exceptional, if not improbable events of climate catastrophe and ecological disaster. Ganguly argues that in twenty-first century novels that grapple with catastrophe, realism “mutates” by incorporating the mythic, the speculative, the allegorical and the Gothic in order to address what seem like post-apocalyptic scenarios in the present.Footnote ²⁵ Cole, in contrast, attends to present catastrophe in terms that cleave more to non-fiction and the historical than to the speculative or the post-apocalyptic. Furthermore, Cole seems more invested in interspecies relations and human-scale historical violence than attention to the planetary or to the climate crisis per se. Cole’s is a revised realism, but one that registers the limits of cosmopolitanism for addressing the legacies of historical violence and more recent acts of violence such that the effects on both humans and other species are understood. In this way, Open City raises the very idea of who or what the cosmos encompasses and, if Cole stops short of equating human and non-human suffering, he nonetheless raises pointed questions about both human and non-human experiences of violence and death.

Cole’s novel addresses catastrophe through a revised realism, I propose, not because the plot is characterized by great disruptions and upheavals, but because of the way it folds such timely and urgent matters as mass deaths, destruction, and climate change into the daily walks, the conversations and the meditations of its protagonist. Indeed, Julius even ruminates on the extent to which “the last few decades”—the novel is set in 2006—represent “an anomaly in human history” insofar as human beings “lack … familiarity with mass death, with plague, war, and famine,” and are consequently “unprepared for disaster.”Footnote ²⁶ Julius’s privileged perspective is betrayed in this observation, as it is so frequently over the course of Cole’s text, for not all twenty-first century humans enjoy such good fortune as to lack familiarity with war, famine and death on a massive scale. Indeed, since the publication of Cole’s novel, steadily increasing numbers of people have been enduring these catastrophes—in Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere. If the unequal distribution of disaster among humans remains implicit in this passage, the mass deaths and other worldly harms experienced by non-human species are made explicit.

In a pattern echoed in other passages of the novel, Julius’s observations about human familiarity with war, plague, and famine are prompted by a conversation about bee colony collapse and the suggestion one character makes that bees may be “sensitive … to all the negativity in the human world.”Footnote ²⁷ While “negativity” is notably vague as an explanation, the remark does point to the role played by human practices like pesticide use, and to more general causes with human roots like habitat loss and climate change. This is the sort of yoking together of human and non-human species that interests me, and it is handled in this instance, as in so many others in the novel, not so as to make the bees merely a metaphor for human disaster but rather to draw out the interspecies parallels and relationships. Julius’s friend jokes that the name “colony collapse disorder” “sounds like something out of imperial history,”Footnote ²⁸ while his girlfriend reflects on what bees represent in Victor Erice’s 1973 horror film El Espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), which portrays life under Franco. Admittedly, Lise-Anne’s remark that in Erice’s film the bees represented “a way of thinking and being that was specific to bees, but that was related to the human world,”Footnote ²⁹ even as it acknowledges the specificity of bees and an interspecies relationship, seems to lead back in the direction of allegory, and the horror film itself to Ghosh’s “generic out-houses.” Yet both bee thinking and bee deaths have a material specificity more in line with the figural, and they enter Cole’s novel through a mundane activity, the protagonist’s picnic with friends in Central Park—through what Moretti would call “filler,” in short. And while the scene in the park and the conversation among friends are fictional, colony collapse disorder is not. In Cole’s novel, that is, the everyday is not only where “seriousness” enters the work of fiction, but also where the “real” enters, rather than where the real is concealed, as Ghosh argues is more typical of the realist novel.Footnote ³⁰

Furthermore, the fact that non-fiction is most often the form through which Cole presents non-human species in Open City is significant in light of what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin note about literary representations of the species boundary. They point out that “it is difficult for animals to escape anthropocentrism because they exist in modern cultures much more in representation than in ‘the real,’” and they underscore the largely symbolic meaning animals are accorded by humans, their “exclusively human significance.”Footnote ³¹ In Open City, in contrast, animals and other non-human species exist also as “real and historical.” To be sure, non-human species cannot represent themselves in a human-authored work, but Cole’s recourse to non-fiction, to the historically and scientifically verifiable details about bee colony collapse, avian deaths, invasive species and more, within the framework of a work of fiction, is a means of at least disrupting readerly impulses to allegorize. The work’s repeated crisscrossing of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, its status as a “roman d’essai,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s description of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,Footnote ³² offers a means of formalizing as a problem the human representation of nonhuman others. This is a problem, moreover, that the novel refrains from solving.

Cole’s figural approach to the linkages between species not only enables a historically grounded engagement with interspecies relationships but also the novel’s fundamentally real/ist approach to events or phenomena that seem outsized, exceptional. Given that the current need for refugia is both urgent and on an exceptional scale and given the pervasive denialism attending not only the climate crisis but the legitimacy of refugee claims, making the existence of atrocity evident through the narrator’s daily pastimes is strategic. As Julius remarks as he contemplates the site of the World Trade Center bombing, having stumbled upon it on one of his regular walks, “atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals.”Footnote ³³ This observation, explicitly linking banal human and animal familiarity with extraordinary violence, is embedded in a passage that, once again, draws attention to the mundane as much as to the exceptional. The narrator observes the World Trade Center site from the Vesey Street overpass as he “marche[s] along” with his fellow commuters who are apparently inured to the fact that “nothing separate[s]” them “from the people who had worked directly across the street on the day of the disaster.”Footnote ³⁴ Nothing, that is to say, separates the ordinary from the extraordinary in the novel, nor is there much separating the human from the animal except conventional human insistence that humans be treated differently. Thus, Julius remarks that the chain-link fencing enclosing the commuters “penned” them in, “‘like animals’ stumbling to the slaughter.”Footnote ³⁵ The inverted commas around the phrase “like animals” both marks and takes some distance from this conventional cross-species comparison that rests on the assumption that humans should not be treated in the way humans treat animals. Lest readers miss this point, Julius then muses “But why was it permitted to treat even animals that way? Elizabeth Costello’s nagging questions showed up in the strangest places.”Footnote ³⁶ Not only does the allusion to J.M. Coetzee’s novel embed yet another reference to historical atrocity—Costello compares the way humans treat animals with the Holocaust—it also suggests the formal mixing of fiction with non-fiction that characterizes both works.Footnote ³⁷ In the face of denialism, the novel insists that there is nothing aberrant or improbable about atrocity, nothing exceptional about states of exception, and it does so by giving us a cosmopolitan narrator who himself acts as “a mirror carried along a high road,” Stendhalian fashion, as he walks through such apparently “open” cities as New York and Brussels, and, through that movement, becomes the engine driving the narrative.

The novel’s form is of a piece with the figural strategy by which Cole insists on interspecies relationships. Cole invites readers to think about the place of the non-human in his novel by introducing figures of flight in the opening pages. Comparing his own “aimless wandering” through New York with his “habit of watching bird migrations,” the narrator-protagonist of Open City describes looking for “the miracle of natural immigration.”Footnote ³⁸ Cole does not use the more expected “migration” to describe the geese whose seasonal movement Julius tracks, so readers immediately make the connection between migrating birds and (im)migrating humans. By means of this slippage, readers arguably find themselves on familiar anthropocentric terrain, trying to read in the avian metaphor a means of understanding the worldly politics of border-crossing just as Julius reads bird behavior as though “taking auspices,” looking for what it might say about human actions or human futures. But Cole’s novel repeatedly troubles such reading practices, just as it troubles Julius’s cosmopolitan character, established in the same opening passages. We learn that Julius listens to classical music stations in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands while he looks out the window of his Manhattan apartment, and that he turns his attention to reading, once it becomes too dark to see birds in the sky. The works he reads—Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Peter Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul, or Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend—are all translated from European languages, as the narrator makes a point of stressing.Footnote ³⁹ To be sure, these works have greater significance in the novel than the fact of their having been originally written in French and German, but their immediate purpose at the outset of the novel is to establish Julius’s cosmopolitanism. In juxtaposing Julius’s status as cosmopolitan migrant with migrating birds, the novel introduces the problem of refuge in a cosmopolitan framework and does so through the idea of reading across borders and across species. In this way, Cole’s novel offers an oblique meditation on what Eduardo Mendieta has called interspecies cosmopolitanism, which is to say a “politics of ‘becoming-with-companions’ that entails also a distinct form of worlding, of making worlds,” including re-making cosmopolitanism itself so that it is no longer the “Kantian cosmopolitanism of human exceptionalism, but an interspecies cosmopolitanism.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The problem of reading that the novel elaborates, that is to say, is one that attends to the defining of kin and kind in human and in inter-species terms. Yet Cole also resists endowing his protagonist with a clear ethical stance. Certainly, Julius neither promotes kinship across kind—or even within kind—nor endorses the explicitly ethical positions on the question of climate change or racism that Moji, the sister of his childhood friend, articulates. He restricts himself mostly to observation and reportage on these subjects, offering only diffident commentary when he comments at all. The reader need not be directed by the narrator-protagonist’s views and behavior so much as think alongside him about borders and species.

Attempts to read across species divides are fraught, Cole makes clear. Toward the end of Open City and shortly before the momentous revelation of the narrator’s “blind spot,”Footnote ⁴¹ Julius reflects on the “quasi-mystical art” of “sympathetic herbal medicine”Footnote ⁴² as he recounts a visit to the Cloisters Museum in upper Manhattan and the herb collection in its walled garden. The practice of naming and using herbs to treat ailments of the body parts they resemble—plants such as liverwort or lungwortFootnote ⁴³—was based on a notion of sympathy as “a (real or supposed) affinity between certain things” that allows them to “affect or influence one another.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Also known as simpling and as the doctrine of signatures, the practice serves as a figure in the novel for humanist thinking about the “natural” world and human “nature.” Thinking about the assumption that the physical appearance of the plant was a sign of its medicinal properties—a sign designed to be read by humans—leads Julius to comment on the work of the early modern Swiss-German natural philosopher Paracelsus, who extended the medicinal “search for Signs” to moral philosophy. As Julius tells it, Paracelsus believed “the light of nature … informed us what the inner reality of a thing was by means of its form, so that the appearance of a man gave some valid reflection of the person he really was.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The always-erudite Julius reminds readers of later developments of this line of thinking in the direction of “the debased forms of phrenology, eugenics, and racism.”Footnote ⁴⁶ While Julius passes lightly over these racist practices, the latent violence in simpling is nonetheless held out for readerly consideration. Just as plants may be harvested for human use, so may human Others be exploited in view of their inferior “natures.” Donna Haraway’s assessment of the link between other species and racism in humanist thought is apposite: “The discursive tie between the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animal—all reduced to type, all Others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution—is at the heart of racism and flourishes, lethally, in the entrails of humanism.”Footnote ⁴⁷ That sympathetic medicine is also known as simpling, a detail Cole highlights by using the term twice in the space of a paragraph, implicitly alerts the reader to the problematic simplicity of this view of medicine, moral character, and racial “science.” Indeed, “simple” was used to pun on foolishness in the period in which the practice of simpling emerged.

Resemblances across species and the assumption that appearance is a clue to the nature of a living organism, human or non, are identified in this passage as problems both for ways of knowing and for ethics. If apparent correspondences fail to establish an appropriate form of understanding; if, moreover, sympathy cannot be trusted—either in the sense of an “affinity between things” or, as we will see, in its later, more common meaning of fellow feeling—what alternative forms of knowing and relating ought one to pursue? The novel offers no straightforward answer to this question. What it does do, through this meditation on sympathetic medicine and the doctrine of signs, is to prefigure—that is to say, “to announce something else that is real and historical”Footnote ⁴⁸—the epistemological and ethical inheritance of humanism in the twenty-first century. And in this way, through a play on the different senses of “sympathy,” Cole returns us to the problem of cosmopolitan violence and the putative link between cosmopolitanism and sympathy for others.Footnote ⁴⁹

Contra the established association of cosmopolitanism with sympathy, Cole offers a narrator who frequently displays a remarkable lack of fellow feeling. Despite his knowledge of inequitable histories of migration distinguishing the European “refugees” for whom Ellis Island was once “a symbol,” from “‘we blacks’ [who] had known rougher ports of entry,”Footnote ⁵⁰ Julius repeatedly rebuffs the claims of “brotherhood” made on him by the Africans and African-Americans he encounters in the course of his day-to-day, belying the allusion to Stephen Biko’s call for Black Consciousness.Footnote ⁵¹ Of the African taxi driver who rebukes him for not saying hello when he entered the taxi—“Hey. I’m African, just like you”—Julius remarks “I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”Footnote ⁵² When Julius goes to mail a copy of Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism to Farouq, the African-American postal worker who waits on him hails him as a visionary and proposes they “see some poetry together.” Julius responds with a disingenuous “sure thing” before “mak[ing] a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future.”Footnote ⁵³ Julius’s more extended encounter with Saidu, the Liberian refugee he visits in a Queens detention center, illustrates this problem of human sympathy more explicitly. His visit to the facility is motivated not by an interest in the fate of the “undocumented immigrants” being held in prison conditions, but by a desire to get closer to his girlfriend Nadège. While Julius characterizes himself as lending “a sympathetic ear”Footnote ⁵⁴ to Saidu’s story about fleeing the civil war in Liberia, that claim of sympathy is undercut by Julius’s subsequent revelation of his skepticism. “I wondered, naturally,” Julius remarks, “whether I believed him or not … . He had, after all, had months to embellish the details, to perfect his claim of being an innocent refugee.”Footnote ⁵⁵ That Julius should characterize his skepticism as “natural” while his sympathy turns out to be performative—Julius has been playing at “the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle”Footnote ⁵⁶—must strike most readers as a cynical inversion of the more “natural” impulse to sympathy conventionally associated with cosmopolitanism and the act of listening to the stories of others.

Julius’s lack of sympathy is part of the point, not only in this passage but throughout the novel. As Lily Saint points out, “the novel juxtaposes the urge to connect that constitutes the global cosmopolite with an equally powerful urge to escape, elude, or even ignore others’ suffering.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This extended interrogation of cosmopolitanism’s compromises, often as not, takes the form of interspecies figures. A case in point, readers cannot help but be struck by Julius’s curious mix of attachment and detachment to the elderly and now ailing Professor Saito, who had befriended Julius when he was an undergraduate and who Julius continues to visit now and then in New York. It is most striking when during one visit Julius fails to attend properly to what Saito is saying about gay rights and civil unions, fails to engage him in a personal conversation about his former partner, because Julius has begun thinking about bedbugs, an infestation of which he learns Saito has been battling. Julius is struck by several features of the insects’ behavior—their invasion of private spaces, their “embarrassing” failure to “discriminate on the basis of social class,” their longstanding ability to conduct “low-grade warfare … at the margins of modern life,” their “cannibalistic nature,” their “cunning,” or apparent “power of reasoning”—qualities that, although Julius does not say so explicitly, make the bugs uncannily like humans.Footnote ⁵⁸ So preoccupied is Julius by the (anthropomorphized) parasites that he confesses that Saito’s “recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Even though he acknowledges the feeling as “contemptible,” he confesses that for him “the bedbugs trumped” these more calculated and vicious kinds of attack.Footnote ⁶⁰ So unsettled is Julius by this interspecies conflict that he falls into a troubled sleep after reading more about bedbugs and has a nightmare about the bombing of a pet market in Basra, where both humans and their companion animals share in the violence and disorientation that follows.Footnote ⁶¹ This vision of violence across the species divide is, significantly, also linked in the dream to the problem of human displacement. Julius wanders through the carnage in his lab coat and encounters his mother, from whom he is estranged and whose experience of being made a refugee in Berlin following the Second World War Julius can scarcely acknowledge, let alone sympathize with.

This impulse to “escape, elude or … ignore others’ suffering,” as Saint puts it, is nowhere more glaringly evident than in the narrator’s conversation with Moji, with whom he has recently become re-acquainted, late in the novel. The ethical is linked to the epistemological in this instance too. Framing that conversation is the passage on sympathetic medicine discussed above and Julius’s subsequent reflection on the idea of a blind spot, both the physiological and the metaphorical. Julius’s blind spot, readers are likely to conclude, is his limited capacity for sympathy and what he is not able to admit into his field of vision. “Each person,” he observes, “must assume that the room of his own mind is not … entirely opaque to him” and consequently “we are not the villains of our own stories” even though “in someone else’s version, I am the villain.”Footnote ⁶² In assuming self-knowledge, Julius proposes, we assume moral innocence. Julius then reveals that according to Moji, “I had forced myself on her” and that this act of sexual violence “had been ever-present in her life, like a stain or a scar,” while Julius seemed not even to recognize her when they met again in the United States.Footnote ⁶³ In another kind of novel this scene would shift the course of events, but like the other exceptional events I have discussed above, the impact of this momentous revelation is chiefly on the reader rather than on the narrative itself. It is not only that the assault is not depicted but rather narrated in a quiet and controlled manner years after it has happened, but there is also no evidence that Julius is affected by the revelation. He has absolved himself even before readers learn why he is a villain in Moji’s story: “From my point of view,” he remarks, “even without claiming any especially heightened sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Fittingly, in light of the connection Julius makes between occluded vision and compromised ethics, the chapter ends without Julius responding to Moji’s accusation, nor does he return to reflect on this moment before the novel closes.

Humans, it is tempting to argue, are not a particularly sympathetic species, on the evidence of Julius’s blind spots and the cumulative evidence supplied in the narrator’s historical excavations of violence and suffering over the course of the narrative. From the African Burial Ground, “most of [it] now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies,” that presents an “echo across centuries, of slavery in New York,” to the many “erasure[s]” at the site of the World Trade Center, making it a “palimpsest … written, erased, rewritten,” to the mass murder and dispossessions of the Hackensack, Delaware and Iroquois peoples, Julius disinters the traces of colonialism, enslavement, and racism kept otherwise out of view.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Julius’s historical meditations, the figural operates not only by drawing parallels across species boundaries, but also within, connecting the displacements of settler-colonial history and the history of Atlantic slavery with the contemporary human displacements the novel represents. These connections expose the violent underbelly of humanism, its imperial foundations, and the kinds of sub-categories of the human erected on those foundations that condemned those considered to be the “rejects of humanity” to the kind of “life in suspension” or “life in a zoo” that Mbembe proposes is the nature of life “under the sign of race.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Yet the novel also proposes a less narrowly humanist way of thinking about sympathy, one attuned to more occult or at least unacknowledged influences and relationships, and not only intra-species ones. Among the now obsolete meanings of sympathy is as “a (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This is the sympathy of sympathetic medicine, but it also finds echoes in the novel’s tracking of occluded relationships between and within species. The narrative archaeology of human-on-human violence that Julius undertakes on his walks is complemented by the evidence the novel offers that other species accompany humans across the globe, like bedbugs—significantly nicknamed red coats along the eastern seaboard, as Cole points out twice—or the tree of heaven, brought to the United States from China, that flourished so well in its new environment it came to be known as an invasive species.Footnote ⁶⁸ “But aren’t we all?” remarks Julius’s friend,Footnote ⁶⁹ in an acknowledgment that can be read both as an implicit recognition that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”Footnote ⁷⁰ and as a tacit reference to colonial settler-invaders. The novel thus not only tracks how “human knowledge of and relationships with the natural world … have led to ecological crises,” and have “ties to colonialism,” as Byron Caminero-Santangelo argues.Footnote ⁷¹ It also prompts readers to consider that humans as a species are caught in the sort of cosmic blind spot Julius finds himself in at the end of the novel when he is locked out of a concert hall on a “flimsy fire escape”—a phrase it is hard not to read as an ironic comment on Julius’ cosmopolitanism.Footnote ⁷² From this position he is not only cut off from his fellow concertgoers and those on the street far below. His impression is that his “entire being [is] caught up in a blind spot” on an interplanetary scale, so distant is he from “unseen” and “unreachable starlight” that “would arrive in due time, and cast its illumination on other humans, or perhaps on other configurations of our world, after unimaginable catastrophes had altered it beyond recognition.”Footnote ⁷³ Much like the narrator’s reflection on his apparently anomalous position as a young Black man among older, white concert goers, and on the music itself—“But Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question”—human preoccupations and power relations sometimes benefit from such de-centering and re-scaling.Footnote ⁷⁴

Caminero-Santangelo makes a case for understanding Cole’s approach as “constellational,” a strategy of “connect[ing] the dots or … patterns of power] behind … isolated ‘disasters,’” as Cole himself puts it.Footnote ⁷⁵ While Caminero-Santangelo focuses primarily on the links between climate change and migration that, on his account, Cole’s novel can be said to decolonize, my focus has been less on climate change than on the attention Cole gives to non-human species more generally, as well as to a long history of human and non-human movement and to the colonial and capitalist activity that precipitates and intensifies it. I have been trying to show how, in repeatedly returning us to interspecies parallels and relationships, the novel not only tracks the links between “disasters,” but does so in a way that registers the shared human and non-human need for refuge/refugia. To be sure, other species typically move across the globe in different ways than humans do. Some species move freely across the political borders humans have erected—birds, butterflies, wildebeest—while others have been intentional or unintentional companions to human movement: apples and honeybees brought from Europe to the Americas, potatoes from the Americas to Europe, India and Central Asia, but also the emerald ash borer and Japanese knotweed from Asia and bedbugs from Europe. Import regulations and biosecurity protocols might usefully be compared to the border regimes controlling human movement, but Julius does not take up regulation in his encounters with his fellow migrants and refugees, nor in the attention he gives to bees, bedbugs, and invasive species. The figural relationships are what matter in this work.

The novel ends by returning readers to the figures of flight with which it opened. Sollors is right to observe that “it is hard not to read” this passage “as an allegory of the lure and potential destructiveness of America to the migrant.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet here, too, Cole insists on the historicity of the bird deaths and not merely on their symbolic resonance. Acknowledging that the Statue of Liberty “has had its symbolic value right from the beginning,” Julius points out that it was also, “until 1902 … a working lighthouse” that “guided ships into Manhattan’s harbor” even as it “fatally disoriented birds.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In other words, the statue is something “real and historical” that speaks to something else that is “real and historical,” in this case an interspecies relationship that is not easily reduced to the human consequence alone.Footnote ⁷⁸ Representing a haven for humans and peril for birds, the beacon means different things for each, and while it can be said to signify “the destructiveness of America to the [human] migrant,” its literal destructiveness to many species of migrating bird is no less real and historical for that, as Julius’s rehearsal of the official tally of numbers, dates and species, and commercial as well as scientific, “public-spirited” uses for the dead birds makes clear. And while large numbers of bird deaths could sometimes be associated with turbulent weather conditions, the novel closes on “something more troubling,” an extraordinary statistic without a correspondingly unusual “natural” cause: “175 wrens had been gathered in … although the night just past hadn’t been particularly windy or dark.”Footnote ⁷⁹ A perfectly ordinary night, a disturbingly elevated death toll: the novel ends with these apparently incommensurable details, reminding readers of the limits on human efforts to separate “natural” causes from the human-made. These figures of flight, in their ordinariness and their mutual implication, if we are to take their auspices, point to the need for multi-species refugia and new ways of realizing them.

At the same time, this ending stops short not only of the humanist position Sollers articulates, but of any clear (re)solution. If readers deduce the import of forging kinships across kind from the evidence of human impact on other species, it is not because the narrative voice endorses such a position. Julius’s taking of auspices is something the novel leaves behind—as Julius himself does—in the opening pages. As a strategy for attending to human and other-than-human migration within the space of what Peter Boxall characterizes as the novel’s “anthropocentric organization of being,”Footnote ⁸⁰ abandoning attempts to read other living species for their significance to humans, or, to put it more strongly, not treating other species as symbols or signs that are meaningful only by virtue of their import for humans, is a way of making narrative space for the nonhuman within the novel form. Yet Julius remains the perceiving center of the novel, as perforce he must as narrator, though his is a perspective that comes up short both with respect to human refugees like Saidu and the living species whose lives, deaths, and history he recounts so dispassionately.

Cole’s protagonist offers readers a series of meditations on human violence, its costs and ongoing consequences, and on the complex ways that human violence and human epistemologies are bound up with our interspecies relationships. To an extent, it points to the need for a “new foundation” for humanism of the sort called for by thinkers like Sylvia Wynter or the “(neo)humanist retorts” to the “dark posthumanisms” of climate crisis, neoliberal “reason,” and “abandonment” of democracy that Wendy Brown argues for.Footnote ⁸¹ Such new humanisms, we might conclude after reading novels like Cole’s Open City, are usefully extended by engagement with our interspecies relationships. Julius’s cosmopolitanism affords him subtle ways of thinking about relations within and across kind, even as he struggles with making kin, with feeling with others whether human or not. In this way, the particular capacities and limitations of the protagonist Cole has placed at the center of this text serve to illuminate what Ganguly characterizes as the “normative humanist epistemology of the realist novel” from within.Footnote ⁸² As an exploration of cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century, moreover, the novel’s exploration of a kind of moral stasis in Julius’s repeated failure to take an ethical stance in his encounters with strangers, whether human or not, suggests that we may read the novel not only as a “darker” version of Appiah’s work, but as an implicit response to it. At key moments in his peregrinations, Julius exposes perceptions of the world and its human and other-than-human inhabitants that are incommensurate. However the “real” enters the text, without shared perceptions, without common feeling, there can be no solidarity, no engagement, no action. In this way, Cole’s novel points to the current lack of political will to address the causes and consequences of unprecedented levels of human displacement and of other living species. Cole’s use of figures allows readers to make connections across and within species boundaries, but the hope that cosmopolitanism might be a means of addressing current crises like the problem of refuge shared by humans and our companion species is not held out by Cole’s novel so much as placed in doubt. The failure is a human one—a cosmic blind spot of the human eye—and it is in offering readers an anatomy of such a failure that Cole invites scrutiny of the form’s “normative humanist epistemology” and “anthropocentric order of being.”