The World as Singular Plural Composite: Suhayl Saadi

Abstract

This chapter contends that Suhayl Saadi’s short fiction as a whole offers a collage of a singularly plural cosmopolitan community that is similarly aware of local particularities and global human commonalities. Jansen suggests that Saadi’s concern with Scottishness in a number of stories is ultimately part of an all-encompassing interest in cosmopolitanism. She shows that Saadi’s short stories are characterised by a higher degree of cohesiveness than Kunzru’s, creating a decidedly composite vision of mondialisation. In particular, the stories collected in The Burning Mirror (2001) acquire a marked coherence through their arrangement in a short story cycle. Jansen argues that Saadi’s cosmopolitan stories also differ from Kunzru’s in their encouragement of reader involvement. They open the depicted singular plural community out towards the extradiegetic other and thereby illustrate that the imagined cosmopolitan community is inoperative, that is necessarily incomplete and open to ‘whatever being’ (Giorgio Agamben).