Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Ahdaf Soueif s The Map of Love both construct cosmopolitan figures, who through their narratives, attempt to reformulate nationalist constructions of nation. This study compares Rushdie and Soueif's configuration of the cosmopolitan global consciousness and its rootedness in the postcolonial local centers of Bombay and Cairo respectively. The comparison shows that the multiply determined identity of cosmopolitans can both impede, as well as allow for, the active participation in the social and political life of the country in which they inhabit and aim to represent. This thesis considers Rushdie and Soueif's journey back into postcolonial centers where the contested threshold between homogenous constructions of national identity and the heterogeneity of cosmopolitans has to be negotiated before productive critique and reform can begin at home.

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