Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitan Culture, and Economics in Zadie Smith’s NW

This chapter traces new trajectories in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), where vernacular cosmopolitanism is mostly premised on the idea of local and everyday lived experiences of cosmopolitans whose problems mostly pertain to class and economic inequalities, rather than race or ethnicity, which in turn inform the formation of identity. Against the backdrop of these contemporary senses of cosmopolitanism, the sub-sections in this chapter aspire to provide insight into NW’s concerns: cosmopolitan communication, narrative glocality, the notion of cosmopolitan outlook for subjectivity as well as political hyper-awareness for globalization’s repercussions over vernacular cosmopolitan lives. The analysis of NW in this chapter then takes into account the economic dimensions of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism in order to address the chief problems of contemporary culture.