Teju Cole’s Open City is often read as the quintessential Western cosmopolitan novel. But despite the protagonist’s fixation with European aestheticism, the presence of African antecedents looms almost as an unacknowledged shadow in the acclaimed cosmopolitan novel. This article traces how Yorùbá visual registers about perception, subjectivity, and representation provide interpretative cues for understanding the meta-text of Cole’s novel in ways that illuminate the conflicted, contradictory itineraries of the postcolonial African transnational figure. I argue that Yorùbá conceptual registers relating to visuality, especially the concept of Àwòrán and its insistence on intersubjective relations and the visual call of images, highlight a visual hermeneutics that inflect the construction of personhood in Open City. By tracing the centrality of Yorùbá optic codes to Cole’s project, the article concludes that the novel’s philosophically dense conversation with aspects of Yorùbá culture demonstrates how conceptual registers from African cultures might contour Afro-diasporic texts.

Teju Cole 的《开放城市》经常被解读为典型的西方世界主义小说。但是，尽管主人公对欧洲唯美主义情有独钟，但非洲先行者的存在几乎就像这部广受赞誉的世界主义小说中未被承认的阴影一样隐约可见。本文追溯 Yorùbá 对感知、主观性和表征的视觉记录如何为理解科尔小说的元文本提供解释线索，以阐明后殖民非洲跨国人物的冲突、矛盾的行程。我认为 Yorùbá 与视觉有关的概念记录，尤其是 Àwòrán 的概念及其对主体间关系和图像的视觉召唤的坚持，突出了一种影响人格建构的视觉解释学开城。通过将 Yorùbá 光学代码的中心性追溯至 Cole 的项目，文章得出结论，该小说与 Yorùbá 文化方面的哲学密集对话展示了来自非洲文化的概念寄存器如何勾勒出非洲散居文本。