Cosmopolitan Criminality: Cultural Entanglements and Globalised Crime in Imraan Coovadia's Green-Eyed Thieves

Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa's most celebrated contemporary novelists. Scholarship centred on his work is, however, in short supply. This article, through its focus on Coovadia's second novel, Green-Eyed Thieves (2007), aims to explore the extent to which this prolific voice in the South African literary landscape is able to reflect complex (inter)national and cultural entanglements in his novel. The following analysis of Coovadia's characters in terms of their geographical flexibility, cultural plasticity, and hybridity is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome as applied to culture. This application demonstrates how each of the characters, whether conscious thereof or not, is a complex cultural rhizome that exists as a hybridised entanglement of culture. While Coovadia's transcontinental caper comedy has been labelled as "migrant literature", this article suggests that this novel is better classified (albeit tentatively) as a cosmopolitan post-transitional novel that differs greatly from his debut novel, The Wedding (2001). What sets Green-Eyed Thieves apart from Coovadia's debut offering is the absence of longing associated with migrant literature. The process of "fitting in" in a new environment is also often accompanied by difficulties and even a failure to adjust. Coovadia eschews any notion of entropic homogeneity by maintaining a local specificity by crafting characters and a city that exist as rhizomian entanglements, which exhibit identifiable yet inextricable cultural threads linking South Africa and its inhabitants to the rest of the world.