Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, that our age, the age of global economy, has been characterized by culture and identity contamination. By this he means that every person and every culture has in some way been touched by the other. The idea of cultural purity therefore is spurious. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, a knot of narratives that stretch across several centuries and different ethnicities, crafts the same argument. The novel’s different stories could be seen as variations on a common theme of exile, what it means to be alien or alienated. Luckily though, it is at the moment of exile and alienation that we experience the emergence of solidarity that goes beyond ethnic affiliations. Thus Desdemona falls in love with Othello, and Othello himself seeks to weld solidarity with the Jews in the ghetto, largely because he finds himself sharing the same fate with them. In this way, Venice becomes a metaphor for exile and redemption, love and pain. Based on the narratives of The Nature of Blood, this essay discusses the possibility and relevance of cosmopolitan solidarity in our age that has been characterized by exile, violence and uprootedness.