Whose Cosmopolitanism?

Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents

Nina Glick Schiller, Andrew Irving

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781785335068
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782384465
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism's possibilities, aspirations and applications—as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents—so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.

Table of contents

• Whose Cosmopolitanism?
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What's in a Word? What's in a Question?
• Part I — The Question of 'Whose Cosmopolitanism?': Provocations and Responses
• Provocations
• Chapter 1 — Whose Cosmopolitanism? Multiple, Globally Enmeshed and Subaltern
• Chapter 2 — Whose Cosmopolitanism? Genealogies of Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter 3 — Whose Cosmopolitanism? And Whose Humanity?
• Chapter 4 — Whose Cosmpolitanism? The Violence of Idealizations and the Ambivalence of Self
• Chapter 5 — Whose Cosmopolitanism? Postcolonial Criticism and the Realities of Neocolonial Power
• Responses
• Chapter 6 — Wounded Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter 7 — What Do We Do with Cosmopolitanism?
• Chapter 8 — Cosmopolitan Theory and the Daily Pluralism of Life
• Chapter 9 — Chance, Contingency and the Face-to-Face Encounter
• Chapter 10 — Cosmopolitanism and Intelligibility
• Part II — The Questions of Where, When, How and Whether: Towards a Processual Situated Cosmopolitanism
• Encounters, Landscapes and Displacements
• Chapter 11 — 'It's Cool to Be Cosmo': Tibetan Refugees, Indian Hosts, Richard Gere and 'Crude Cosmopolitanism' in Dharamsala
• Chapter 12 — Diasporic Cosmopolitanism: Migrants, Sociabilities and City Making
• Chapter 13 — Freedom and Laughter in an Uncertain World: Language, Expression and Cosmopolitan Experience
• Cinema, Literature and the Social Imagination
• Chapter 14 — Narratives of Exile: Cosmopolitanism beyond the Liberal Imagination
• Chapter 15 — The Uneasy Cosmopolitans of Code Unknown
• Chapter 16 — Pregnant Possibilities: Cosmopolitanism, Kinship and Reproductive Futurism in Maria Full of Grace and In America
• Chapter 17 — Backstage/Onstage Cosmopolitanism: Jia Zhangke's The World
• Endless War or Domains of Sociability? Conflict, Instabilities and Aspirations
• Chapter 18 — Politics, Cosmopolitics and Preventive Development at the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Border
• Chapter 19 — Memory of War and Cosmopolitan Solidarity
• Chapter 20 — Cosmopolitanism and Conviviality in an Age of Perpetual War
• Contributors
• Index