New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity

Cultural Perspectives

Ewa Barbara Luczak, Anna Pochmara, Samir Dayal

• Publisher: De Gruyter Poland
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110626209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

This anthology sheds new light on cosmopolitanism and culture in the contemporary world. Drawing on postcolonial, ethnic, and critical race studies as well as recent literary and critical theory, it demonstrates that new cosmopolitan thinking can embrace an awareness of ethnic and local differences. It disputes the utopianism of colorblind universalism and argues for the persistence of "race" and racialized thinking in lived experience. The essays collected in this volume valorize minoritarian perspectives and urge readers to rethink cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the underprivileged and marginalized and highlight the role of culture in mobilizing social empathy and solidarity with the world's precariat. The contributors, who come from over a dozen different countries and from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, constitute a vibrant cosmopolitan community in itself.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction: New Cosmopolitanisms: Rethinking Race, Geography, and Belonging
• I: Rootedness and the New Cosmopolitanism: Sovereignty, Hosts, Guests and Hospitality
• Africans in Calais: Migrants, Rights, and French Cosmopolitanism
• “In the Tangled Lily-bed”: Rhizomatic Textuality and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood
• Envoy to the World: Nomadic Cosmopolitanism in Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Emperor of Water Clocks
• The Pastiche of Discrepant “Minoritarian” Voices in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
• II: Minority Bodies
• Normative Materialist Cosmopolitanism
• From Édouard Glissant’s “The Open Boat” to the Age of Mass Migration
• Men in Eugenic Times: Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring and the (Im)possibility of Cosmopolitan Friendship
• Across the Atlantic and Beyond: Tracing Cosmopolitan Agendas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes
• III: Minoritarian Mobilities
• Migrant Women’s Bodies in Transit: From Sub-Saharan Africa to Spain in Real Life and Film
• From a Japanese Notebook: Afro-Asian Critical Cosmopolitanisms in William Demby’s 1950s Reportage from Postwar Japan
• Lost in Transnation: Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go
• Truncated Cosmopolitanisms: Post-apartheid Literary Identities in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View
• IV: Spaces and Vectors: Migration, Hybridity, Creolization
• The Trope of Displacement, the Disruption of Space: Cuba, a Moveable Nation
• An Angry, Mixed Race Cosmopolitanism: Race, Privilege, Poetic Identity, and Community in Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina and Thrall
• The Cosmopolitan Reality of Polish American Families
• Global Metropolis and the City of Neighborhoods: Polish Immigrants and New York City’s Two Cosmopolitanisms
• V: The Powers and Perils of Cultural Expression
• Black English and the New Cosmopolitanism: Karima 2G’s Linguistic Creativity as a Transethnic Performative Practice
• Cosmopolitan Hospitality and Accented Crossing: Forging an Ethics of Listening with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Artworks
• Imagining Something Better: Rolas from My Border Hi-Fi
• “A White Slave”: Albinism in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings
• Contributors on Their Cosmopolitan Experiences: A Postscript
• Contributors on Their Cosmopolitan Experiences: A Postscript
• Index