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Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation

(coedited by Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins, Minnesota UP, 1998)

Rob Wilson, Afterword:

“ A New Cosmopolitanism Is In the Air: Some Dialectical Twists and


Turns”

A new cosmopolitanism is in the air, heady with the postmodern

fusions of cultures and cuisines, mobile with the dynamics of capital and

consumption, situated within the very public heart of transnational

capitalism, and, as this collection points out, all too eagerly embracing the

post of postnational as promissory of some egress from xenophobias of

nationalism and traumas of identity-politics that have wrought havoc within

the twentieth century. This lyric promise of a postnational culture is

captured in the first issue of Public Culture in 1988, at the threshold of the

globalizing era, as Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge answer the

transcultural/transnational question “Why Public Culture?” now with “it’s a

cosmopolitan world” evocations like the following: “The world of the late

twentieth century is increasingly a cosmopolitan world. More people are

widely traveled, are catholic in their tastes, are more inclusive in the range of

cuisines they consume, are attentive to global media-covered events and are

influenced by universal trends in fashion.”1

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Such transnational practices, here figured in the shopping-mall

sensibility of those who have and choose rather than from those more

shadowy corridors of the ‘global assembly line,’ Euro-trash, or the trickle-

down fashion choices of the street people, do seemingly call out for a

renewed cosmopolitan framework of understanding, a way of coming to

global/local terms with this geopolitical horizon that Pheng Cheah and Bruce

Robbins call “the cosmopolitical.” As in some carnivalesque profusion of

ethnic mixture, we may see video nights in Kathmandu and Indian dinners in

Chicago, a disjunctive, win-win brew for some sites and ecumenical

subjects. Unevenly, to be sure, the global has already flowed across national

and local borders, margins and centers collide and interact, and we face a

more cosmopolitan situation in which (as Ben Anderson remarks in his essay

on rather anachronistic forms of census-style identification and boundedness

in this collection) “revolutions in communications and transportation of the

post-World War II era, have combined with postindustrial world-capitalism

to produce cross-national migrations on an historically unprecedented scale.”

Anthologizing the diasporic literary results for a multiculture-hungry yet

immigrant-paranoid American market, Garrett Hongo asks of his

Asian/Pacific enriched “open boat” of “Asian American” poets, “But can it

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be fairly judged who is the cosmopolitan and who the provincial?” for “We

[Asian Americans as representative Americans] are of the diaspora.”2

It may paradoxically remain the case that, as Pheng Cheah suggests in

his introduction, “nationalism is not antithetical to the cosmopolitanism” we

now desire and need, the movement towards a progressive cosmopolitanism

he evokes as “socialist cosmopolitanism” and linked, as such, to the

threatened, still-emergent popular nationalisms in the periphery. Citing

Samir Amin’s vision of uneven and unjust capitalist development of labor in

Re-Reading the Postwar Period (1994), Pheng Cheah would counter what he

calls a “false imperialising cosmopolitanism” with the more “genuine

cosmopolitanism” of something liberating and justice-inducing on an

international scale and seen as working through (rather than blithely posting

at the core of the superstate) such nation-states and spaces of surplus labor

on the periphery. Wary of dislocation, this new internationalism is

something this collection helps to unpack, as capital itself goes on (to echo

John Stuart Mill and the OED) “becoming more and more cosmopolitan.”

Almost any use of ‘cosmopolitan’ implies, I think, some embedded

geopolitical allegory, a world-mapping of contradictory locations and

multiple flights from and/or towards the territory/positioning of the local

(nation) and world-cultural center (cosmos). The term packs into itself not

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only the voluntary adventures of liberal self-invention and global travel, but

also those less benignly configured mixtures of migration, nomadism,

diaspora, tourism, and refugee flight. Hence, one must be wary by now of

some “multicultural cosmopolitanism” trope packing into its amnesiac

postmodern mix the splendors and traumas of the “the immigrant as global

cosmopolitan” and carrier for some liberal and liberated hybridity, which of

course the United States of America represents as capitalist vanguard.3 The

postmodern cosmopolitanism may itself reflect one uneven effect of a

“disorganized capitalism” in which conditions of heightened risk, post-

Fordist restructuring, cultural unloosening, and transnational mobility have

made for an aggravated “reflexivity” about physical and social environments

as well as about the terms of cultural/national identity and belonging as

such.4 Tracking global/local dialectics, Ulf Hannerz has called attention to

(if not endorsed) the rise of a “new class” of transnational cosmopolitans,

armed with free-floating credentials and go-between talents and serving as

protean embodiments of important symbolic/economic resources of code-

switching and “decontextualized cultural capital” they can relocate across

“world culture.”5 The scattered location of such cosmopolitan culture is

everywhere and nowhere, high, middlebrow and low, and the image of “the

indigenous photographer as a kind of bush cosmopolitan” still shocks and

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amazes the makers of metropolitan culture.6 Yet such transnational-class

cosmopolitans, as Masao Miyoshi contends, “now have and will continue to

have disproportionate income and freedom with which to master the new

global spatiality.”7

What I am getting at is that any dialectical unpacking of cosmopolitan

will still reveal a storehouse of uneven contradictions, regressive and

progressive twists and turns in its historical deployment from the eras of

Kant, Goethe, and Marx onward into these postmodern new-times: on the

one hand, the cosmopolitan can be invoked as a figure for rootless and

mobile, avowedly universal, uncommitted and detached positions (as when

Karl Marx castigates a surplus-driven cosmopolitanism that reeks of the

mobility of international capital, profit-seeking on a world scale by those

who cannot afford it in ). Jonathan Friedman warns, in his portrait of

“disillusioned cosmopolitanism” as a modern fate of ironic self-

consciousness towards merely local identity, “[the] Cosmopolitan is, in

identity terms, betwixt and between, without being liminal” and as such

reflects “the position and identity of an intellectual self situated outside of

the local arenas in which he or she moves.”8 Conjunctural of universal and

particular if not place and system, cosmopolitan still reeks of a certain

weightlessness and unwillingness to settle down and commit: for example,

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contemporary globalists like those “transnational astronaut fathers” shuttling

between Hong Kong and Vancouver, for whom (as Aihwa Ong portrays in

her essay, “The Pacific Shuttle: Flexible Citizenship Among Chinese

Cosmopolitans”) “bravado constructs a bearable lightness of being that

capital buoyancy can bring.”

On the other hand, to speak affirmatively, cosmopolitan would

prefigure some ‘world citizen’ at once more enlightened and mobile, all but

freed from particularized prejudices, fixed ties, and narrow local/national

boundaries This happens when Karl Marx, in the very same passage

(echoed by me above) from the Communist Manifesto on how the

“bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a

cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,”

goes on to show how this cosmopolitan framework liberates liberal-

capitalist subjects from “the old local and national seclusion and self-

sufficiency” to the point that we can increasingly move beyond narrow-

minded local and national frames towards the freer creation of a “world

literature” and international forms reflecting this interaction.9 Taking up the

current transnational situation, Paul Bove rephrases this affirmative

cosmopolitan sense towards globalization in these scaled-down terms of

intervention: “Expertise suggests,” he writes with Spinozan wariness

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towards the being of the market, “that the hybrid intellectual can acquire

something like a ‘cosmopolitan’ as opposed to a global persona or function;

the ‘cosmopolitan’ [as in the cultural criticism of Edward Said or Gayatri

Spivak] can take up the perspectives and knowledge needed to acquire a

point of view on the global whether imagined as total or seen in struggle

with the local.”10

The value of this far-reaching Cosmopolitanism: Thinking and

Feeling Beyond the Nation collection, then, is to help us to unpack these

devious twists and turns of ideology and sentiment, these complex rootings

and re-routings of the “cosmopolitan” stance in transnational culture today,

when the very dynamics of international production and high finance that

Marx dialectically outlined, in affirmative and critical senses, have only

intensified. State borders and national formations of eligible citizenship, as

Etienne Balibar tracks in his “The Frontiers of Europe” essay in this

collection (and Naoki Sakai and Bonnie Honig theorize and lament in other

national-imperial contexts), are at once more porous and yet have become

more exclusionary, paranoid, re-racialized, and policed by neo-

fundamentalisms. We must begin to conceptualize culture, place,

sovereignty, and subjectivity in disorganizing formations and unstable

frameworks that can render so-called “postnational” defenses (and, no less

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so, the border-crossing “culture of postmodernity”) ambiguous and glib, in

ways Pheng Cheah is cautionary about in his introduction.

We have only begun to theorize social transformation and globality in

a world where, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak quips of “the left

multicultural imaginary,” it is now Sweden that has become “the last holdout

of the Socialist International,” and culture itself (as in the cultural studies

boom underway) may have already become the unwitting vocabulary (if not

unconscious allegory) by which to bespeak the current economic

restructuring she calls “the financialization of the globe, or globalization” as

telematic “development.” The goal for a certain, soft version of left

cosmopolitanism (as in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s global village of

postmodern little stories along with an over-extended incredulity towards

master-narratives of capital), as Spivak warns, is “to go back to precapitalist

spiritual riches without their attendant [imperialist] discomforts.”

Canonical heritages of “the local” and “the national,” not to mention

such fixities as “Europe,” “China,” “Japan,” and “America,” have been set in

comparatist motion by the reign of this global market and the impact of new

media, offshore finance, and alien inputs. Bruce Robbins captures this

necessary sense of thinking/feeling geopolitical situation (if not totality) and

the push towards a more trenchantly cosmopolitan understanding of global

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and local transformations of cultural identity when he urges (in his essay,

“Comparative Cosmopolitanisms”) the following: “When we speak today

of world literature or global culture, we are not naming an optional extension

of the canon. We are speaking of a new framing of the whole which

revalues both familiar and long-accepted genres, which produces new

concepts and criteria, and which affects even those critics who never ‘do’

world literature or colonial discourse at all-- which affects all critics that is,

by shifting criticism’s whole sense of intellectual enterprise.” For, at best,

globalization is generating new forms of reflexivity, altered terms of

citizenship, amplified melanges and ties to transnational culture, and thus

provoking an aesthetic of openness towards otherness that is not just the

chance for commodification, spectatorship, and colonization. As Scott Lash

and John Urry hopefully describe this geopolitical situation in Economies of

Signs & Space (1994), “Such a cosmopolitanism presupposes extensive

patterns of mobility, a stance of openness to others and a willingness to take

risks, and an ability to reflect upon and judge aesthetically between different

natures, places and societies, both now and in the past.”11

On the other side of liberal modernity and speaking from within its

mobile terms, Kwame Anthony Appiah (in his essay in this collection) puts

an autobiographical spin upon the contradictory dialectics of “cosmopolitan”

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when he theorizes the complicated postcolonial makings of a “rooted

cosmopolitanism” and, conversely, “cosmopolitan patriotism” in his own

trajectory from Ghana and Africa to England and the United States.

Affirmatively aesthetic, Appiah’s representative embrace of liberal-self-

invention (“the tool kit of self-creation”) and global mobility (“take your

roots with you”), organized around “the cultural variability that

cosmopolitanism celebrates,” is predicated upon a free-market abundance of

upward circulation where postmodern heterogeneity will overwhelm ancient

domination patterns.

Such an American-centered vision of cosmopolitanism affirms, I

would suggest, some mutual space of globality/locality, where the liberal

state supports freedom and the nation promotes sentiments of group

belonging; in effect, the transnational market is all but etherialized into the

space of autonomy and private realization. We stand renewed as free-

thinking patriots, as in some American Dream of the Whitmanic Cosmos

materialized on a new global scale of imperial disavowal-- a figure that, by

the way, Americanists themselves are finding it harder to believe in, at home

or abroad, when spectacles of uneven development are factored into the

cultural equation.12 It is exactly such American-based “global asymmetries”

that are unmasked by Louisa Schein in her global-local ethnography of an

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International Symposium on Hmong People held in St. Paul Minnesota in

1995 to forge some flexible and pragmatic vision of horizontal solidarity

between the Chinese “Miao” and the Hmong overseas as co-ethnics and

business partners in (what one of the planners called) “a world spread

nation.” But rather than a free staging of “non-elite cosmopolitanism,”

what emerged was this: “At the level of structure, then,” Schein writes, “the

symposium produced a startlingly close replication of an American vision of

a global order in which non-Western others supplied exotic culture and raw

material for core desires.” Aihwa Ong presents a no less wary, complicated,

multi-situated portrait of “overseas Chinese [who] are key players in the

Asia Pacific, living with the postmodern pressures of capital mobility.” As

she remarks of the “flexible citizenship” (cum “flexible accumulation”)

required of such transnational Pacific Rim players, she relocates the

American dream, as it were, offshore on the Pacific shuttle somewhere

between Los Angeles and Hong Kong: “Thus to Hong Kong Chinese,” Ong

observes, “for whom the meanings of motherland, country, and family have

long been discontinuous and even contradictory, legal citizenship is sought

not necessarily in the sites where one conducts one’s livelihood, but in

places were the family can make their American dream.” Ong rightly warns

that “a different kind of cosmopolitical right is at play,” as in her figuration

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of border-running executives with no state loyalty but flexible citizenships

and cultural identities in the service of maximal profit to family and self.

If haunted by some post-Kantian dream of liberal self-invention and

perpetual peace, if not some imaginary figuration of international socialism

awakened from within the seeming closures of transnational capitalism as

world-system, the scaled-down measure of what James Clifford has called

“discrepant cosmopolitanisms” must be taken in both local and global

senses, in official and vernacular contexts that deform and bewilder easy

semantic practice or indictment of the cosmopolitical: “In this emphasis we

avoid, at least, the excessive localism of particularist cultural relativism, as

well as the overly global vision of a capitalist or technocratic

monoculture.”13 Forging a fluid poetics of multiple diasporas emerging in

between the tired binary of McWorld and jihad, Clifford evokes not so

much a postnational as a “postcultural” condition in which centers and

peripheries are mutually entangled, local frontiers dissolve, and borders

become entry points for uncanny mixes, amazed mirrorings, and creolized

representations. Cosmopolitan hybridity as such has seemingly become

some normative postmodern condition in the city and bush. And yet, “like

nations,” as Bruce Robbins puts it in his introduction (and exemplifies in his

far-reaching essay on this new sensibility), these discrepant

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“cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular,” hence need to be situated,

conjoined, compared, and unpacked in all their contextual ambiguity,

material embodiment, and idealist promise. Tracking the spread of the “new

cosmopolitan” vocabulary across various genres as a hunger for reflexively

situated universals, Amanda Anderson notes that the topos of

“cosmopolitanism has repeatedly emerged at times [from Seneca to Julia

Kristeva] when the world has suddenly seemed to expand in unassimilable

ways” and the tired discourse of “universalism needs the rhetoric of

worldliness that cosmopolitanism provides.”

Still, the question remains, amid such post-Kantian heteroglossia of

context and ambiguity of usage, such ‘universal abandon’ as portrayed in the

thick-and-thin conceptualizations of morality, loyalty, and reason by Richard

Rorty in his “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” essay in this collection, how can

‘cosmopolitanism’ be invoked in any kind of critical or normative sense, as

Robbins et al would want to use it (“essays in this collection take the risk of

trying to locate or embody cosmopolitanism without renouncing its critical,

normative power”). Given its free-floating mobility, heritage of privilege,

detachment, and ethnographic gaze, how can cosmpolitanism be used to

imply some kind of coherent geopolitical allegory or progressive narrative of

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cultural-political vision? The push towards cosmopolitan globality, if

necessary, is ambiguous in its tactics and goals.

What indeed would the imperatives, norms, and tactics of a “global

moral community” be when, as Rorty advises postmodern philosophers of

liberal reason and enlightenment loyalties, “the rhetoric that we Westerners

use in trying to get everybody to be more like us would be improved if we

were more frankly ethnocentric, and less professedly universalist”? The

cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment project, which viewed “perpetual

peace” as the fulfillment of some historical vocation on a global (or at least

European) scale, is, as Allen W. Wood reminds us in his essay’s analysis of

Kant, “rejected equally by communitarians and cultural relativists,” even if

what the international system still needs is a vision of “peaceful

cosmopolitan federation” that is not just that of the World Bank or IMF. But

if, at a more radical extreme of Western social vision, the old

internationalism is dead (or at least moribund) at century’s end, new social

movements of women, ecology, peace, human rights, and regional

organization (as Peter Waterman et al remind us) take energy, strategy, and

direction from linking the grassroots (local) to the international (global) in

ways that can only be affirmed as “critical cosmopolitanism.”14 In the wake

of certain forms of state socialism and the triumphs of capital on a new

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scale, the assessment of Allen W. Wood that “the twentieth century has not

been the century of enlightenment, but the century of disillusionment”

should give us pause and stimulate critique, at multiple-- global, national,

and local-- levels of commitment.

If many essays in Cosmopolitanism can be seen rejecting a certain

kind of “romantic localism” as the foundational basis of social solidarity,

horizontal fraternity, and primary loyalty, the danger at times in this

collection is a dialectically related one: ‘cosmopolitanism’ generated as a

discourse of romanticized globalism, as I have been suggesting, at once

reflecting a US-centered ideal of multiple belonging and international

community (what Robbins affirms as “some transnational sort of

fellowship”); and all too blithely at times bespeaking a border-crossing

postcolonial expansiveness that somehow will spell freedom, equality, and

justice on a new scale of human solidarity. This win-win linking of the

national/local to cosmopolitan forms of the global dynamic is something

Stuart Hall had warned against in his cautionary mapping of “postmodern”

global/local dynamics as serving dominant interests and the consumer-

culture hegemony of American capital.15

Earlier, in the “Fordist” moment of US internationalization, Antonio

Gramsci had critiqued a certain kind of “vague ‘cosmopolitanism’” of the

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cultural critic as an imperialist legacy of mobility coming down from

Catholicism and the Latinate culture of the Roman Empire to

internationalize-- and, in effect, delink--the formation of Italian intellectuals

from their regional, “organic,” and national struggles; and, later situated in

postcolonial contexts, Frantz Fanon et al (in a criticism echoed by Rob

Nixon against V. S. Naipaul, and Tim Brennan against Salman Rushdie)

dismantled a certain kind of free-floating comprador cosmopolitanism as

undermining the will to “national vocation” and Third World struggles to

decolonize.16 These critiques must, given this globalizing moment of

postnationality/ postmodernity reaching out from the United States and

European core, give us critical pause and several essays reflect upon such

warnings. For such ‘cosmopolitan’ stances may effectively be tied, in

contemporary US stratifications, to a residual professional idealism and

cheery-pluralist politics of liberal-market selfhood (at times more

Emersonian than Kantian in its pragmatic applications as literature, cultural

criticism and philosophy) that still deforms the political economy in its

“postnational” reach outward, from superpower centers, towards generating

what Ulf Hannerz (see the comments above) has called the “context-free

cultural capital” and semiotic reflexivity-- towards national identity,

commitment, and location-- of these emerging transnational intellectuals.

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Still, it does not do to make cosmopolitanism as such simply into

another apology for, and mere reflex of, the hybrid dynamics of global

capital in its transnational reach across state borders and upon the imagined

communities/belated ideologies of the nation.17 Economic advantage and

military might make it all the more imperative upon American cultural

critics, as Bruce Robbins concludes in his introduction, to measure not just

the pride but the shame and trauma of the superpower nation, the damages

that can be wrought in distant places and upon diverse citizens and races in

the world our economy is so deeply imbricated within. A new-- non-

imperial-- cosmpolitanism, as Scott L. Malcolmson suggests and gestures

towards in his essay, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,”

represents a strategic bargain with globality and enacts a multi-situated

struggle towards securing universal human rights and distant impacts, given

a world order where “capital must become more heterogeneous, or

multicultural, in order to find new markets and so continue expansion.”

As modernist visions of cosmopolitan belonging have “yielded ground

to the prejudices of identity and internationality” (meaning the political

system of nation-states that developed under capitalism), Jonathan Ree can

only wonder (after tracking down various national delusions of origin,

territory, language, and culture as self-evident wholes in “Cosmopolitanism

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and the Experience of Nationality”), “Is it possible to hope for a new

cosmopolitanism, after internationality?” All but posting the national and

the local as sites of peculiar, bounded, and prejudicial belonging that go on

aggravating political differences, Ree turns at the end of his end-of-

millennium essay to invoke the cosmopolitical as some vision of a utopic

transnational community-- “a post-national and post-international world,

which would no longer make a fetish of political form; a new cosmopolitan

world, which could put the illusions of internationality [and the nation

system] behind it, for good.” Needless to say, the gesture is a desperate one,

filled with historical pathos and imaginative longing, and challenged by

other findings in this collection itself not to mention struggles for

recuperated nationhood from Hawai’i to Palestine to Ireland.

At century’s end, perhaps forces of globalization can now make

possible, as Lash and Urry et al suggest, the formation of a growing

cosmopolitanism in which it is possible “to extend reflexive critique beyond

the ‘neo-tribes,’ a chance for translation between speech communities” to

take place in non-domineering ways, across geopolitical situations, and in

multiple media.18 It would be a material cosmopolitanism that dreams not of

eternal traveling nor of textualizing “hybridization as the undoing of the

imperialist or cosmopolitical-cultural project” (see Pheng Cheah’s critique

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of postcoloniality discourse as “closet idealism”). It would be a material

cosmopolitanism that builds outward from nation-state grounding towards

imagined forms of global civil society and interconnected public spheres.

“Thinking and feeling beyond the nation,” as Cheah and Robbins suggest in

this thick-descriptive, multiple-genre collection, we can arrive at the end-of-

millennium condition of a spiritual “cosmopolitanism” disgusted with

legacies of imperialism and delusions of free-floating irony. Still, this

collection wagers, the global terrain of the cosmopolitical does not just

belong to transnational capital and jeremiad despair, but to cultures of

global/local mixture whose hope-generating resources can be marshaled to

serve better ends than the xenophobic hegemony of mono-nations, mono-

races, and mono-creeds.

1
Vol. 1, p. 5.
2
Garrett Hongo, ed., The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), p. xx.
3
See Frederick Buell’s free-floating vision of postmodern hybridity and immigrant visions in National
Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 205.
Affirmative of the cosmopolitan carnival driven by American consumer-culture, Buell’s view on such
matters remains close to Pico Iyer’s in Video Night in Kathmandu (1988): “he celebrates the vitality of the
cultural heterogeneity produced when a postmodernizing globalization of American commercial popular
culture incites cultures and communities worldwide to produce a carnivalesque profusion of hybrid forms”
(11). On the “indifferent” cosmopolitan hybridity of Bharati Mukherjee’s American immigrants, see Fred
Pfeil’s critique, “No Basta Teorizar: In-Difference to Solidarity in Contemporary Fiction, Theory, and
Practice,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal
Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 197-230.
4
See Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs & Space (London: Sage, 1994), Chapter 10.
5
“Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 237-252.
6
See Faye Ginsburg, “Aboriginal Media and the Australian Imaginary,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 557-
578.

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7
Masao Miyoshi, “Sites of Resistance in the Global System,” boundary 2 22 (1995): 61-84.
8
“Global System, Globalization, and the Parameters of Modernity,” in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and
Roland Robertson. eds., Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), p. 78.
9
“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Revolutions of 1848-- Political Writings, Vol. 1
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 70-71.
10
“Afterword: Memory and Thought,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 378.
11
Economies of Signs & Space, p. 256.
12
See the array of critical essays gathered in Amy Kaplan and Donald E Pease, eds., Cultures of United
States Imperialism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), for example, “‘Make My
Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics and The Sequel” by Michael Rogin, pp. 499-534.
13
“Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg et al eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 96-116.
14
Peter Waterman, “Internationalism Is dead! Long Live Global Solidarity,” in Jeremy Brecher, John
Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press,
1993). pp. 257-261.
15
“The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-
System, ed. Anthony King (Binghampton: Sate University of New York at Binghamton, 1991), pp. 19-40.
16
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and translated by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 17. For related issues in the
contemporary moment of postmodern celebrity and image engineering, see Paul Bove on the cautionary
work of Regis Debray, “Celebrity and Betrayal: The High Intellectuals of Postmodern Culture,” In the
Wake of Theory (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), pp. 98-121.
17
Refusing center-periphery and global-local models as residually colonial and Marxist-modernist, a
collection like Scattered Hegemonies ends up using “transnational” in an affirmative but rather empty
sense as the de-differentiated longing for “transnational feminist solidarity” across racial, class, nation and
gender lines, pp. 9-15.
18
Economics of Signs & Space, p. 143.

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