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A New Cosmopolitanism Is in The Air Som
A New Cosmopolitanism Is in The Air Som
fusions of cultures and cuisines, mobile with the dynamics of capital and
capitalism, and, as this collection points out, all too eagerly embracing the
captured in the first issue of Public Culture in 1988, at the threshold of the
cosmopolitan world” evocations like the following: “The world of the late
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
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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
down fashion choices of the street people, do seemingly call out for a
global/local terms with this geopolitical horizon that Pheng Cheah and Bruce
ethnic mixture, we may see video nights in Kathmandu and Indian dinners in
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
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be fairly judged who is the cosmopolitan and who the provincial?” for “We
Re-Reading the Postwar Period (1994), Pheng Cheah would counter what he
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
something this collection helps to unpack, as capital itself goes on (to echo
John Stuart Mill and the OED) “becoming more and more cosmopolitan.”
(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
diaspora, tourism, and refugee flight. Hence, one must be wary by now of
postmodern mix the splendors and traumas of the “the immigrant as global
cosmopolitan” and carrier for some liberal and liberated hybridity, which of
everywhere and nowhere, high, middlebrow and low, and the image of “the
4
amazes the makers of metropolitan culture.6 Yet such transnational-class
have disproportionate income and freedom with which to master the new
global spatiality.”7
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
identity terms, betwixt and between, without being liminal” and as such
5
contemporary globalists like those “transnational astronaut fathers” shuttling
between Hong Kong and Vancouver, for whom (as Aihwa Ong portrays in
prefigure some ‘world citizen’ at once more enlightened and mobile, all but
boundaries This happens when Karl Marx, in the very same passage
capitalist subjects from “the old local and national seclusion and self-
minded local and national frames towards the freer creation of a “world
6
towards the being of the market, “that the hybrid intellectual can acquire
devious twists and turns of ideology and sentiment, these complex rootings
when the very dynamics of international production and high finance that
collection (and Naoki Sakai and Bonnie Honig theorize and lament in other
national-imperial contexts), are at once more porous and yet have become
7
so, the border-crossing “culture of postmodernity”) ambiguous and glib, in
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
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
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and local transformations of cultural identity when he urges (in his essay,
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,
risks, and an ability to reflect upon and judge aesthetically between different
On the other side of liberal modernity and speaking from within its
mobile terms, Kwame Anthony Appiah (in his essay in this collection) puts
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when he theorizes the complicated postcolonial makings of a “rooted
trajectory from Ghana and Africa to England and the United States.
invention (“the tool kit of self-creation”) and global mobility (“take your
domination patterns.
belonging; in effect, the transnational market is all but etherialized into the
the way, Americanists themselves are finding it harder to believe in, at home
10
International Symposium on Hmong People held in St. Paul Minnesota in
between the Chinese “Miao” and the Hmong overseas as co-ethnics and
what emerged was this: “At the level of structure, then,” Schein writes, “the
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,
between Los Angeles and Hong Kong: “Thus to Hong Kong Chinese,” Ong
observes, “for whom the meanings of motherland, country, and family have
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
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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.
senses, in official and vernacular contexts that deform and bewilder easy
between the tired binary of McWorld and jihad, Clifford evokes not so
become entry points for uncanny mixes, amazed mirrorings, and creolized
some normative postmodern condition in the city and bush. And yet, “like
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“cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular,” hence need to be situated,
material embodiment, and idealist promise. Tracking the spread of the “new
Rorty in his “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” essay in this collection, how can
Robbins et al would want to use it (“essays in this collection take the risk of
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cultural-political vision? The push towards cosmopolitan globality, if
cosmopolitan federation” that is not just that of the World Bank or IMF. But
organization (as Peter Waterman et al remind us) take energy, strategy, and
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scale, the assessment of Allen W. Wood that “the twentieth century has not
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cultural critic as an imperialist legacy of mobility coming down from
from their regional, “organic,” and national struggles; and, later situated in
European core, give us critical pause and several essays reflect upon such
criticism and philosophy) that still deforms the political economy in its
what Ulf Hannerz (see the comments above) has called the “context-free
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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
military might make it all the more imperative upon American cultural
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
struggle towards securing universal human rights and distant impacts, given
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and the Experience of Nationality”), “Is it possible to hope for a new
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,
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of postcoloniality discourse as “closet idealism”). It would be a material
“Thinking and feeling beyond the nation,” as Cheah and Robbins suggest in
collection wagers, the global terrain of the cosmopolitical does not just
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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