Cultivating a Hospitable Imagination: Re‐Envisioning the World Literature Curriculum Through a Cosmopolitan Lens

Abstract

When world literature as a subject was introduced to schools and colleges in the United States during the 1920s, its early curriculum was premised on the notion of bounded territoriality which assumes that identities of individuals, cultures, and nation‐states are fixed, determinable, and independent. The intensification of global mobility in an interconnected 21st century calls for educators to re‐envision the world literature curriculum through a cosmopolitan lens. I argue that such reconceptualizations necessitate reclaiming the primacy of the other which suggests the importance of cultivating an imagination hospitable to the other. In the first part of the article, I discuss inherent paradoxes underlying cosmopolitanism in both social and political domains which then point to the role of the hospitable imagination as a vital intervention disrupting individualistic and instrumental agendas. The hospitable imagination manifests in other‐oriented cultural creativity in which creativity is a means culminating in responsibility to the other. In the second part of the article, I utilize cross‐comparative case‐study analysis of world literature teachers in three cities—New York, Perth, and Singapore—to theorize cosmopolitan approaches, particularly curricula practices, that foster hospitable ways of imagining through continually problematizing the boundaries of openness toward the other. Ultimately, such practices aspire toward unconditional, absolute hospitality involving decentering the self and deterritorializing interpretations of the other.