Getting a “Flexible Eye”: Round-the-World Travel and Scales of Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Abstract

The “flexible eye” describes a particularly cosmopolitan perspective derived through mobility, detachment and multiplicity as opposed to rooted-ness or national affiliation. In this article, I explore the extent to which the “flexible eye” serves as an apt metaphor for the spatial and civic affiliations enacted by round-the-world travellers. The discussion here is based on research that examines the narratives travellers publish online while travelling around the world. Drawing on recent academic work on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, I investigate the way a discourse of cosmopolitan citizenship circulates in these narratives. In particular, I examine the way travellers frame these related activities—moving around the world and sharing their experiences via the Internet—in terms of civic responsibility. Travellers respond to a sense of obligation to produce tolerance, interconnectedness and cultural understanding out of encounters with difference. This formulation of a round-the-world trip as a civic obligation entails movement not only around the world, but also between national and global scales of belonging. How is cosmopolitan belonging filtered through practices of national citizenship? How are travellers both detaching from and re-attaching to notions of national identity in their quest for the “flexible eye” of the cosmopolitan citizen?