Solidarity and Place-Making in Supranational Politics: A Review of Inés Valdez's Transnational Cosmopolitanism and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders

Abstract

Solidarity and Place-Making in Supranational Politics:A Review of Inés Valdez's Transnational Cosmopolitanism and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders Arturo Chang (bio) Inés Valdez. Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 228 pp. $105.00 (hc). ISBN: 9781108630047. Paulina Ochoa Espejo. On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $32.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780190074203. Recent debates in political theory have turned to supranational politics to better delineate spaces of collective resistance, emancipation, and solidarity. Beyond the international sphere, this supranational turn centers varied forms of place-based practices and spaces that frame political organizing—among these are transnational, hemispheric, convergent, and scalar approaches.1 The role of the nation-state and nation-led global order within these frameworks, however, remains in dispute. To what extent can theories of political solidarity and collective resistance truly decenter the nation-state given its dominance as an organizing and regulating institution? Similarly, questions remain regarding the respective commitments that political leaders, thinkers, and marginalized groups hold toward the nation-state as an emancipatory project. While the field has attended to these problems via the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, space remains for addressing them from a normative standpoint. Two recent books speak to this need in significant ways: Inés Valdez's Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (2019) and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (2020). While Valdez and Ochoa Espejo respond to distinct, and sometimes contrasting political questions, both are invested in constructing a normative framework that can adjudicate between experiences of injustice as they manifest across state jurisdictions and within local, national, transnational, and territorial contexts. In this regard, putting Ochoa Espejo and Valdez in conversation provides a helpful account of where studies of supranational politics stand; further, their overlap reveals a need to attend to questions of place and place-making politics within these debates. Valdez's, Transnational Cosmopolitanism proposes a framework that transnationalizes cosmopolitan thought to better capture forms of "solidarity that contest the exclusionary structure of domestic and international realms of politics" of national spaces (1). In doing so, Valdez draws on W.E.B. Du Bois's writings on transnational solidarity among marginalized groups, which emphasize the "political craft" of building networks of commiseration via place-based politics—what Valdez calls the transnational "counter-public" (153). Transnational cosmopolitanism, however, also draws on neo-Kantian principles that [End Page 393] are themselves enmeshed in the domestic and international politics that subject marginalized groups to colonial and neocolonial power. Thus, as Valdez argues, transnational cosmopolitanism offers a "normative and theoretical problem" that questions to what extent neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism can be reimagined to account for solidarities which "facilitate emancipatory forms of political subjectivity, hospitable political exchanges, and coalition making that contest exclusionary forms" of governance (123). Transnational Cosmopolitanism embarks on the task of amending neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism and its privileging of Eurocentric notions of solidarity from the outset (6). In response to the limitations of Kantian and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism, transnational cosmopolitanism proposes four changes in its approach to global politics (18–19). First, it accounts for the role of "heterogeneous racial structures of power" in grounding different forms of subjection across domestic, international, and transnational politics. Second, it aims to think beyond state and interstate politics by centering the "political craft" (18) of cosmopolitan solidarity that operates beyond these contexts. Third, it highlights identity-based coalitions that support "transnational counter-publics" (19) by pursuing emancipation from the margins. Fourth, transnational cosmopolitanism "transfigures extant understandings of cosmopolitanism, communication, and hospitality" through the "transnational and solidaristic political craft of subaltern actors" (19). Valdez aims to identify the "processes of will-formation" that allow coalitions to organize toward overcoming domination within domestic and international politics. Valdez's critique of Kantian and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism comprises the first two chapters of the book. As Valdez shows through a contextualist account of the anticolonial principles behind Perpetual Peace in chapter 1, Kant's cosmopolitanism was committed to a civilizational and racial hierarchy (24). As such, Kant...