The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution Len Von Morzé (bio) Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writing and Culture chiara cillerai Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 205 pp. Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution christine levecq University of Virginia Press, 2019 289 pp. Enlightenment Orientalism in the American Mind, 1770-1807 matthew pangborn Routledge, 2018 272 pp. After Martinette de Beauvais has begun to describe her international education, the heroine of Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799) asks her how a young woman could have learned so many languages and seen so many exotic places. Before launching into a long account of her adventures, Martinette draws a striking contrast between her early education and Constantia's: "You grew and flourished, like a pale Mimosa, in the spot where destiny had planted you. Thank my stars, I am somewhat better than a vegetable. Necessity, it is true, and not choice, set me in motion, but I am not sorry for the consequences" (Brown 146). While Martinette's insulting comparison of Constantia to a plant may suggest a simple contrast between global circulation and a vegetative state, her choice of the mimosa complicates the picture. From his reading of an oft-reprinted passage in Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants, Brown would have known that mimosas are not in fact immobile; they move when touched—one might [End Page 259] say by necessity rather than choice (Darwin 30–31). Darwin's account of the mimosa as both prudishly averse to foreign hands and alluringly foreign itself (an Ottoman "bride" no less) further complicates the plant's rich figuration of both xenophobia and exoticism. To the extent that Constantia feels both planted and mobile, she will be torn between her friendship with the Anglo-American Sophia and her new friend, the polyglot Martinette. Thanks to Kwame Anthony Appiah we have a positive designation for the position Martinette invites Constantia to inhabit—"rooted cosmopolitanism"—though for Brown the relationship between a fondness for one's homeland on the one hand, and openness to the wider world on the other, is an either/or (transatlantic Anglo-American filiopiety or cosmopolitanism?) rather than a both/and, a binary that can be resolved only at the end of Constantia's knife. For literary historians, cosmopolitanism might seem to be purely a descriptor of cultural mobility, but as Appiah usefully reminds us, this concept (unlike hybridity) cannot be entirely separated from an ethical dimension. What is a cosmopolitan ethics in early America? It is not, at least in the three books under review, as simple as an attitude of simple broad-mindedness, a capacity to entertain the both/and. To enjoy such liberality in the Atlantic world seems here the privilege of a white male elite who, making their selfhood on their own terms, can stand aloof from ascriptive identities—an Enlightenment optimism that Appiah's ethics in many ways replicates.1 Perhaps counterintuitively, cosmopolitanism emerges in these studies as a way of describing a worldview whose starting point is privation rather than plenitude. While eighteenth-century cosmopolitans are generally imagined as white men whose wealth allowed them to step above narrow national prejudices, the first two books instead admirably draw attention to figures who represented themselves as cosmopolitans yet were denied full belonging within their respective nations. The third book, meanwhile, finds the critical force of cosmopolitanism in the early United States, in particular, in its negative relation to the privileges of wealth, the unfettered freedom of movement of people or goods enabled by participation in the British Empire. Seen in this way, critical American cosmopolitanism is directed against modernity: against the footloose traveler, the Lemuel Gulliver indulging his "man of the world" fantasies, or the global consumers of that unbounded market described by the Spectator [End Page 260] in number 69 of Addison and Steele's series. Instead most of the Atlantic cosmopolitans studied in these books circulate, like Martinette, of necessity rather than of their own free will, or are forced to move in search of bread like Constantia. This itinerancy seems to produce new epistemological standpoints from which to participate in global conversations and to engage...