Two Responses to Paul Bourget: Henry James and Thomas Mann

Abstract

In Homi Bhabha’s introduction to The Location of Culture, he argues that we need to think beyond concepts such as nationality, historical period, class and gender and consider the interstices or spaces between them, in order to explore what identity really means. Taking a cue from Benedict Anderson’s work on the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality, Bhabha suggests that there is evidence of what he calls ‘a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities’.1 Although one might think that the term ‘cosmopolitan’ could denote such a hybrid imagined community, Bhabha does not use it here, possibly because of its social connotations, or possibly because he does not wish to attach these interstices to one particular label. He does however refer to it in two overlapping articles from 1996, ‘Unpacking My Library. . . Again’ and ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’.2 In these pieces he criticizes Martha Nussbaum’s essay ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ on the grounds that her ‘universalist model’ of cosmopolitanism does not address questions of ‘humanness’, agency or the position of the subject.3 Bhabha takes specific issue with her spatial model of cosmopolitan identity, where the self is at the centre of a series of concentric circles from family, to ethnic and communal groups, to humanity per se. Nussbaum’s universalist view of cosmopolitanism, based mainly on her reading of the Stoic philosophers and Kant, owes an acknowledged debt to Kant’s two essays that might be seen as the founding texts of modern cosmopolitan theory: ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795).4 In the latter, Kant conceives a tripartite model of national or civic law, international law and cosmopolitan law, based on a loose global federation of nation states. Where Nussbaum suggests that universal cosmopolitanism is the outermost circle of this model,