Reviewed by: Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization ed. by Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky Jesse Arseneault Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky, eds. Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization. McGill-Queen's up, 2017. viii + 408 pp. $39.95. Craig Calhoun's 2002 assessment of scholarship on cosmopolitanism cast a skeptical eye toward its more hopeful iterations that emerged in the 1990s, calling them "overoptimistic, perhaps, more attentive to certain prominent dimensions of globalization than to equally important others" (870). His critique, put forward in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, insisted that "the cosmopolitan ideals articulated during the 1990s seem all the more attractive but their realization much less immanent" (870). Although offered nearly two decades ago, that statement arguably resonates with the divisive politics of the present moment. With the increased security discourse of the Western city in a post–isis world, xenophobes inflamed by explicitly racist national leaderships, the ongoing urgency of multiple global refugee crises, and attention to climate change that brings with it the spectre of imperialism's extractive and exploitative histories, notions of global citizenship and, especially, hospitality are as fragile as they ever have been. In this moment the aspirations of such a cantankerous category as cosmopolitanism might seem a naive intellectual fantasy. Enter Negative Cosmopolitanism, an impressive collection that imbues the concept with renewed perspective and, especially, a critical weight not always found in the work of its major proponents. The book is the culmination of a 2012 conference whose theme was likewise "negative cosmopolitanism," and it contains a rich array of essays—fourteen in total—whose analyses span multiple locations across the globe. The book and its editors' efforts to draw on a wide variety of scholarly work in rethinking the oft-celebrated notion of cosmopolitanism, especially in many of its essays' departure from the concept's frequently Euro-American zones of critique, is a welcome contribution to studies of globalization. In its efforts to push beyond the elite enclaves of the global citizenship implied by the term, the collection fits well with efforts, as voiced by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff's Theory From the South, to orientate global criticism around "cosmopolitanisms forged in the spaces between promise and privation, between inclusion and erasure, there to assert their own contemporaneity, their own … modernity" (6). If the book is orientated toward the inbetween, that ethos extends to its interdisciplinarity as well, gathering as it does multiple voices from the humanities and social sciences. Many of these are from literary studies, but the collection also includes those from [End Page 171] history, geography, film studies, and cultural studies, encompassing conversations influenced by political economy, critical race studies, feminism, queer studies, and postcolonialism, to mention only a few. This book's deceptively simple title, which might be read as merely indicating an opposing perspective to ostensibly "positive" modes of cosmopolitical scholarship, instead introduces wide-ranging and complex critiques of the concept's orientations toward universality and inclusion. The book troubles what Peter Nyers refers to in his afterword as the "happy universalism celebrated by advocates of world citizenship and global democratic governments," instead showing "how cosmopolitanism gets enacted as a practice in support of the dividing logics of nationalism, capitalism, and heterosexism" (283). Beginning with a concise but nuanced account of cosmopolitanism's genealogy informed by some of its influential commentators—for example, Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace" and its more recent hopeful iterations such as those by Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah—the text's editors take seriously the potential of the concept while not letting off the hook the suspect universality of the global citizenship it promises. If Appiah's cosmopolitanism is premised on "universal truth"—especially that expressed in his contention that "every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea" (144)—Negative Cosmopolitanism is attentive to those who, under current instantiations of global power, do not appear to matter from within the global communities implied by such obligations. Some of the analyses within the book also index those peoples in various states of disenfranchisement who cultivate their own worlds and modes...