Cosmopolitan Experience Research Articles

Cosmopolitans and ‘cliques’: Everyday socialisation amongst Tamil student and young professional migrants to the UK

Among student and young professional migrants to the UK the opportunity for a global or cosmopolitan experience emerges as a motivating factor for migration. This article takes the example of student and young professional migrants to the UK from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and explores how this cosmopolitan ambition plays out in the formation of UK social networks. Two ‘types’ of research participant are identified; ‘self-conscious cosmopolitans’ whose social networks are cross-ethnic, and others whose networks are largely co-ethnic and who are often derided by their self-consciously cosmopolitan counterparts as ‘clannish’ or ‘cliquey’. The article asks how ethnicity emerges as salient (or not) in these migrants’ talk and practice around UK social network formations. It then considers whether a co-ethnic social network necessarily limits the cosmopolitan experience, or whether this interpretation reflects a narrow understanding of cosmopolitanism which excludes the multiple inter-cultural encounters these migrants experience in their everyday lives.

Entangled communities: interethnic relationships among urban salesclerks and domestic workers in Egypt, 1927–61

This paper examines the relationships among salesclerks and other lower-level commercial and domestic employees in inter-war and post-Second World War urban Egypt, especially Cairo. It argues that the Italians, Greeks, local Jews, Armenians, Syrian Christians, Maltese, Coptic Christians and Muslims who often worked side by side on the floors of department stores and private homes participated in multiethnic occupational subgroups, formal unions and leisure cultures that created a series of networks linking lower-middle-class people in workplaces, public and neighbourhood space as well as commerce. These networks spanned ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, and they reveal a complex shared Mediterranean culture, underpinned by a juridical system shaped by European colonialism. Although historians have documented the vertical relations within ethnic groups and the horizontal relationships among the business elite of different communities, horizontal relationships among the lower and lower-middle classes of locally resident foreigners or Egyptians, who made up the bulk of the different communities, evidence both deep entanglement and regular conflict. The history of lived Mediterranean or cosmopolitan experiences thus challenges contemporary uses of both terms.

“Cosmopolitanism Within”: The case of R.K. Narayan’s fictional Malgudi

Postcolonial criticism challenges the normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism rooted in metropolitan cultures by inviting locally-bred, subaltern and third world experiences as forces of intervention and interruption in shaping universal(ist) ethics for a shared humanity. Nevertheless, these approaches remain more speculative than substantive, and they lack the empirical currency required for grounding local cosmopolitanism(s) outside of diasporic, transnational, exilic contexts. Through a close reading of R.K. Narayan’s fictional town of Malgudi, this paper explores its metonymical implications for a local cosmopolitanism (“locopolitan”): its unique rural and urban constellations; and an ethno-humanist narrative drawn along the “locopolitan” lines as opposed to the metropolitan (pre)conditioning of cosmopolitan experience. Such a reading aims at opening up an empirical basis for local cosmopolitanism within the postcolonial framework.

Free TV

Circulation of television programs in file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent is one of the many developments in the era of media convergence prompting a renewal of television’s place in the popular imagination. Scholarly study of file-sharing tends to focus on movies and music, keeping TV marginal despite its heavy circulation in P2P networks. By considering its cultural implications as revealed in the discourses of P2P TV sharers, this essay’s aim is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television’s value during the contemporary period. It is especially concerned with understanding the ethical theories of file-sharing participants. It situates these within the context of television’s shift from low, mass culture to a more legitimated status; from a freely accessible public good to a private good for which one must enter into terms of commercial exchange; and from a national/local form of culture to a global, cosmopolitan experience.

Producing the Folk at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival

Abstract In this paper, we consider how the folk are produced and consumed at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest). Founded in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as a cosmopolitan gathering of music, food, and art lovers, Jazz Fest has become one of the world’s largest music festivals. The staging of the festival in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was seen as a symbol of the reviving spirit of New Orleans and showcased the festival as an icon of the city. Blackness and other forms of otherness are central to producing a concentrated experience of cosmopolitanism there and to constructing a "hip" identity. Festgoers and producers are "in the know" about the folk, even as they are separated from them by race, class, and/or education. Those who produce the folk participate in an imaginary leveling of difference, while festival visitors experience the spine-tingling transcendence of musical communion. At the same time, folk artists, demonstrators, vendors, and performers are tightly disciplined by the structures that specify precise limits on what they can and cannot do. A close examination of the production of culture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival reveals a reproduction of a racialized social structure in which people of color (mostly African Americans) and other "folks" are sidelined while owner-connoisseurs are able to control presentation and production.

Producing the Folk at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival

In this paper, we consider how the folk are produced and consumed at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest). Founded in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as a cosmopolitan gathering of music, food, and art lovers, Jazz Fest has become one of the world's largest music festivals. The staging of the festival in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was seen as a symbol of the reviving spirit of New Orleans and showcased the festival as an icon of the city. Blackness and other forms of otherness are central to producing a concentrated experience of cosmopolitanism there and to constructing a "hip" identity. Festgoers and producers are "in the know" about the folk, even as they are separated from them by race, class, and/or education. Those who produce the folk participate in an imaginary leveling of difference, while festival visitors experience the spine-tingling transcendence of musical communion. At the same time, folk artists, demonstrators, vendors, and performers are tightly disciplined by the structures that specify precise limits on what they can and cannot do. A close examination of the production of culture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival reveals a reproduction of a racialized social structure in which people of color (mostly African Americans) and other "folks" are sidelined while owner-connoisseurs are able to control presentation and production.

BOOK REVIEW:Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard

Reviewed by: Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels Catherine Gallagher (bio) Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard; pp. vi + 320. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, $24.95, £15.95. A book we have been waiting for—a serious, careful, and original study explaining how nineteenth-century British world hegemony shaped major Victorian novels—has finally appeared. James Buzard's Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is not a survey of little-known fictional depictions of imperialism, nor is it yet another inquiry into the attenuation or complete absence of such depictions in canonical novels. Instead, it explores how well-known British novelists (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and surprisingly, William Morris) adopted the perspective of outsiders in depicting their home cultures. The implied authors of Bleak House (1852–53) , Villette (1853) , and Middlemarch (1871–72) seem to have left home and returned; they evince a combination of intimacy with and estrangement from English culture, which figures itself in narrators resembling ethnographers and protagonists resembling native informants. Rather than being stuck in the evolutionary assumptions of Victorian ethnology, which allegedly turned spatial and cultural difference into a temporal continuum surveyed from its highest point of development, the novelists explored England through complex, doubled, and self-interrupting narrative modes. Indeed, Buzard demonstrates that nineteenth-century British novelists developed the ethnographic concept of culture as well as the procedures of the participant observer before anthropologists did and that both were used first at home rather than in some exotic locale. And yet English presence in foreign lands was the condition that both enabled and required the novelists' autoethnographic labors. The formal features that Buzard identifies as belonging to this stage of the novel were first developed in the national tales of the Celtic fringe and brought to early maturity in Scott's novels. In his analysis of Waverly (1814), Buzard concedes that Scott gave his metropolitan English audience the thrill of penetrating into self-contained and otherwise inaccessible milieus. But Buzard demonstrates that the tendency to consolidate Britain through "touristification" of its alien enclaves was also a strategy by which an ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and politically various Scotland could become a cultural whole, for only efforts to create a supra-Caledonia could save the country from "becoming nothing or no place distinctive in accommodating itself to English ways and expectations" (101). The consolidation of Scottishness into a particular culture (rather than a collection of disparate factions) increasingly became Scott's aim, and the impression of giving complete surveys of all Scottish types in, for example, Heart of Midlothian (1818), set a representational pattern through which the wholeness of a culture was associated with the boundedness of the book describing it. Moreover, the characters who best personified the wholeness of the [End Page 109] country in Scott's later novels were metropolitan persona with cosmopolitan experience, neither entirely limited to the local perspective nor completely deracinated from it. Thus another of the formal traits of what came to be (in Buzard's phrase) metropolitan autoethnography was a strong but elastic bond between an unplaced narrator outside the story world and a diegetic persona within—a form of narratorial doubling anticipating the pairing of the ethnographer and the native informant. The transference of these national narrative strategies to the south of the island, even to the cosmopolitan center of London itself, served a similar purpose for the English, who feared that their specific culture was disappearing into a general "imperial statehood" (107). Both the expansiveness and the coherence of Bleak House arose from the need to proliferate "a series of discontinuous and seemingly irreconcilable spaces within Britain," to set in motion a narrative that not only connects them but also isolates "the single moral geography in which all these connections obtain against an expansive backdrop of other possible connections" (107). The seeming completeness and locality of the novel's world protects the metropolis against the very forces of global amalgamation it has set in motion. Moreover, Bleak House neatly illustrates the doubling of narrative responsibility between the nameless, detached third-person, present-tense narrator and...

Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial Re-Configurations of Belonging

This article explores the relationship between the nation, the city, narratives, and belonging in Serbia through an analysis of narratives of a set of 30 interviews with young Belgrade intellectuals aged 23–35. I argue that what appears to be emerging in post-Milosevic Serbia is a new articulation and a new scale of belonging. Most of my informants are mobilising their city identities, moving from a national to an urban perspective. They imaginatively defend their city identity through a discourse that ‘others’ its newcomers, i.e. the rural residents. However, the article is critical of their articulated dichotomous rhetoric of ‘Us, the City Cosmopolitans’ vs. ‘Them, the Rural Nationalists’. My overall aim is to offer an analysis of the Serbian case, where one sees that the city of Belgrade has become a microcosm and a symbolic expression for modernity, resistance, openness and democracy. However, instead of seeing urbanity as the only locus of modernity, one needs to understand that urbanity does not one-dimensionally lead to the urbanisation of the mind, implying that once you have cities, or live in a city, there is a specific urban, cosmopolitan experience.

REIMAGINING AFRICA: WHAT AMERICAN STUDENTS LEARN IN SOUTH AFRICA

This article explores how travel influences American attitudes to South Africa and Africa. It draws on long-term ethnographic relationships with American study abroad students in Cape Town, South Africa. Travel is often assumed to be an ideal way of changing how the ``other'' is perceived, but most research on travelers shows only how the traveler is changed. This article is a rare contribution to discussions of what travelers can learn about their destinations. Africa tends to be imagined in the US as a homogeneous entity either good in its primitiveness and wildness or bad in its violence, poverty, and disease. These perceptions color the expectations of students traveling to South Africa and frame their experiences there. Some of their preconceptions are shaken, especially the assumption that racial categories are the same everywhere. The students frequently assert, ``South Africa is not Africa.'' They also learn through their volunteer work, and conversations with South Africans, that poverty is not necessarily a homogenizing, debilitating force and that despite lack of material possessions, poor South Africans have ambitions and pride. The students' image of Africa is disturbed by the combination of their cosmopolitan experiences in South Africa and this unsettling of their preconceptions about poverty

Creolization in Robert Antoni’s Blessed is the Fruit

With the exception of reggae, creolization is no doubt one of the major Caribbean contributions to the world of universal culture. Originating in the area's complex and often painful early experience of migration and cosmopolitanism, it has recently been summed up as syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities. Although cultural interbreeding, and the unique forms of civilization it has led to, have characterized the Caribbean from the fifteenth century onwards, they were not openly acknowledged before the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, in spite of earlier individual attempts to highlight the cross-cultural roots of the area, for example that of the Cubans Jose Marti and Nicolas Guillen, racial purity and national compartmentalization long remained the norm under the influence of the colonial agenda. Now, however, plurality and impurity have been recognized and praised, even to the point of becoming stereotypes, as potential wombs of ontological enrichment. One cannot help thinking, however, that the popularity of these notions has been facilitated by the fact that they now more clearly apply to a Western world that is increasingly on the move, thus undergoing intensive creolization as well. If 'creolization' has become one of the key notions in the field of cultural studies and their interest in identity issues, one should nonetheless beware of its ideological appropriation and of its idealization, which, as J. Michael Dash points out, can turn the Caribbean into a centre of exemplary creolity. Major Caribbean artists like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and Derek Walcott have sidestepped such a pitfall by constantly highlighting creolization as a process (as opposed to a state or an end in itself) but also by presenting it as a site of cross-cultural harmony as much as one of conflict. This complex view of creolization has, it seems, much affected the younger generation of West Indian writers. Many of them address this phenomenon of cultural hybridization from their point of view as artists who, in their majority, belong, yet do not fully belong, to the West

Sicily and Sicilitudine in the Novels of Silvana Grasso

Vincenzo Consolo, commenting on the tradition of Sicilian fictional writing, distinguished between writers he called 'verticali' and those he called 'orizzontali'. While 'horizontal' writers are those whose work can draw on cosmopolitan experience, reaching for inspiration beyond national boundaries, the 'vertical' writers (Neapolitans, Sicilians, South Americans) are drawn by the conditions of the reality they inhabit to explore compulsively the underlying social and historical structures of their own land: 'maggiore è l'infelicità di una terra, più i suoi scrittori sono "verticali" per il bisogno di spiegare il proprio dolore, di capirne il perché.'

Towards the Hong Kong Learning Organisation: An exploratory case study

A learning organisation (LO) is one that practises organisational learning (OL). Existing, multifaceted models of LOs reflect the diversity of perspectives on OL. Since underlying dimensions of Hong Kong Chinese culture differ from others where LO models have been developed, we derived a model from an actual case of a developing Hong Kong Chinese LO. Interviews were conducted with 25 staff from the organisation, and a model was developed inductively from early interviews and checked against later ones. The emerging LO model had much in common with attributes of existing ones, but there were distinctive characteristics that reflected wider cultural assumptions of high power distance, relational collectivism and long-term orientation, the unique strategic circumstances of the company and the cosmopolitan experience of its leadership. We conclude that key dimensions of Hong Kong Chinese culture, such as Confucian dynamism, can be strengths in an emerging LO. What is required for progress as a 'mature' Hong Kong LO is a matter of conjecture and controversy, but we think that the company studied may need more interpersonal trust across the workforce as a whole, to go with high existing levels of trust in the management. The state of democracy in wider Hong Kong society may be a relevant consideration.

"Lord, please don't take me in August": African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island - towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter. Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them. Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season - June, July, and August - that brought blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.

The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s Walter Kalaidjian Rita Barnard. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. viii + 271 pp. Rita Barnard’s The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance, in addition to presenting important new approaches to the work of Nathanael West, has the distinction of being the first book-length publication [End Page 837] on the poetry of Kenneth Fearing. Barnard’s sustained attention to Fearing’s poetic achievement is timely, coming as it does in the midst of the general reconstruction of American literature and culture between the wars undertaken by Cary Nelson, Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, Paula Rabinowitz, and Alan Filreis, among others. It also has the virtue, in my opinion, of recovering the cultural context of that era in ways that link it to how we are now dealing with the political economy of postwar consumer society and its specters of pervasive commodification, spectacle, and simulation. Thus in Barnard’s project, Fearing is properly joined, not to the productivist ethos of the Comintern’s Third Period and not to the proletarian semiosis of the Soviet Union, but to the emergence of what Warren Sussman has theorized as the “culture of abundance.” Part 1 of this study, entitled “Context,” provides a thorough-going analysis of the roots of mass culture in the United States and theorizes its implications for literary production and reception across the modern/postmodern divide. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Comintern’s agitational strategy of promoting class identification among oppressed proletarians was effectively countered by capital’s own campaign to interpolate workers as consumers. Here the Fordist techniques of factory production meshed with the print, radio, and film media to popularize an abundance of new products, celebrity idols, and simulated lifestyles. According to Barnard, it is within and against the foundational context of what Guy Debord theorizes as the modern society of the spectacle that Fearing’s and West’s writing has its force and its continuing purchase on the contemporary critique of advanced capitalism. Drawing from the “flexible Gramscian conception of hegemony as a terrain of contestation,” Barnard analyzes the ways in which Fearing and West intervene in what Lizabeth Cohen characterizes as the “shared culture” of the emerging consumer society. Part 2 comprises three chapters that provide a biographical framing of the poet’s career, an overview of Fearing criticism, his own theories on poetry and mass culture, and, finally, close readings of his major works. Barnard’s discussion of Fearing’s essay “Reading, Writing, and the Rackets” (which introduces his 1956 New and Selected Poems) reveals the poet as a discerning cultural critic. In its analysis of the mass media’s influence on everyday life and the public mind (as well as in its pessimism), this piece resembles the Frankfurt School’s bleak vision of [End Page 838] administered culture. “News, commonsense, good literature,” Fearing writes, “these are whatever the voices of communication unanimously, and often, say they are. Conversely, distortion, false reasoning, base and degenerate writing, these, too, are whatever the concerted organs of communication repeatedly denounce as such. Still more conveniently, those topics and views not mentioned in the forums of communication at all do not exist; certainly, if some unpleasant subject does win a momentary, unauthorized interest, under the magic eraser of silence it soon dies.” For her own part, Barnard negotiates between, on the one hand, the kind of one-dimensional version of the culture industry witnessed, say, in the early Herbert Marcuse or Theodor Adorno and, on the other hand, a more contemporary attention to the chances for popular contestation and cultural articulation theorized by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In comparing and contrasting Fearing’s work with high modernism, Barnard lays out a convincing critique of T. S. Eliot, focusing on “American Rhapsody”‘s “retort to Eliot’s comment on the undesirability of ‘free-thinking Jews.’” Noting their mutual embrace of poetic impersonality, mass cultural citation, and cosmopolitan experience, Barnard distinguishes Eliot’s poetic push to “unify...

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES ON SPANISH COMPOSERS' MUSICAL STYLES BETWEEN 1450 AND 1500

One of the distinctions made in Spanish secular music repertories between 1450 and 1500 is that musical styles gradually changed from independently moving polyphonic parts to homorhythmic and syllabic textures. Although the same trasnformation can be observed in most European repertories by 1500, particularly those exposed to Italian humanist ideas, the Spanish reception to Italian trends manifests itself by the 1470s. The focus of this paper is on a variety of stylistic changes observable in the works of a few early Spanish Renaissance composers represented in Colombina and the Cancionero Musical de Palacio. Outside influences on early Spanish composers are seldom as easy to study as in the case of Juan Cornago. His biography is described in detail elsewhere, but briefly, he obtained a bachelor degree in theology from the University of Paris in 1449, he joined the retinue of Alfonso I of Naples by 1453, and he was in the service of Ferdinand V of Aragon by 1475.1 Cornago's cosmopolitan experiences stimulated new com positional approaches, three of which can be isolated for analysis. Cornago may already have developed compositional skills by the time he reached the University of Paris, but while in Paris he may have come into contact with English compositions because his Mass, the Ayo visto lo mappa mundi is characterized by numerous English traits from the new Mass cycle genre, including head motifs, assymetrical phrases,

Charles Martin Loeffler and George Gershwin: A Forgotten Friendship

Among the many who were charmed by the music and the personality of George Gershwin is a composer overlooked by Gershwin's biographersCharles Martin Loeffler. Their relationship, as this article will attempt to show, brings to light an unexpected view of Loeffler. In his time Loeffler (1861-1935) was an eminent composer, a distinguished violinist, and a proponent of modern music. Although associated almost exclusively today with French impressionism in America, Loeffler was not as limited in his tastes and creative activities as assessments of his position in American music have made him out to be. Among other things, Loeffler was an ardent supporter of American nationalism in music and of its popular music. An initial impression of Loeffler might well preclude associating him with jazz, Broadway shows, or with George Gershwin. He has been everywhere described as aristocratic, dignified, and fastidious-even austere. Although not a native of Boston, might well be called a proper Bostonian, for, according to a contemporary account, he was all that the elect of the city desired: a man of distinction, culture, cosmopolitan experience; as composer, a craftsman and stylist for the world to admire; an intellectual and a modernist, regarded with pleasing suspicion by the conservatives; a brilliant conversationalist, at ease and in place with the socially exalted, as John Sargent or Karl Muck were in place and on equal terms-really great artists, but, thank Heaven! not socially impossible!1

The International Conference on Education

THE Conference which was held at the Health Exhibition last week has achieved a remarkable success. It was attended by upwards of a thousand persons, including many of the leading teachers in English, Scotch, and continental schools, University professors, statesmen, managers of schools, and others interested in different ways in the subject of education. The interest was so well sustained that all four sections were more crowded on the last day than the first, and very general regret was expressed that the Conference should close so soon. Two circumstances mainly contributed to this result. The president, Lord Reay, by his tact and courtesy, his knowledge of foreign languages, and his cosmopolitan experience was singularly qualified, both to obtain from different continental States their most fitting representatives, and to give to these representatives when they arrived appropriate tasks and a worthy welcome. And Lord Reay was helped in the task of organising the Conference by a small but efficient committee, by whom during several previous months the work of selecting the readers of papers had been sedulously pursued. Unless pains had been taken in relation to each subject of discussion to secure that it should be initiated by a person who spoke upon it with some authority, and special knowledge, the result would have been far less satisfactory.