Cosmopolitan Imaginaries Research Articles

The Reconstruction of the Cosmopolitan Imaginary: Chinese International Students during the COVID‐19 Pandemic1

Social and geopolitical disruptions triggered by the COVID‐19 crisis have raised crucial questions about the shifting meaning of race, citizenship, and nationality for transborder migrants amidst receding globalization, hardening borders, and geopolitical tensions. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Chinese international students have viewed and negotiated their ambiguous racial and ethnonational position between nations during the global pandemic. Drawing on 16 student interviews at one upstate New York campus between 2019 and 2021, we argue that Chinese international students have occupied a liminal space between nations that shapes their understanding of race and racism through a distinctly geopolitical lens. Double‐edged exclusion and discrimination from both the US and China during the global pandemic have heightened their sense of social dislocation and withdrawal from nationalist politics in both countries. In the process, they have not so much surrendered the cosmopolitan ideals that motivated their migration but rather, reimagined them while maintaining a delicate balance between global cosmopolitan ideals and ethnonationalist loyalties. Our findings provide insights into the future political trajectory of Chinese transborder migrants amid tense US–China relations and help to explain the contradictions of diasporic Chinese worldviews on current affairs.

Theorising Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro through Opium: João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a Postcolonial Framework

In 1905, Brazilian writer João do Rio published the crônica “Visões d’ópio” (Visions of opium), an account of his forays into the Chinese opium dens of Rio de Janeiro. While opium is often emblematic of both Parisian cosmopolitanism and exotic Orientalism in fin-de-siècle literature, I argue that the drug is less a replication of these coordinates in Brazil than a method of geopolitical thinking. Drawing from opium’s extractive history in China and its versatility as a material thing – plant, commodity, drug, alkaloid – I argue that opium as theory and praxis not only reconfigures the writer’s experience of Rio, but also makes stark the strategies behind and costs of Brazil’s colonial formation. While opium sustains a desire for modernity through its exotic and cosmopolitan imaginaries, its destabilising effects on the body disrupt fantasies of colonial amalgamation, exposing histories of extraction and racialised labour implicit in the drug’s circulation. Through an analysis that bridges empirical and new materialisms – and from a Chinese geographical axis that puts Brazil into a transnational dialogue beyond Europe – opium becomes a medium for thinking through Brazil’s colonial roots and its place in the world among other nation-states during a period of transition from empire to republic.

Cosmopolitan imaginary: The reception of Turkish TV series among young audiences in urban, rural, and diasporic settings (Istanbul, Emirdağ, and Brussels)

This study explores the reception of selected melodramas and their cosmopolitan imaginary, based on a large-scale qualitative study consisting of 79 in-depth interviews with young Turkish audiences across three locations: the metropolis Istanbul, the rural town of Emirdağ, and Brussels which has a large Turkish diasporic community. In the past two decades, melodramas representing the upper-class, elite, westernized lifestyles taking place in luxury residences in Istanbul's urban landscape occupy a central space in the Turkish series as an example of cosmopolitan imaginary in their representation and mode of production. The study reveals that the cosmopolitan imaginary of these TV series leads participants to negotiate Turkish modernity, westernized secular, upper-class lifestyles, Turkish values, religion, and identity issues in these settings and destabilizes a uniform and fixed understanding of their identity and imagined community.

The Map and the Menu

This article considers Bernard DeVoto’s defense of Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). DeVoto and other western historians championed Turner’s thesis celebrating westward expansion and Manifest Destiny at the same time that Julia Child was living in France, writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). While a group of heterosexual males were reviving Turner’s account of the US frontier experience in the mid–twentieth century, Child—along with a cohort of female collaborators and several gay men writing back home in the states—were positing a non-isolationist vision of America and a more cosmopolitan imaginary of its relations with other countries. They did so by writing about seemingly apolitical subjects, such as European cuisine and mixed alcoholic concoctions called “cocktails,” during World War II and the Cold War era.

Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country

Mobility has been historically tied to conceptions of cosmopolitanism, bringing forward imaginaries of belonging-in-the-world and going beyond the narrow limits of parochial allegiances into embracing virtues of openness as global citizens shaped by the experience crossing borders and encounter with the Other. Despite dominant ideas about cosmopolitans as elite itinerants of middle-class intellectuals, artists, tourists, expatriates and capitalists, global migration with its entailing forms of mobilities from below—economic migrants, transmigrants, refugees, exiles—has redefined the term to include forms of minor and vernacular cosmopolitanisms that emerge among the migrant underclass. However, just like these forms of mobilities, these types of cosmopolitanism are also bound and shaped by class, gender and ethnicity. This paper explores versions of cosmopolitanism from below in the stories of Mia Alvar in her book, In the Country, that center on female domestic workers from the Philippines. Through the transnational itineraries of these border-crossing women protagonists in contemporary Filipino fiction, the article examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.

"I Wish I Were a Plumber!": Transnational Class Re-Constructions Across Migrant Experiences Among Hong Kong's Professionals and Managers.

This study examines processes of class construction within a transnational community of professionals and managers who are emigrants, returnees, and non-migrants. Building on Bourdieu's class analysis and literature on transnational migration, we examine how class statuses are supported by moral claims based on varying transnational mobility strategies. We draw our results from qualitative interviews with 45 Hong Kong respondents in Hong Kong and Canada. We find that despite Hong Kong emigrants' loss of economic capital due to de-professionalization, their cultural and symbolic claims frame an alternative set of norms about their life successes. Returnees claim to have the best of both worlds having amassed economic capital, while making social distinctions from stayers in terms of their globalized cosmopolitan imaginaries. Stayers appear envious of emigrants' and returnees' flexibility and seek to accumulate economic capital for future retirement migration or to send their children abroad. Respondents' moralizing discourses reveal a social field defining within class distinctions apart from hyper concerns of upward mobility through material gains. Nuanced class distinctions articulate values around freedom of space, time, and expression not readily accessible to residents remaining in Hong Kong.

Ideological indeterminacy: Worker Esperantism in 1920s Sweden

This article investigates visions of Esperanto upheld in the Swedish labour movement during the 1920s. It offers an account of the linguistic–political practice of the Swedish Worker Esperanto Association (SLEA). The analytical focus is placed on SLEA's conceptualisation of Esperanto as an effective means for achieving social, political and communicative amelioration. The ideological open-endedness afforded by this idea is a particular point of interest. In SLEA's practice, Esperanto was regarded both as a means of overcoming and safeguarding linguistic heterogeneity. The ameliorative potential ascribed to Esperanto could be appropriated both by national and cosmopolitan imaginaries. The co-presence of these two visions points to a fundamental indeterminacy interwoven into a seemingly rigid ideology of language.

Solidarity Cities and Cosmopolitanism from Below: Barcelona as a Refugee City

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ provoked a wave of solidarity movements across Europe. These movements contrasted with attitudes of rejection against refugees from almost all EU member states and a lack of coordinated and satisfactory response from the EU as an institution. The growth of the solidarity movement entails backlash of nationalized identities, while the resistance of the member states to accept refugees represents the failure of the cosmopolitan view attached to the EU. In the article, we argue that the European solidarity movement shapes a new kind of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism from below, which fosters an inclusionary universalism, which is both critical and conflictual. The urban scale thus becomes the place to locally articulate inclusive communities where solidarity bonds and coexistence prevail before national borders and cosmopolitan imaginaries about welcoming, human rights, and the universal political community are enhanced. We use the case of Barcelona to provide a concrete example of intersections between civil society and a municipal government. We relate this discussion to ongoing debates about ‘sanctuary cities’ and solidarity cities and discuss how urban solidarities can have a transformative role at the city level. Furthermore, we discuss how practices on the scale of the city are up-scaled and used to forge trans-local solidarities and city networks.

Solidarity cities and cosmopolitanism from below. Barcelona as refugee city

The so-called «refugee crisis» provoked a wave of solidarity movements across Europe. These movements contrasted with attitudes of rejection against refugees from almost all eu member states and the lack of coordinated and satisfactory response from the eu as an institution. Whilst the first position entails backlash of nationalized identities, the latter represents the failure of a cosmopolitan view attached to the eu. We argue that the European solidarity movement shapes a new kind of cosmopolitanism: a cosmopolitanism from below which fosters an inclusionary universalism, which is both critical and conflictual. Urban spaces thus become the place to locally articulate inclusive communities where solidarity bonds and coexistence prevail before national borders and cosmopolitan imaginaries about welcoming, human rights and the universal political community are enhanced. We relate these discussions to ongoing debates about sanctuary cities and solidarity cities and discuss how urban solidarities can have a transformative role at the city level. We use the case of Barcelona to provide a concrete example of intersections between civil society and a municipal government. Furthermore, we discuss how practices on the scale of the city are up-scaled and used to forge trans-local solidarities and city networks.

Cosmopolitanism without a World? David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

This article argues that David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas equivocates between an optimistic articulation of a global public sphere and a more pessimistic inability to offer its readers a vision in which this public sphere can be realised. I attribute this equivocation to two competing imaginaries within the novel. The first—a cosmopolitan imaginary—wishes to dispense with teleological accounts of human beings, the societies they create and the world in which these societies are located. The second—an emancipatory imaginary—evidences deep concerns regarding the carceral conditions that increasingly dominate the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Mitchell’s text appears to evidence an awareness that the promises of freedom around which neoliberal governance has been instituted look increasingly hollow, and thus that the concept of freedom is ripe for reengagement. However, the fact that freedom represents a telos at odds with the novel’s cosmopolitan ethics produces a pessimistic philosophy of history that forecloses any hope for the realisation of human freedom. The cosmopolitan imaginary of Cloud Atlas thus acts as a brake on its emancipatory imaginary and lends the novel a characteristically cyclical structure in which acts of ethical commitment are stripped of ramification. Finally, the article argues that the impasse between the novel’s competing imaginaries is indicative of a larger challenge confronting cosmopolitan discourse today and suggests that a move beyond the ethical humanism at the heart of this discourse is necessary if an understanding of freedom-as-action is to have any place within it.

The Australian Early Childhood Curriculum and a Cosmopolitan Imaginary

In our interconnected and interdependent world, national early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies can no longer be made or read independently from their global contexts. Policy statements often display a global awareness that construct notions about ‘the child’ as a ‘global citizen’, particular relations to others and certain prospects about the world. In this paper, we analyse the Australian Early Years Learning Framework: Belonging, Being and Becoming (EYLF) and associated documents to make explicit the particular child subjects, forms of belonging and prospects they produce. The multivocality and multiperspectivity of the EYLF enable parallel interpretations, which we utilise here and focus on two possible readings: first, an educational prospect that furthers neoliberal globalisation and modernist notions by fashioning ECEC as part of national and mostly economic projects, while the second reading identifies aspects of the EYLF that prefigure a new mode of learning that engages alternatively with our interdependent world through a ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. Based upon our second reading, we utilise our ‘radical imagination’ to extend the cosmopolitan imaginary of the EYLF for pedagogical use.

Cosmopolitan imaginaries on the margins: negotiating difference and belonging in a Delhi resettlement colony

In this article, I examine how social boundaries are drawn and contested by residents in a Delhi resettlement colony, established in 2004 and expanded during the wider slum clearance drive, prior to the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Drawing from life narratives, I explore how residents navigate new social terrains and decide in which situations difference becomes a salient issue. Building on literature that engages with subaltern forms of cosmopolitanism, I argue that openness and conviviality are seen as predominantly urban behaviors, external to that of the colony located on the margins of the city. Residents instead express ambivalent and sometimes contradictory subjectivities in quotidian encounters, and often see social distancing as a necessary tactic. I suggest the narratives offer a nuanced understanding of the multiple constructions of home, community, and belonging amongst the marginalized in and ‘beyond’ the city.

Jazz in Athens: Frustrated Cosmopolitans in a Music Subculture

This paper presents an ethnographic account of jazz music in Athens. The small scene under scrutiny is mainly populated by professional session instrumentalists of the Greek popular music scene who perform jazz as a side activity for their own pleasure. In the process, they construct a conceptual dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘play’. Drawing on the author's extended involvement in this scene, and focusing on private interviews with musicians, this article unveils the discourses of cosmopolitanism invoked through local jazz music-making. The ethnographic material presented aims to illustrate how even a small subculture can serve as a terrain for contesting cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Reflections on a Complex (and Cosmopolitan) Archive: Postcards and Photography in Early Colonial Uganda, c.1904–1928

This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended “social archive” of this collection, by exploring the range of relationships through which these image‐objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals something of a “concealed” archive of meaning within this collection, one which is indicative both of wider cosmopolitan imaginaries that were at play in the British Empire during this period, and of the official view of the new Uganda colony as an inclusive, even collaborative, social project. A focus on the social agency of the postcards themselves then reveals how these meanings became later “overwritten”, to produce a more recognizable semiotics of colonial representation and power.

Cosmopolitanism, Geographical Imaginaries and Belonging in North London

Cosmopolitanism has been described as the cultural habitus of globalisation. It is therefore, albeit defined somewhat loosely, often associated with ethnically diverse, global cities. This paper considers the extent to which London engenders cosmopolitan values amongst its residents. It draws on survey data from the LOCAL MULTIDEM study of minorities' political participation to address these themes. The analysis examines perceptions of respect, belonging and geographical imaginaries - amongst established minorities and the ethnic majority - in north London. It is argued that cosmopolitan ethics are transformative and dialectical and, critically, cannot remain the preserve of the privileged in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. The analysis presented demonstrates that a sense of belonging and cosmopolitan imaginaries are not evenly accessed by different ethnic groups; notably, that Bangladeshi Londoners who are born and bred in the city are less likely to appropriate these discourses than Caribbean, Indian or White residents.

Dialogical subjectivities for hard times: expanding political and ethical imaginaries of subaltern and elite Batswana women

Tracing the careers of three Batswana women leaders, two of them trade unionists and one a public servant who became, first, a politician and then an international civil servant, the article explores ideas of ethical leadership in Botswana and argues that leadership is to be understood as essentially dialogical, linked to notions of dignity and responsibility, while activism has created an impetus for the women to expand their cosmopolitan political imaginaries. The article responds to feminist poststructuralist arguments regarding the possibility of gendered agency and ethical subjectivity. While rejecting Michel Foucault's ‘negative paradigm’ in favour of a more dialogical understanding of subjectivity, it argues that an alternative reading of Foucault's later work may provide insight into an ethics of the other, beyond the self.

Strangers, Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary in Mobile Societies

This article deploys a double conceptual framework. One frame is positioned through the ideas of absolute strangers and outsiders. The other frame develops out of, though is distinct from, the first, and refers to the disaggregated forms of modern citizenship. The citizen-as-absolute-stranger in addition to accruing political rights may also accrue social, economic or identity rights, or traverse wider relations between him or herself and other absolute strangers in either national or international settings. It is in this context that outsiders are configured - aliens who have no national-juridical status