Cosmopolitan Narrative Research Articles

Realpolitik in Global Governance: Understanding the Competing Realist and Cosmopolitan Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Era of International Law

Realpolitik in Global Governance: Understanding the Competing Realist and Cosmopolitan Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Era of International Law

Restitution of cultural property: the rise and fall of a cosmopolitan ideal

ABSTRACT This paper provides a historical analysis of the peak and demise of the international view on cultural heritage. In the 1980s, cultural internationalism emerged as a conservative reaction against the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which organises the restitution and return of stolen cultural properties. Internationalist and cosmopolitan scholars who have claimed that cultural heritage ‘belongs to humanity’, generally condemned restitution, and pushed back against the ratification of the Convention. The international view on cultural property became traditionally dominant in milieus such as universal museums, antiquity markets and some academic disciplines. However, over the past half-decade, the growing importance of research on provenance has challenged cultural internationalism in two areas. Firstly, research on provenance focused on art and archaeological crime has shown that artefacts allegedly excavated in the past are often the proceeds of recent looting, especially in conflict zones. Secondly, recent studies on historical provenance have revealed that many objects were collected using colonial violence. As a result, developments in criminology, postcolonial history, and indigenous peoples’ rights have generally led to the retreat of cosmopolitan narratives on cultural property. Ultimately, this paper highlights that cosmopolitanism in cultural heritage has historically hinged on the imperialist past.

Ambivalent cosmopolitanism from above in Dubai

This paper focuses on new forms of governance of diversity in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), unpacking the ambivalence of its cosmopolitanism from above. It explores how the Dubai government’s narratives brand Dubai as a cosmopolitan city, rarely using the term but conveying the idea by promoting diversity, emphasizing on tolerance and happiness as two core national and urban values. The main hypothesis is that the government uses Dubai’s own landscape as the principal tool (alongside others, such as policies, institutions, discourses, events) to embody this new ideology, engraving its symbols into built landscapes and making it visible to all. Behind these inclusive cosmopolitan narratives are diverse ‘regimes of visibility’ which sometimes serve to hide strong logics of exclusion.

Emotions and critical thinking at a dark heritage site: investigating visitors’ reactions to a First World War museum in Slovenia

ABSTRACT This paper explores the connection between memory study theories (antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic) and emotions in a dark heritage site. It does so by investigating Italian and Slovene visitors’ emotional reactions to the permanent exhibition of the Kobarid Museum. The museum is located in a dark heritage site in Slovenia that was the epicenter of a series of bloody conflicts during the First World War. Relying on a cosmopolitan narrative, the museum promotes a clear antiwar message, aiming to elicit emotional responses such as empathy and compassion for the victims to connect with visitors. However, our analysis brings to light antagonistic emotions among Italian and Slovene visitors, raising important issues concerning the role of emotions and multiperspectivity in dark heritage sites. Hence, we discuss how these emotions could instead promote critical thinking, self-reflection, and cross-national dialogue.

Creating a Cosmopolitan Past: Local and Transnational Influences on Memory Work in Schindler's Factory, Kraków

This article tests the limits of cosmopolitan memory. It spotlights a unique case study, the permanent exhibition in Schindler’s Factory in Kraków, shaped by a group of local curators and politicians, as well as representatives of foreign memorial institutions and supranational NGOs. The thrust to create a cosmopolitan narrative came from Polish curators, but their vision was curbed by both a local politician and the head of a global NGO. The version of cosmopolitanism offered in Kraków engaged with contemporary Polish problems. However, it ignored Polish anti-Semitism and perpetration. The article reveals how in practice the cosmopolitan message is shaped, what propels it forward and what limits its horizons.

Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

AbstractGermany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right‐wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg's urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg's landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’—sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg's cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg's role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article's main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today's global city.

White Women. White Nation. White Cosmopolitanism: Swedish Migration between the National and the Global

ABSTRACTEmerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects

Fashion and Air Travel: Australian Photography and Style

The expansion of commercial air travel in Australia after the Second World War caused significant changes to women's fashion and its marketing in this country. The developing technology of aeroplanes as commercial carriers meant European clothes and ideas reached Australia increasingly rapidly. A long-term sense of stylistic inferiority diminished and the sometimes unquestioning acceptance of imported style was challenged. As post-war retailers expanded their product range, they sought possibilities to market Australian designed and made garments both in Europe and the US. Using co-marketing with the airline industry in particular, retailers began to foster a new confidence amongst middle-class women that by wearing local attire they could participate in a worldwide network of stylish production and consumption. For a brief period, Australian, US and European-made fashions were in serious competition. This article suggests promotional images featuring the connectivity between the technology of air transport and fashion after the Second World War mark a discrete moment in the representation of women in this country as mature and stylishly dressed global travellers, prior to a vigorously emerging youth market by the mid-1960s. It also posits the idea that, although representational stereotypes of Australian women as homemakers remained intact, the use of technological settings of airline travel in fashion photography created a new and cosmopolitan narrative that ran counter to the ideal of domesticity.

Cosmopolitan dice recast

This article argues that hegemonic cosmopolitan narrativity fails to frame a complex cosmopolitan normativity. The hegemonic cosmopolitan narrative celebrates a mobile selfhood merely hospitable to the encountered, mobile diversity that comes ashore. A recent educational-theoretical ‘refugee-crisis’ initiative serves as an illustration of the normative shortcomings of the new cosmopolitanism. The implicit normativity of the dominant cosmopolitan narrativity is, I claim, politically too weak to cover the normative surplus of a more critical cosmo-politics. Cosmopolitanism should be recast to make higher ethico-political demands on the global self and world for the cultivation of neglected ecological and relational sensibilities.

What are museums for? The enduring friction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACTThis response to Peggy Levitt’s book Artifacts and Allegiances argues that, as cultural institutions, museums are too deeply embedded within the nation state to be able to present cosmopolitan narratives that go beyond the biased particularities of the nation. Rather than conceiving nationalism and cosmopolitanism as a continuum, the relationship between the two should be seen as one of enduring friction, creating a major challenge for museums around the world to tell stories suited for our mobile, global times.

Rethinking integration: new perspectives on adaptation and settlement in an era of superdiversity

This paper explores how super-diverse sites encourage people to develop cosmopolitan attitudes, skills and competence (Vertovec 2009; Wessendorf 2014; Devadson 2010; Muller 2011). Drawing insights from an ethnographic study conducted within a leading management school in one of the UK’s most diverse boroughs, we argue that undergraduate management education provides an enhanced context to explore how people learn through coping with contrasting cosmopolitan narratives. Findings show touristic cosmopolitan narratives reliant upon privileged geographical mobility that are reproduced by transnational students can provoke informal learning for those with limited geographical or social mobility (Bauman 1996). Unable to leverage the same resources, local and home students find their own personal trajectories minimized by the white trashy English girl stereotypes they face in Managing Diversity seminars. Marginalized as if ‘vagabonds’ without choice of attending the school, they develop critical attitudes toward rich transnational students and legitimate their own mobilities by drawing on their own and others’ diversity as a narrative repertoire (Bauman 1996). This failure is significant because clear interest is placed upon preparing management students for globalized workplaces, although current approaches are largely found wanting (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Taras et al., 2009: 415; Eisenberg et al., 2013: 604; Rosenblatt et al., 2013: 356; Ng et al., 2009). Today emphasis is placed upon developing management students’ cultural intelligence because “the context for action is constantly changing and students must learn to adapt swiftly” (Blasco, 2009: 177). Such aspects of managerial know- how or tacit knowledge however are harder to recognize “in action” and notoriously more difficult to represent and transmit through traditional teaching methods (Chia and Holt, 2008; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka and Toyama, 2007; Blasco, 2009; Taras et al., 2009). In response, emphasis is now placed upon ‘experiential learning’ interventions perceived to offer greater opportunity to develop more obscure aspects of management activity (Kolb and Kolb, 2005; Armstrong, 2008; Jones, 2003). “Cultural awareness”, for example, has been found to be most effectively learned through “direct, experiential exposure to intercultural situations where students are affectively as well as cognitively engaged” (Blasco, 2009:177). They also aim to cultivate management students‘ cultural intelligence through inviting critical reflection upon cultural stereotypes, or develop multicultural competencies through apparently intensive direct contact with other cultures via technological global virtual classrooms that link up seminar classes around the world. Other interventions aim toward developing students’ diversity awareness through study-abroad programs, or awareness to new management approaches through volunteering in different countries (MacNab and Worthley, 2012; Berger, 2001; Eisenberg, 2013: 616; Taras et al., 2009; Schwabenland, 2011; Erez et al., 2013). But although such approaches are popular they still lack relevance to management graduates’ experiences of globalized workplaces (Blasco, 2009: 176). Concluding, the paper argues super-diverse sites do not in themselves encourage cosmopolitan learning but can provide contexts within which learning arises informally between the sometimes conflicting narratives of different groups. As a result, research tends to ignore diversity within everyday management learning contexts and implications for student experiences. This also means most researchers presume management learning experiences are restricted to “purposefully designed experiential learning interventions” (Eisenberg, 2013: 616). The “construction of learning from experience” thereby appears to be “an intentional act” in which “learners must be (consciously) engaged for learning to occur at any level” (Fenwick, 2001: 4). There is little interest in day-to-day implications of diversity and management students might cope with, and learn from these. Instead, it appears management students can only learn to “manage diversity” through experiential learning interventions deliberately designed by educators who specify “the experiences to make figural for the day” (Yballe and O’Connor, 2004: 474).

Re-embedding European Social Citizenship through Cosmopolitanism

This article tackles the issue of social citizenship in Europe, beyond its legal and political defini-tion, as the result of social mechanisms and practices, and it assumes the cosmopolitan perspective as a conceptual tool for the interpretation of changes in its principles and structure as related to Europeaniza-tion and globalisation. It starts from the heuristic value of the concept, grounded in modern industrial so-cieties and built on its institutions and forms of social solidarity. Then it draws on the debate about the challenges of the welfare state and capitalism’s transformations, as well as on the impact on social citizen-ship of the European integration process. It proposes cosmopolitanism as a lens for catching cosmopolitan ideas, narratives and values that contribute to creating new practices of solidarity and mutual recognition, which are the basis for the construction of new kinds of sustainable social citizenship in Europe. The Euro-pean social forum of 2012 has been considered a significant case study for an empirical exploration of the cosmopolitan imagination as a factual process. A cosmopolitan epistemology takes shape, based on the values of commons and global public goods. Meanings, actions and practices enhanced by social actors, building solidarity in diversity and following global-local logics, show forms of recognition of otherness and of sharing global responsibilities representing a tendency towards a new conception of European social citizenship. Social rights and recognition beyond territorial boundaries are at the core of the construction of a cosmopolitan citizenship in Europe.

Sustainable solutions for wheelchair and seating assistive technology provision: Presenting a cosmopolitan narrative with rich pictures

BACKGROUND: Concepts of sustainability are beginning to emerge in relation to appropriate provision of wheelchair and seating assistive technology (WSAT) from design to follow up and management. OBJECTIVES: 1. Raising awareness and understanding of and actively considering the complex nature of stakeholders’ participation in the wheelchair and seating provision. 2. Establishing a consensus regarding key goals and sustainability indicators when developing an action plan for sustainable wheelchair and seating provision systems, that would allow for effective process monitoring and measurement. METHOD:Qualitative research design, involving key stakeholder perspectives by utilising a soft systems methodological framework including organisational ethnography and critical participatory action research was chosen to study this complex system. Research processes involved participant observation, individual interviews and a series of collaborative workshops. These processes were made up of four main pillars: 1) stakeholder identification, 2) understanding perspectives, 3) meaningful collaboration and 4) strategy development. Pillars 2 and 3, sought to understand stakeholder perspectives individually and collectively, are addressed in this article. RESULTS: Pillar 2 presents rich pictures which were created to represent collective experiences of wheelchair and seating provision. Pillar 3 presents solutions for building sustainable systems. Findings identified the complexity of the system and key areas for development. Specific concerns reported to exist related to individual and nationwide organisational roles, responsibilities and regulation which appeared to influence the disproportionate rhythm of the wheelchair and seating provision system. CONCLUSIONS: A better understanding of this primary need is required to set provision of WSAT for prioritisation at a public and policy level both nationally and internationally.

ENVISIONING JEWISH CENTRAL EUROPE: FRIEDRICH TORBERG, THE AUSTRIAN ÉMIGRÉS, AND JEWISH EUROPEAN HISTORY

This essay uses the Viennese remigré writer and journalist, Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979), his Austrian Jewish cohort, and their invented “Central Europe” and “Austrian Literature” to argue for a paradigmatic shift in émigré historiography. The cosmopolitan narrative predominating in émigré historiography has marginalized traditional Judaism. By shifting the focus from the German to the Austrian émigrés, and from the European nation state to the Austrian Empire, historians can reclaim traditional Jewish culture and pluralize the hegemonic narrative. Late imperial Austria, constitutionally federalist and ethnically and culturally diverse, made room for a Jewish national culture in ways that Germany did not. The Austrian émigrés shaped visions of Central Europe that foregrounded Jewishness and provided wider space for Jewish life than comparable visions of leading German émigrés. Yet, even Austrian émigré visions remained largely incognizant of rabbinic culture, the core of traditional Jewish life. To make traditional Jews agents of Jewish European history, European historiography must now move to incorporate rabbinic culture.

Can Henny Speak? The inadequacy of epistolary narrative in Vikram Seths Two Lives

The dialectic of ‘self’ and ‘other’ contains within it the rhetoric of expression. ‘Self’ is given ascendency over the ‘other’ because ‘self’ is able to speak while the ‘other’ is either considered unfit for speaking or forcefully muted or silenced. In the attempt to reclaim these lost voices of the ‘other’, a handful of intelligentsia ‘represents’ them before the world. But is it the true ‘representation’ of the lost voice or merely an artificial ‘re-presentation’? The discourse upon the ‘representation’ of unrecorded voices can be taken outside the realm of postcolonial critique and applied on the cosmopolitan narrative of Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, a biography on the life of his great uncle Shanti Behari Seth and his German wife Henny. For a spirited reader the interest of the book lies not only in the awe-inspiring tale of cross-cultural relationship of Shanti and Henny, but also in the epistolatory narrative technique conscientiously chosen by the writer. Vikram Seth, as the self-reflexive narrator of the story, explains the gestation of the book in the summers of 1994, when Aunty Henny was already dead and Shanti Uncle was a frail old man of eighty five. In the course of writing his book Seth interviewed Shanti many times to capture his side of story, but for recording Henny’s voice there was no other way except her secret correspondence found by chance in a ‘cob-web covered trunk’ kept hidden at the attic of her room. Henny’s letters, thus, form the basis of her side of story in Two Lives. But then, can these letters truly represent her actual persona? Are they worthy enough of being explored for the purposes of biography? Is it ethical to make personal letters of a private person publicly visible in the form of a biography? And lastly, but most importantly, can Henny really speak through them? Key words: Vikram Seth, two lives, representation, epistolary narrative.

The 1919 Central European revolutions and the Judeo-Bolshevik myth

Both contemporaries and historians have associated the Soviet-style revolutions in Munich and Budapest in the spring of 1919 (and the earlier autumn 1918 revolutions) with prominent Jewish revolutionaries. From a transnational and comparative context, we unhinge the connections often made between the role of Jews in the revolutions and the role of the revolutions in explaining later Central European anti-Semitism. In 1919, there was no option other than cosmopolitanism in these two cities. Communism and anti-Communism were both consciously international and transnational ideologies. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries worked through transnational conspiratorial networks. Ideological and historical perspectives were similarly cosmopolitan; the battle for control of Munich and Budapest was understood in the context of the European historical narrative of revolution, an undeniably cosmopolitan narrative. In this 1919 Central European iteration of the narrative, the trope of Jews as particularly drawn to internationalism, and as ‘rootless’ or foreign played an pivotal role in how the revolutionary moment was understood and remembered. ‘Judeo-Bolshevism,’ the idea that Jewish and communist interests were the same, and even that ‘Jew’ and ‘communist’ were interchangeable identifiers, was a powerful myth that shaped events and perceptions in Central Europe in 1919.

On Machines and Mosquitoes: Neuroscience, Bodies, and Cyborgs in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome

Amitav Ghosh's The Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (1995) traces the hidden dangers of modern science, exposing the constant threats that surround a futuristic world of new technology and postcolonial cybernetic warfare. The book magnifies concerns about the power of advanced technology to absorb into its fateful design all the nightmarish horrors that surround the spread of global terrorism, crime, disease, war, and empires. Suspicion about the Internet's potential to do massive harm increased during the mid-to-late 1990s, causing many to be concerned that, as James Saynor observes in his review of the book, the World Wide Web would swallow us up--minds, personal identities, credit-card numbers and all--in a manner more scary than anything the electric brains managed in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' or '2001.' (1) Reminiscent of the experimental writings of Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, The Chromosome defies easy categorization, being equal parts medical mystery, historical novel, ghost story, and postcolonial thriller. (2) In this cosmopolitan narrative, Ghosh tells the story of a displaced Egyptian immigrant, Antar, who remains secluded in a rent-controlled apartment building that conceals everyday violence and murder in the New York metropolis. (3) Behind the closed doors of each lonely apartment, many uprooted Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants are hidden and marginalized by a world of transitory existence, where they live in quiet desperation and die in relative obscurity. Antar spends his days working for and being monitored by a global mega-corporation, the International Water Council, where his pay has docked because of 'declining productivity' (5). The International Water Council attempts to make world history in much the same way that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as epitomizing globalization's resurgent forms of empire: structural hegemonies perpetuate the neo-imperialist ambitions of multinational corporations, turning the so-called natives into docile, subservient laborers. The International Water Council aims to privatize access to the world's water supplies, advancing a broader corporatist vision to control all life. However, since the nineteenth century a secret society of Indian mystics led by the shadowy, slightly deranged, syphilitic figure of Mangala has been quietly pursuing its own experiments in the science of immortality. Mangala and her Indian subjects operate through secrecy, rumor, and silence; denied access to official lines of communication, they continue to advance their own politically insurgent ends. Ghosh suggests that British bacteriologist Ronald Ross, whose scientific experiments in malarial research garnered the Nobel Prize in 1902, was prompted by Mangala and her followers. Ghosh further depicts Mangala and her followers using the results of scientific experiments in the West to perform their own tests, building on science and counter-science to perfect a more sophisticated technology in interpersonal transference (107). The key to the technology of transference--that is, to a scientific investigation into Hindu reincarnation--resides in the function of the host, which evolves in the novel from past carriers such as the mosquito or the pigeon to the present-day locus of the computer. As Claire Chambers explains, the host transports the soul from body to body (58). The soul has been isolated and named by scientific analogy as the Calcutta Chromosome. L. Murugan, one of Antar's former coworkers in the International Water Council, comprehends just how global Mangala and her followers have become as they look for new chosen carriers and hosts to develop ongoing experiments. Murugan disappears, yet he reappears to Antar in his New York apartment as a startling holographic projection, informing Antar that he will be called to participate in the next and perhaps final experiment. …

The Symbolic Politics of Sport Mega-Events: 2010 in Comparative Perspective

For ambitious civic and national boosts sport mega-events provide unique opportunities for the pursuit of symbolic politics—a chance to signal important changes of direction, reframe dominant narratives about the host, and/or reinforce key messages of change. These signals or narratives are critical vehicles of legitimation, with both narrowly instrumental objectives and more expansive purposes related to the mobilisation of societal support for certain dominant ‘ideas of the state’. This paper explores the realm of symbolic politics through a comparative analysis of three disparate mega-event hosts which will take the world stage in 2010: South Africa (the FIFA World Cup), Delhi/India (the Commonwealth Games), and Vancouver/Canada (the Winter Olympics). The paper argues that despite important differences in the circumstances of these hosts and the events they are to mount, there are some key commonalities in the narratives they seek to deploy and the subtexts they embody. These commonalities revolve around a paradoxical blending of inclusive, transcendent, or cosmopolitan narratives on the one hand, and competitive, differentiating narratives of ‘world class’ aspirations and achievements, on the other. Strikingly then, these widely dispersed events have become vehicles for similar messages with potentially contradictory implications.

Elephants in the Labyrinth of Empire: Modernism and the Menagerie in The Old Wives’ Tale

Research Article| June 01 2003 Elephants in the Labyrinth of Empire: Modernism and the Menagerie in The Old Wives’ Tale Kurt Koenigsberger Kurt Koenigsberger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2003) 49 (2): 131–163. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-3001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kurt Koenigsberger; Elephants in the Labyrinth of Empire: Modernism and the Menagerie in The Old Wives’ Tale. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2003; 49 (2): 131–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-3001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity

Recent years have witnessed a great deal of attention to the emergence of nationalism in late-eighteenth-century Europe, and critics such as Seamus Deane have drawn particular attention to the way in which the new nationalist narratives tended to displace the older cosmopolitan narrative of universal subjects and universal reason. As Deane points out, Enlightenment forms of narrative (like the philosophical tale) were threatened by a newly assertive nationalism, predicated on notions of national character.'1 The kind of national thinking-and narrative-that he has in mind is represented by a figure like Edmund Burke and his well-known argument anchoring national identity in attachment to one's little platoon.2 But the same milieu that produced Burke also produced Maria Edgeworth, who offered a rather different reading of national identity in the same period. Her writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish tales, offers an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) nor borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion). This effort to rethink nationness makes Edgeworth more than the colonial writer who figures in current criticism.3 Having herself been both immersed in Continental Enlightenment thought and personally affected by the nationalist upsurge of the 1798 Rebellion, she used herwriting to reconsider the meaning of the denomination AngloIrish.4 And through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute Anglo-Irish less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders. In his influential formulation of national identity in Reflections on the French Revolution, Burke attempts to increase the political distance be-