Cosmopolitan Subject Research Articles

‘Out in the blue of Europe’: modernist cosmopolitan identity and the deterritorialization of belonging

ABSTRACT Vieten attempts to intervene in the ongoing ideological attempt to present a particular (modernist) European culture as a founding myth for a European Union identity. Taking the recent debate on transnationalism as a point of departure, she uses some aspects of the life story of the Austrian British writer Hilde Spiel as a case study to discuss deterritorialized belonging, the impact of insecure citizenship and the meaning of a particular cosmopolitan subjectivity. The first part of the article will clarify the terms ‘citizenship’, ‘exile’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘belonging’, and how deterritorialization frames the reading of an individual cosmopolitan subjectivity. In the second part Spiel's understanding of her cosmopolitan identity will be related to contemporary modernist European agendas. In the final part, while discussing some material taken from Spiel's newspaper articles and autobiographical writings, her strategies for coping with shifting attachments to national cultures and the contradictions of diverse and confused national belonging will be illustrated.

At Home in Tuscany: Slow Living and the Cosmopolitan Subject

This article will examine how the recent proliferation of “at home in Tuscany” literature represents a desire to live differently through both a change of location and a change in temporality. Slow living is offered as the key to an enriched life and is closely linked to notions of authenticity bound up with everyday practices of domesticity, especially those connected with food. In looking closely at some examples of this Tuscan farmhouse literature and considering what constitutes la vita lenta, I will analyze two broad areas of concern: first, how the values and practices of slow living constitute a particular kind of “slow” subject, characterized by cosmopolitanism but located in domesticity; secondly, whether the celebration of slow living is a nostalgic and reactionary evasion of the “real world,” or whether it represents an opportunity to think ethically and creatively about how we live.