Cosmopolitan Turn Research Articles

A new paradigm of moral education and civic engagement? A sociological institutionalist interpretation of multiculturalism among Taiwanese youth

ABSTRACT Sociological Institutionalists of education suggest that the first quarter of the 21st century has seen a paradigm shift in moral education worldwide toward depicting global citizenship as rooted in social diversity and common humanity, going beyond the locally focused interests of nation-states. Within the context of the ongoing nation building process in the self-governing territory of Taiwan in the past two decades, this study offers a telling example of the dynamics between the cosmopolitan turn in curriculum reforms and the parallel socio-political realities. Drawing on a large group of university students (N = 1,020) from Taiwan, this paper offers an empirical perspective regarding how multiculturalism promotes civic and political participation as a process of global citizenship making. The indirect effects through the mediating variables of political self-efficacy and trust in the democratic system have also shed some light on how the process works on certain individual and social conditions.

De los debates globales a las prácticas locales: pedagogías emergentes para el fomento de la interculturalidad en el aula de español para adultos migrantes

ABSTRACT Recent theoretical debates in the field of intercultural language education reveal a “cosmopolitan turn”, which implies a glocal, critical, and transformative perspective of interculturality as praxis. This article explores the promotion and development of interculturality from a critical cosmopolitan perspective and reports on the results of an empirical study carried out in a Spanish language classroom for adult migrants in Barcelona through a didactic intervention based on emergent pedagogies. The results enrich the conception of a “cosmopolitan agenda” for language teaching and contribute to bridging the methodological gap between global theoretical debates and local practices of intercultural language education.

The Re-orientalised Cosmopolitan Turn in Yangsze Choo’s “The Ghost Bride”

"The Re-Orientalised Cosmopolitan Turn in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride. The magical realist bestseller The Ghost Bride (2013) by Yangsze Choo was adapted into a Netflix original series in 2020. The story revolves around the female protagonist, Pan Li Lan, whose hand has been requested to wed the late Lim Tian Ching, making it a “ghost marriage” or “spirit wedding,” and her, a ghost bride. With the financial woes that the Pan family is facing, Li Lan has to carefully consider this macabre proposal by the wealthy and prominent Lim family. In this article, the authors look at the novel and the Netflix series, The Ghost Bride and argue that it is a form of re-orientalised metropolitan cosmopolitanism, contrived for global consumption in the current global cultural marketplace. Set in 1893, in the colonial cosmopolitan port city of Malacca, the production employs the elite culture of the Peranakan Chinese and re-orientalises it. The critics will, therefore, examine the dynamics of re-orientalism and cosmopolitanism and eventually contend that the production of The Ghost Bride manifests a re-orientalised cosmopolitan turn in depicting a local culture for a global audience. Keywords: re-orientalism, metropolitan cosmopolitanism, magical realism, Peranakan Chinese, The Ghost Bride"

Social Philosophical Discourse of the World Risk Society in a Pandemic Situation

The author considers the situation associated with coronavirus pandemic and its possible consequences for social cultural processes. The difficulty in risk analysis is that the risk is between objective and subjective, between rational and irrational, between social and existential. The logic of uniqueness gives way to the logic of ambiguity, which finds its expression in the connection of the risk society with the cosmopolitism. Ulrich Beck's concept of the cosmopolitan turn of modern civilization is updated, which is revealed through the concepts of "danger", "social inequality" and through the existentials "fear", "uncertainty", which indicate the social vulnerability of modern society. We are talking about the need to distinguish between risk and danger, about their complex relationship in modern conditions. Global risks include the coronovirus pandemic: risk has become a global hazard from which future risks and crises originate. The reflexivity of the unknown and the methodological cosmopolitanism – point to a global change in the society in the 21st century, whose priority is security. Cosmopolitanism is expressed in social delocalization, which includes three dimensions: spatial, temporal, and social. Risks have symbolic and existential content and include life guidelines, traditions and cultural norms. The coronavirus was a challenge to the intellectual sphere of society. The author focuses on the transformation of risks in the field of science and education. Self-isolation and social distance initiate the active introduction of distance education and media education. Attempts are being made to identify possible risks resulting from the introduction of media technologies in the educational system. The concept of the multiplicity of interpretations of riskogenics allows us to understand the prospects for the transformation of the global risk society in a pandemic situation.

The cosmopolitan turn in Literature education and its resulting tensions in Singapore schools

ABSTRACT In this article, I highlight the emergence of a cosmopolitan turn in Literature education as observed in teachers’ beliefs and practices in Singapore schools. Central to the cosmopolitan turn is the view that Literature education should not be disengaged from real-world connections to others particularly those who are marginalized and oppressed in the world. In the first part of this article, I describe core principles informing a cosmopolitan approach to teaching Literature that is distinct from previous movements. In the second part, I utilize case studies of Literature teachers from four secondary schools in Singapore to discuss key tensions resulting from teachers’ attempts to foster cosmopolitan sensitivities. These tensions point to the propensity for Literature education to prioritize a form of universalism that neglects the dynamic interconnections between national and global identity; to encourage a human capital approach to education where cosmopolitanism is co-opted to strategically benefit elites and to perpetuate passive rather than active cosmopolitan engagement with justice. I suggest that awareness of these tensions can enable educators to develop more holistic and ethically grounded cosmopolitan Literature education where all students can be equipped with critical and empathetic capacities to navigate diverse and conflicting values in our global age.

Unintended consequences of cosmopolitanism: Malcolm X, Africa, and revolutionary theorizing in the black power movement in the US

During the black power movement (BPM) in the US and the contemporaneous anti-colonial movement in Africa, African-Americans sought to emulate the liberation struggles in Africa. BPM revolutionists, epitomized by Malcolm X, attempted to adopt the practices of the African liberation struggle to overthrow white supremacism in the US. Pursuant to that, Malcolm developed his thesis on black revolution in the US from a static, unidimensional, religious-based conception into a dynamic, multidimensional, secular framework; however, the cosmopolitan turn in Malcolm’s influential thesis inadvertently limited its applicability to the US. Specifically, it contributed to (1) Malcolm’s reverse civilizationism, which privileged developments in Africa over those in the US; (2) his conflation of the conditions facing Africans with those faced by African-Americans, suggesting the salience of a colonial framework in understanding both; (3) his adoption of a UN petition strategy to address the human rights issues of black America, following a failed strategy of previous activists. Each of these unintended consequences of Malcolm’s cosmopolitan turn contributed to the theoretical enervation of the BPM.

Memorializing Akhundzadeh: Contradictory Cosmopolitanism and Post-Soviet Narcissism in Old Tbilisi

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer and critic Mirza Fath ʿAli Akhundzadeh (1812–1878). My discussion focuses on Akhundzadeh’s house museum in contemporary Tbilisi and the uses to which it has been put over the course of the past decade. I consider how bringing together the divergent Soviet, Azeri, and Iranian literary and intellectual trajectories of Akhundzadeh’s legacy can foster a robust cosmopolitanism that moves beyond the normativity of the nation as the basic unit for writing literary history. Akhundzadeh's legacy shows that when the literary history of the Caucasus is viewed from outside nationalist paradigms, its geography appears less marginal, and its margins more central, to world literature than our current literary geographies envision.

Varieties of Second Modernity and the Cosmopolitan Vision

This text was prepared for presentation in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010. Its aim was to explore a dialogue with Asians toward a cosmopolitan sociology. Beginning from the idea of entangled modernities which threaten their own foundations, Ulrich Beck advocated a complete conceptual innovation of sociology in order to better comprehend the fundamental fragility and mutability of societal dynamics shaped by the globalization of capital and risks today. More specifically, he proposed a cosmopolitan turn of sociology: first, by criticizing methodological nationalism; second, by introducing the concept of cosmopolitization; third, by re-mapping social inequalities; fourth, by discussing risk society in the context of East Asian development; and fifth and finally, by proposing a cosmopolitan vision. Along this line, Beck attempted an overview of the researches done on second modern transformation in East Asia and suggested that an active dialogue may be possible when Asians begin to see the West from their perspectives rather than being caught in the Euro-centric and West-hegemonic presuppositions.

Unpacking the Ideology of Cosmopolitanism in Language Education: Insights from Bakhtin and Systemic Functional Linguistics

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the constructs of heteroglossia and dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981; Blackledge & Creese, 2013) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Using the SFL Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005) to analyze how cosmopolitanism is constructed in political speeches, official educational documents, and classroom interactions in Singapore, we also examine the ways in which cosmopolitanism is mediated in these discourses and how it impacts the varieties of English that are valued in society and school. Following the analyses of our data, we call for a development of dialogical cosmopolitanism (Canagarajah, 2013), which conceives of cosmopolitanism as a negotiated process and values linguistic hybridity. The article closes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of the study and highlights that in order to nurture cosmopolitan dispositions among students in language classrooms, some degree of curricular flexibility, tolerance for uncertainty, and deregulation needs to be undertaken.

Cosmopolitanism and the Modern Revolutionary Tradition: Reflections on Arendt's Politics

This paper reviews the contribution of Hannah Arendt's 1963 monograph, On Revolution, to the theme of this collection: “contestatory cosmopolitanism.” I am critical of normative interpretations of the text that treat it as a wholesale rejection of the French revolutionary tradition and as a tribute either to American constitutionalism, in more liberal readings, or to the council system of direct democracy, in more radical readings. I read it against this doctrinal grain as a dialectical analysis of the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole. I argue that it is more productive for our own purposes and more faithful to Arendt's own approach to read the book as an exploration of the developmental forms of the modern revolutionary tradition, beginning with the “perplexities” present in the modern concept of revolution and then moving on to the more applied and practical “perplexities” involved in the realization of the concept: first in the French Revolution, then in the American Revolution and finally in the forms of council communism Arendt termed the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition. Clearly, the order of presentation which Arendt employs cannot be historical, because historically the American Revolution preceded the French and the “lost treasure” has existed coevally with every modern revolution. I propose that the order of presentation is better understood dialectically, in the sense that each stage of development constitutes an attempt to resolve the contradictions of the previous stage but ends up recreating its contradictions in new forms. And I suggest that, in this logic of development, there is no telos, no final synthesis and no moment of reconciliation. Thus, the last chapter of the book on the “lost treasure” should not be read as a statement of Arendt's own political position or philosophy. Rather, it should be read as a critical analysis of revolutionary endeavours to resolve the contradictions of the French “general will” and American constitutionalism in ways that can only create new perplexities and problems in relation to key democratic, national and social questions. Finally, I suggest that, if we take forward Arendt's dialectical form of argument beyond the covers of her book, we would have to address the cosmopolitan turn in revolutionary thought. This would enable, I believe, bold resistance to the isolation of the cosmopolitan and revolutionary traditions from each other, re-integration of these traditions with reference back to their original unity and a turn to the paradoxical conceptions of “revolutionary moderation” which we find pronounced but not yet articulated on the existential margins of the revolutionary tradition.

Postcolonialism 2010–2014

The idea of postcolonialism as signifying a break from the past, as the sign of the new, as a critical reappraisal in the context of imperialism and the rise of capital, and as a register of social and political assertiveness took shape as major geo-political changes were underway (the Iranian Revolution, the gradual decline of the Soviet Union, and so on). However, by 2006 when the word finally entered the OED, the citation and the definition embedded in it captured an important shift: “postcolonialism” as a proactive cultural logic aimed at the creation of an intentional object. The critical survey undertaken here suggests that the discourse of postcolonialism is now an intentional discourse with specific affects. These affects, as seen in the Anglophone bibliography on the subject of these past five years, may now be examined with reference to subjects and themes as varied as melancholia, shame, the horrors of poststructuralism, creolization, the vernacular, the cosmopolitan turn, the postcolonial “jew”, the subaltern challenge, global warming, world-literary systems, traumatized bodies, among others.

Cosmopolitanism, sociology and the otherness of the other

This article is concerned with the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in sociology and examines the ways in which the discipline attempts to come to terms with the otherness of the other as a corrective to its own Eurocentrism. It examines in particular the pluralisation of the notion of modernity and argues that although this strategy allows sociology to maintain its disciplinary identity, it falls short of the aim of transforming the discipline into a cosmopolitan discourse. More broadly, the article argues that cosmopolitanism is not a possible object of experience. Like other idealisations, it is plagued by what Derrida calls ‘autoimmunity’ – the tendency to self-destruct.

Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds and Screens

Over half a century has passed since the first wave of labour migration from Turkey to West Germany, yet only after the reunification in 1989 did German cinema screens see a real proliferation of films dealing with the phenomenon, being made by second- and third-generation migrant filmmakers. The first examples of what came to be known as Turkish German cinema go back to the 1970s, but it became prominent as an object of inquiry within Anglo-American film studies two decades later, coinciding with a necessary redefinition of the concept of national cinema under globalization. Although several journal issues have been entirely or partly devoted to Turkish German cinema,1 Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel's edited collection is the first book to focus exclusively on this expanding category of migrant filmmaking after 2000 – the year which, as Lutz Koepnick and Stephan K. Schindler argue, saw the emergence of a cosmopolitan turn in German cinema, urging film scholars to ‘realign their compass of historical and theoretical analysis’.2

Writing, Religious Faith, and Rooted Cosmopolitan Dialogue

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

The Cosmopolitan Turn and the Primacy of Difference

Cosmopolitanism is commonly understood as a universal norm—moral and political—in the light of enduring differences, and for that reason it has historically embodied a seemingly inevitable dilemma of universality/particularity. Since its inception, cosmopolitan thinkers have struggled with the dilemma and have attempted ways to address the question of difference so that the universal norm and obligation can be justified and defended. One of the most common strategies is to give primacy to universal humanity and override difference; another recent strategy is to give up universalism to take difference seriously and frame difference in agonistic terms. I argue in this article that both strategies are inadequate and unsatisfactory in conceptualising and dealing with difference. Briefly tracing some of the major cosmopolitan approaches, I argue that the conceptualisation of difference and human subjectivity is at the core of the problem as well as the solution. Drawing on Lévinas and his emphasis on the primacy of difference in the constitution of human subjectivity and community, I propose a new understanding of the self and the Other for the success of the cosmopolitan project.

Is Modernism Really Transnational? <em>Ulysses</em>, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger

��� W riting in 2007, Richard Begam concluded that “in imagining a Hellas of the north, Joyce might well have envisioned a country not unlike the Irish Republic of today: liberal, prosperous, cosmopolitan, modern—a country that has achieved a distinct cultural identity, while assuming its rightful place within the community of nations” (203). By locating in Joyce’s vision the reconciliation of local particularity and global integration, Begam challenges a dominant tendency in Joyce scholarship and modernist studies that stretches from Ezra Pound to Hugh Kenner to Emer Nolan. Whether Wgured as parochialism versus modernism, nationalism versus internationalism, or nationalism versus metropolitanism, Joycean and modernist critics have traditionally held the local and the global in opposition. Begam’s challenge to this opposition illustrates a fundamental similarity between the recent cosmopolitan turn in Joyce studies and the transnational turn in modernist studies: rather than rely on mutually exclusive conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, both approach their subject matter through a conception of cosmopolitanism that is consistent with and even constitutive of nationalism. Such arguments represent the inXuence of new cosmopolitan theory on literary studies, particularly James Clifford’s theory of “discrepant cosmopolitanism.” In his seminal essay “Traveling Cultures,” Clifford argues that the tendency to view the local and the global as mutually exclusive stems from an understanding of culture as rooted and static. In its place, Clifford offers “discrepant cosmopolitanism”—an alternative conception of culture as dynamic and mobile and of cultural identity as rooted in “speciWc, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” as well as “routed” in the displacement and transplantation that bring cultures into contact (1997a, 36). Like

How Climate Change Might Save the World

We are faced with questions too big to fail and too big to answer. Most discussions on climate change are blocked; they are caught by catastrophism circulating in the horizon of the problem: what is climate change bad for? From a sociological point of view, because climate change is a threat to humanity, we can and should turn the question upside down and ask: what is climate change good for? The amazing thing is that if you firmly believe climate change is a fundamental threat to all of humanity, then that belief might bring a transformative, cosmopolitan turn in our contemporary life and the world might be changed for the better. This is what I call emancipatory catastrophism'. The question then is: how might climate change save the world?First thesis: Climate change is the embodiment of the mistakes of a whole epoch of industrial capitalism, and climate risks pursue their acknowledgement and correction with all the violence of the possibility of annihilation.Global risks are a kind of collective return of the repressed, wherein the self-assurance of the industrial capitalism, organized in form of nation-state politics, is confronted with the source of its own errors as an objectified threat to its own existence. Thus the global risk of climate change is a kind of compulsive, collective memory of the fact that past decisions and mistakes are contained in what we find ourselves exposed to; and that even the highest degree of institutional reification is nothing but a reification that can be revoked - a borrowed mode of action which can, and must, be changed if it leads to self-jeopardization.Put differently, the sociological significance of climate change lies in the momentum it generates in the re-emergence of the historicity of society and politics on a global scale, thereby allowing us to imagine new beginnings. Therefore, climate change risk can, as we shall see, be made into cosmopolitan communities of shared risks or even into an antidote to war; it induces the necessity to overcome neo-liberalism and to perceive and to practice new forms of transnational responsibility. It empowers the poor countries of the world and gives them a public voice; it puts the problem of cosmopolitan justice on the agenda of international politics; it creates informal and formal cooperation patterns between countries and governments who otherwise ignore each other or even see themselves as enemies. It makes economic and public actors accountable and makes responsible those who do not want to be accountable and responsible, and this happens even when they have the law on their side. It opens up new world markets, new innovation patterns; it changes lifestyles and consumption patterns. Last but not least, it induces new understandings of and caring for nature. All of this happens under the surface of the mantra of disappointments and disillusionments at the Wanderzirkus (traveling circus) of one climate conference after the other. From this perspective, climate change means first of all the end of the end of politics with highly ambivalent implications: global risk imposes a historical necessity for a cosmopolitan turn in politics but at the same time - and exactly because of this - it empowers anti-cosmopolitan movements.In the present moment, however, this re-emergence of politics remains clouded by the dominance of apocalyptic imaginaries in public discourse. It is limited by the inability of sociological thinking to analyse the transformation of the political and imagine new openings. To combat the sources of climate pessimism, we need a new cosmopolitan outlook, in research and politics, capable of grasping the epochal transformations of economy, culture, society and politics set in motion by the global risk of climate change.Second thesis: Sociologically and politically, the key is to distinguish risk from catastrophe. Risk is not catastrophe, but rather, the anticipation of future catastrophe in the present, as a horizon of the present future. …

Global Ethics in Theory and in Practice: The Case of The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

The UN endorsed the principle of the Responsibility to Protect in 2005. This has proved controversial partly because it includes, where all else fails, military intervention to try to stop certain classes of human rights violation. I welcome the move to R2P as representing a ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in understanding the UN, but doubt whether military intervention is the right way to discharge our cosmopolitan responsibilities to protect. My three reasons – that it is counterproductive, that it unjustifiably privileges the preventing of the deliberate violation of human rights by other agents over the promotion of human rights and protecting human rights in the face of suffering caused by natural causes or the impacts of human institutions, and that it goes against the principle ‘the means are ends in the making’ – all reflect particular a ways in which ethics, particularly in its global dimension, should be understood. This paper explores via the example of R2P some of these ‘higher order’ or ‘meta’ issues in ethics about the nature of consequences, the implications of rights and the relationship between means and ends.

Linguistic cosmopolitans: Arendt, Čapek, Orwell

Political resistance to Fascism in 1930s Europe was often animated by a particular cosmopolitan imaginary. In this article we explore a number of questions concealed within this dynamic. What is the status of language in a space that expands beyond the constraints of the territorial to encompass more mobile allegiances and differently scaled solidarities? Conversely, how does an impulse towards the cosmopolitan turn back to the nation and reframe internal dialogues surrounding the nature of its linguistic constitution? Hannah Arendt’s monograph on the nineteenth-century German-Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, the Czech novelist Karel Čapek’s sat^ire on twentieth-century totalitarianism, War with the Newts, and George Orwell’s accounts of both the Spanish Civil War and the culture of the English working class, all three written in the mid 1930s, engage with language as it detaches itself from the narrow optics of nationalism and reattaches itself to both a politics of the public and an ethics of friendship beyond the nation-state. That 1936 is the date around which these ideas of language and communication cohere gives them a singular resonance. For these three very different writers, ideas of the cosmopolitan provide not only a potential future for human solidarity, but a means of revisiting the nation itself, at once engaging with its history of linguistic repression and with the danger posed by the sovereign monolingualism of Fascism.

The Cosmopolitan Turn in Constitutionalism: An Integrated Conception of Public Law

If the point of constitutionalism is to define the legal framework within which collective self-government can legitimately take place, constitutionalism has to take a cosmopolitan turn: it has to occupy itself with the global legitimacy conditions for the exercise of state sovereignty. Contrary to widely made implicit assumptions in constitutional theory and practice, constitutional legitimacy is not self-standing. Whether a national constitution and the political practices authorized by it are legitimate does not depend only on the appropriate democratic quality and rights-respecting nature of domestic legal practices. Instead, national constitutional legitimacy depends, in part, on how the national constitution is integrated into and relates to the wider legal and political world. The drawing of state boundaries and the pursuit of national policies generates justice-sensitive externalities that national law, no matter how democratic, can not claim legitimate authority over. It is the point and purpose of international law to authoritatively address problems of justive-sensitive externalities of state policies. In this way, international law helps create the conditions and defines the domain over which states can legitimately claim sovereignty. States have a standing duty to help create and sustain an international legal system that is equipped to fulfill that function. Only a cosmopolitan state—a state that incorporates and reflects the global legitimacy conditions for claims to sovereignty in its constitutional structure and foreign policy—is a legitimate state.