Cosmopolitan Discourse Research Articles

Unity and/or Disunity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poetry: Proto-Aestheticism, Cultural Politics, and Italian Nationalism at the Victorian Mid-Century

Revisiting the issue of Rossetti's response to politics, I argue that Rossetti's early work on Italian topics should be placed within the Risorgimento tradition of cultural nationalism that preceded and then ran alongside the political movement for Italian unification. Recent work by scholars such as Christopher Kierstead, Stefano Evangelisto, and Matthew Potolsky on cosmopolitan political discourse within Aestheticism and Decadence has shown that the age of ‘Art for Art's Sake’ does not turn away from politics, but rather re-defines its parameters. By re-situating Rossetti's writing on Italy in relation to issues of cultural nationalism I argue that his work can be regarded as a formative precursor to the development of this cosmopolitan aesthetic. I show how Rossetti's poetics on the topic of Italian unity returns a repeated experience of separateness – a failure of resolution defined politically, epistemologically, and aesthetically. Through exploring and analysing this episteme of separateness in his Italianate works and as an aesthetic principle that recurs throughout Poems (1870), I argue that Rossetti creates an alternate aesthetic of disunity which engages creatively with the modernity of the mid-century and creates the necessary preconditions for the subsequent phenomenon of Decadent cosmopolitanism to emerge. Rossetti's writing on Italy refutes most of the conventions of the tradition of cultural-nationalist writing but it is nevertheless embedded within it: I argue that an embedded reading of this Italian theme in his works is necessary to an understanding of the extent and character of Rossetti's poetic innovations of the mid-century.

Muslim cosmopolitanisms in a transnational world: implications for the education of Muslims

ABSTRACT In a transnational world, Muslim cosmopolitanisms are both numerous and diverse. These cosmopolitanisms constitute a broad spectrum of views and practices, representing a range of interpretations and expressions of Islam, some of which are polarized and polarizing. In this reflective, theoretical paper, I discuss the potential implications of Muslim cosmopolitanisms for the education of Muslims in a transnational world and argue that the teachings of Islam are sufficiently open to interpretation to support various Muslim cosmopolitanisms. While resistance to change has typified the education of Muslims historically in many parts of the world, this resistance is being challenged in new ways, characteristic of the Information Age, wherein near-instantaneous, transnational exchanges of information and ideas are democratizing and adding complexity to Islamic hermeneutics and praxis. In this context, I contend that Muslim cosmopolitan discourses have become necessary, and the outcomes of these discourses will be crucial in shaping the future education of Muslims. Given historical precedents, however, I posit that the triumph of Muslim educational orthodoxy is expected if these discourses lead to or reinforce polarization.

Memory, Migration, and Modern Fiction: An Introduction

This introduction situates refugee and migrant fiction within discourses of memory studies, transnational migration, and cosmopolitanism. It describes a reorientation to place and time in refugee and migrant fiction that is defined by the ambient rather than hard boundaries of time and space. Memory and migration are bound together in such a way that the new place may offer the migrant a less intransigent dislocation, a reduced sense of alienation. A cosmopolitan approach to the transmission of refugee memory is one way to remember the past: by putting it in the service of a better future.

Language investment in the trajectories of mobile, multilingual humanitarian workers

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the discursive construction of mobile, multilingual humanitarian workers at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. In the light of fluctuating linguistic requirements and needs, I focus on the trajectories of ICRC delegates as a window onto the different values attributed to language resources and investments before and during humanitarian work. The data analysed include interviews with three (former) delegates complemented by institutional documents. The ICRC requirement for major languages including English and French goes hand in hand with recent personality profiling in relation to ‘international experience’ (understood as geographical mobility), which is closely connected to cosmopolitan discourses of openness to other cultures and languages. The three delegates mobilised the trope of ‘interest’ in other cultures and languages in connection to their transnational families. Simultaneously, they expanded their linguistic repertoires during their missions, often ‘bits and pieces’ of local languages, to respond to unplanned linguistic needs in the field and to manage interpreters in ways that reinforce power relationships. I argue that linguistic investment in non-strategic languages like Kurdish during humanitarian missions seldom translates into economic capital, but it is converted into symbolic capital indexing their professional mobility and flexible, entrepreneurial speakerhood.

From Global City to ‘City of Villages’: Tracing the State Discourse of Cosmopolitanism in Modern Singaporean History

ABSTRACTSince the 2011 general election, Singaporean state discourse (here political speeches, policy papers, and opinions in the state-regulated newspaper The Straits Times) has retreated from explicit discussion of cosmopolitanism and its social categories. This development does not necessarily signal the end of the state’s efforts to ‘cosmopolise’ Singapore’s people and places. Yet official disengagement with the language of cosmopolitanism does suggest an intriguing shift in the global city-state's rhetorical strategy. By historicising the state’s enthusiastic discussion of cosmopolitanism fifty years ago, alongside its later reconfigurations of cosmopolitanism and more recent silences on the topic, this essay attempts to shed light on when and how the discourse of global connectivity has served the state’s nation-building goals. Given the powerful influence of state discourse on Singapore’s political culture, this omission is likely to impact citizens’ expectations of their nation’s future. It further offers a useful case study in the response of states to anti-globalisation sentiment.

Gender, sexuality and lifestyle migration: Exploring the impact of cosmopolitan place-marketing discourses on the post-migratory experiences of British women in Spain

This article responds to a recent call to problematise the theoretical underpinnings of lifestyle migration and in particular, to critically examine the construction of lifestyle migrants as an ideal-type of individualised subject, freed from the constraints of normative social structures. Recent research has begun to do so, by demonstrating how class, race and gender can intersect to delimit the post-migratory experiences of lifestyle migrants, as they negotiate multiple social hierarchies. This article adds a new dimension to these studies by showing how class, gender and sexuality interconnect through the prism of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to structure the lives of British women in the affluent Catalan town of Sitges. Although British lesbians have more social autonomy than other British female lifestyle migrants in the town, they are simultaneously rendered subordinate in relation to Sitges’ cosmopolitan discourse, which privileges a stereotypical male homosexuality instead.

Austen’s Cosmopolitanism: Women and the World in Austen’s Fiction

ABSTRACTDespite the fact that Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park (1814) is over twenty years old, his claim that Jane Austen’s novel provides implicit support for slavery in the Caribbean continues to be a divisive topic among scholars. In this essay I will consider some of the most important postcolonial readings of Austen’s work before proposing a new way of understanding her fiction in its global nexus. As I will argue, Mansfield Park represents the ways in which women can gain independence through the inculcation of global knowledge, while Sanditon (1817) and its portrayal of a wealthy, “half-mulatto”, West-Indian heiress, creates an elision between exploitative economics in the Caribbean and gender relations at home. In her consideration of the conjuncture between deficiencies in both domestic and colonial governance Austen, as I will demonstrate, initiates a fledgling cosmopolitan discourse in which female liberty, slavery and colonial conduct converge to form a sophisticated debate. James M. Morris graduated with a PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2016 with a thesis entitled, “Beyond Orientalism: ‘The Stranger’ and ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’ in the Romantic-Period Novel.” He is currently teaching in the English Literature departments at the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee.

Islamic transformations in the periphery of Maluku, Indonesia

ABSTRACTThe article explores Islam as an element of the social and symbolic formations created in the context of long-distance trade relations in the Aru and the Kei islands of southeast Maluku. The Muslim migrants and traders who settled in the area in the early colonial period created places that served as entry points to the local, autochthonous society. Even as these sites allowed Muslims to control access to local cultural domains, they allured local people with possible access to trade wealth and mobility. By creating conceptual and tangible boundaries around the indigenous domain, early Islam anticipated the contrast between universally valid religious convictions and materially embedded cultural forms. This contrast became significant after the large-scale conversions to Christianity and Islam in the late colonial period. Islam was also transformed by its interaction with various cosmopolitan discourses, but it has remained more accommodating than Christianity towards socially embedded ritual practices and material symbols. This raises the question whether ‘cultural Islam’ should be defined by its neutral, apolitical attitude towards the secular state which is complicated by the fact that the culturally embedded Islam in Maluku took form in the absence of centralised state power.

Beyond Kant’s Political Cosmopolitanism

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging.

‘Equality on the sea’

In this paper, I examine LGBTQ tourism discourse about Cape Town, South Africa, which is often declared the 'gay capital of Africa'. The paper considers the implications of such claims and how, in the specific case of Cape Town, apparently playful rhetorics obscure deep-seated inequalities under the guise of visibility, equality and globality. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis informed by queer theory, my paper examines the recurrent linguistic and visual production of these rhetorics in a range of LGBTQ tourism marketing materials, before focusing on the website of one key agent: Out2Africa. Ultimately, I demonstrate how, contrary to the superficially progressive and cosmopolitan discourses of LGBTQ tourism, equality is increasingly represented in consumer media as an individual attainment typified by privileged mobility rather than any true social condition. Under the sway of neoliberal capitalism, mobility is a commodity, identity, and metonym for pride, and equality becomes a slogan.

The Alien as a Vehicle for Cosmopolitan Discourses: The Case of The Day the Earth Stood Still

This article looks at the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Derrickson 2008) as a representative example of a group of early twenty-first century science fiction films that have shown remarkable interest in transnational and global phenomena. Given the recent emphasis of the genre on these issues, this article proposes cosmopolitanism as a particularly useful theoretical framework for analyzing contemporary science fiction. The article focuses on the remake’s reliance on the figure of the alien and its destructive potential as a means of drawing attention to the global threat of climate change. The Day the Earth Stood Still presents cosmopolitanism as a perspective and way of acting that develops as a response to specific transnational challenges. Keywords: The Day the Earth Stood Still; science fiction; film; cosmopolitanism; alien; climate change

Christian Short-Term Missions: Creating Global Citizens?

ABSTRACT Thousands of affluent, white, young Americans travel overseas each year on mission trips organised by Christian churches and organisations. Like secular study-abroad and gap-year programmes, contemporary short-term missions (STMs) are informed by liberal cosmopolitan discourses that elevate affinities to ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’ above attachments to nation and locality. Also like secular overseas programmes, STMs aspire to transform young people by immersing them in ‘foreign’ places. STMs, at the same time, are motivated by a distinctively Christian ethos of ‘witness’ and self-sacrifice. Drawing on interviews with youth pastors, mission leaders and young missionaries, this article explores the ways that mission leaders encourage young Christians to engage with and to imagine their place in the world. In addition, it considers the particular contradictions presented by Christian variants of cosmopolitan discourse and practice. Missions are intended to be spiritual experiences in which young people recognise the image of God in every person, no matter how abject. Yet young missionaries learn little about the causes of the poverty they observe. By casting the missionised in the role of authentic foreigners and instruments of spiritual awakening, youth missions reproduce the exploitation that have long characterised American evangelicalism’s global engagements.

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.

Theorizing cultural diplomacy all the way down: a cosmopolitan constructivist discourse from an Ibero-American perspective

ABSTRACT This article reviews selected contemporary theoretical approaches to cultural diplomacy and suggests that there is still room for further theorizing in the field. Cultural diplomacy has drawn its justification and objectives from a rationalist view of politics, particularly the various realisms and liberalisms, and substantiating it with theories of social constructivism and cosmopolitanism is pertinent. Cultural diplomacy all the way down implies making common understanding of Other-societies the prime objective of the field, deploying cooperation and exchanges as a core strategy. An Ibero-American perspective implies a specific cultural-regional discourse, where mestizaje, cooperation, and understanding in the area of cultural diplomacy require a cosmopolitan constructivist approach to make sense. The result is a radical view of the Other-in-relation-to-us, both of whom are part of the family of mankind.

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACTAfter having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.

Are hafus ‘dirty’ or ‘special’? Negotiating mixed-race identities among Japanese-Indonesian youths in Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis is one of the first papers to examine the experiences of mixed-race individuals who have one Japanese parent, commonly referred to as ‘hafu’, living outside of Japan. Specifically, it analyzes the experiences of Japanese-Indonesians living in Indonesia who have attended an overseas Japanese school and an Indonesian or international school in Indonesia or elsewhere. Japan’s dual positioning – as inferior to the West and superior to the Rest – impacts upon the experiences of mixed-race individuals in varying ways depending on the predominant discourse operating at the school. At the Japanese school, the discourse of Japanese superiority, which draws on both the cultural legacy of Japanese imperialism and contemporary regional socio-economic hierarchy, deemed the hafus as inferior in relation to their Japanese peers for not being ‘pure’ Japanese. At the Indonesian school, the regional hierarchy deemed the hafus as superior in relation to their Indonesian peers. In these cases, mixed-race individuals find themselves on opposite ends of Japan’s dual positioning. Finally, at the English-medium international school, the cosmopolitan discourse that privileges mixedness (and western cultural capital) at times inverted the positionality of those who were of mixed descent in relation to their Japanese peers. The paper discusses the way hafus submit to, negotiate or challenge the prevailing discourses through the use of varying strategies (sometimes depending on gender) such as performing Japaneseness or bicultural competence, constructing social distance, or physically fighting. Furthermore, the paper extends the application of methodological transnationalism to analyze the way multiple regional and global discourses intersect to simultaneously and situationally affect hafu experiences.

Conjunctures of the “New” World Literature and Migration Studies

Abstract The essay explores the overlapping discourses in the fields of the “new” world literature and the “new” migration studies, with a focus on their related discourses of circulation and cosmopolitanism. It examines the transnational circulation of writers in addition to texts in twenty-first century world literature with specific discussions of the cosmopolitan treatment of religion in the work of selected diasporic Muslim women writers, featuring Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul and Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazad and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. The essay considers the importance for diasporic Muslim women writers of Scheherazade as a learned woman and clever storyteller who saves the realm through words, not violence. Confronting Islamophobia and Orientalist fantasies of Muslim women, these authors locate traditions of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance within their own heritage, not as an exclusive property of the West.

Cosmopolitan Education in Local Settings: Toward a New Civics Education for the 21st Century

This article reviews the rival trends and competing discourses within the cosmopolitan tradition to formulate a comprehensive educational approach, called ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, that is timely, conceptually operational, culturally sensitive, and applicable in local educational settings. After reviewing the existing conceptions of cosmopolitanism, I define cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education. Then I present various critiques of the cosmopolitan discourse, focusing on the need for rootedness. To bridge the tension between lofty cosmopolitan values and the concrete demands and aims of local educational systems, I conclude by claiming that cosmopolitan education can be sustained through a prism of local culture, religion, heritage and language.

English in the key of Babel: Feeling, affecting, and performing language

ABSTRACTWhat is at stake for multilingual subjects when English becomes a site of conflicting emotions about being in/with the world? What does it mean to understand, negotiate with, and perform the meaning of English as a global curriculum, a lingua franca, a “thing” of the senses, and a desire awakened by narratives feeding into and being fed by discourses of power, appropriateness, globalization, and cosmopolitanism? In this performative auto/ethnography, I enact twenty years of data collected and organized in the feeling, teaching, studying, and experiencing of English through transnational encounters in classrooms, workplaces, immigration centers, and on the streets of the so-called “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations.

Film festivals as cosmopolitan assemblages

In this article, I seek to explore the use and development of the notion of cosmopolitanism within the context of film festivals. I will examine the specific case study of the Leicester Asian Film Festival from the perspective of an insider—as a Film Programmer and Associate Director of the event. The questions that I intend to answer are: what happens to our understanding of film festivals when we frame it through discourses of cosmopolitanism and borders and, conversely, what happens to our understanding of cosmopolitanism when we frame it through film festival studies? Accordingly, I will place cosmopolitanism in conversation with the developing literature on film festival studies. The aim is to offer an idea of film festivals as “cosmopolitan assemblage”, within a frame of fluidity, exchangeability and multiple functionalities (Deleuze and Guattari). In developing this concept, I will draw on Ulf Hannerz’s use of the term cosmopolitanism that includes being open to and involved with otherness. The aim is to theorise the idea of festivals as borders, and inspire new forms of consciousness and cultural competency applied to film festival programming.