Global Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

Redefining a global Cosmopolitanism: An attempt towards openness as a central concept in postcolonial conflict resolution

AbstractThe paper deals with the question whether cosmopolitanism is still a relevant concept for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. First, three common criticisms of cosmopolitanism are addressed, namely that it is Eurocentric, elitist and hegemonic. The paper concludes that these criticisms tend to focus on a limited liberal understanding of cosmopolitanism that does not do justice to the diversity of the concept. A redefinition and renarration of cosmopolitanism from a postcolonial standpoint is therefore necessary. Such a definition can only be an open minimal definition that leaves room for appropriation and localisation. This new, global perspective on cosmopolitanism is then evaluated against the background of conflict resolution in practice. The relevance of the concept becomes apparent when looking at the presence of elitist cosmopolitanism in the field.

Viva Mexico! The Cultural Politics Behind the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Bid

Abstract This article is a case study of the vision of Mexican history, identity, and culture that won the 1968 Summer Olympic Games for Mexico City. The Mexican elites’ portrayal of Mexico as a modern, cosmopolitan nation contributing to emerging global institutions and ideals in the postcolonial era ensured the bid's success. The article's core is a close reading of the official bid and bidding process. This analysis is supplemented and sharpened by contrasting it with alternative visions of Mexican nationalism and the competing Buenos Aires bid. Guided by symbolic interactionism and theories of cultural politics, the study highlights the unique status of Mexico and Latin America in the Olympic Movement, reminds us of the role of the International Olympic Committee in constructing global order in the Cold War era, and shows the value of studying alternative and unsuccessful visions of nationalism, modernity, and global cosmopolitanism.

On Peace Activists and Skilled Survivors

Abstract This article examines multiple entanglements of Afghan exiles’ biographies in West Germany with Cold War- and contemporary history. The life stories of six men who have been residing in Germany since the 1970s but were physically and cognitively highly mobile in their engagement for change in Afghanistan highlight the role of human agency in transnational history-making. The analysis shows that during the time of intense engagement connecting West Germany and Afghanistan, their lives became truly transnational, and the vernacular cosmopolitanism they practised has shaped transnational history from below. While all six life stories mirror transgressive biographies in connection with wartime events and differ from the global cosmopolitanism of elites, these life courses are neither standardised nor linear. The findings point to three types of transgressive biographies—skilled survivors, quietists and masters of crossover—that have preserved the transnational dimension that had been so significant earlier in the exiles’ lives to varying degrees and differed regarding related perceptions of failure, loss and regret.

Cosmopolitan Repair: Reclaiming and Restoring Cultural Heritage in Postcolonial Nigeria

The retention of sacred artifacts against the will of source countries, particularly ex-colonies, represents a form of social and cultural control that facilitates and exacerbates political and economic inequities between nations. Since independence, generations of Nigerian artists have engaged in various forms of recuperation of pre-colonial aesthetics through the adoption of postcolonial modernist visual tactics to negotiate a sense of self-determination and to recover an autonomous postcolonial national identity. Contemporary artists in Nigeria, particularly in Benin and throughout the diaspora have employed a range of aesthetic political practices to disrupt the legacies of colonialism still pervasive within their industries and communities. Through the creation of subversive artwork which attempts to think beyond the framework of western benevolence embedded in the project of restitution, some have made efforts to resist hegemonic influences within the global contemporary art world. The tactics of decolonial resistance that some Nigerian and diasporic artists have employed suggest a strategic redeployment of an aesthetic tradition that simultaneously advocates for the reclaiming of a black radical indigenous history and full realization of Nigerian cultural autonomous potentialities, while also envisioning a future situated within a global cosmopolitan framework – what I refer to as cosmopolitan repair. Such forms of cultural production constitute a critical component of the recent resurgence of decolonial activism that has swept the global art world which, at its core, poses a resistance to extractive capitalism in the Global South.

Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity

Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.

Translingual identity across transnational education spaces: study on a group of Chinese students in joint education programme

ABSTRACT Informed by translingual practice [Canagarajah, S. 2013a. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge] and poststructuralist conceptualisation of identity [Norton, B. 2000. “Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change.” TESOL Quarterly 35 (3): 504–505], this qualitative case study explored the process of translingual identity construction and negotiation among a group of Chinese students in a joint education programme between China and the United States. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observations. Data analysis found that these Chinese students initially perceived themselves as deficient ESL speakers resulting from a lack of competence in English, but were able to transform this dilemma with the development of powerful national identities throughout their China-US transnational experiences. In order to claim ownership of English and membership in the host community, besides using standard norms of English to handle academic and social life communication, students developed translingual dispositions as well as translingual practices to supplement their communicative competence with expanded semiotic repertoire. The study extends previous discussions on identity by examining through an analytical lens as translingualism to explore students’ identity construction and negotiation in transnational education spaces and provides implications for translingual-oriented language policy and ideologies in intercultural contexts to enhance outcomes of teaching practices and students’ learning.

Securitization and Forced Migration in Kenya: A Policy Transition from Integration to Encampment

AbstractThis article explores forced migration and policy transition in East Africa using the case study of Kenya—a key regional destination for forced migrants. Using a descriptive and historical approach to highlight the dynamics of forced migration (1990–2021), the study emphasizes on what factors underlie the change of policy from integration to encampment. The author argues that central to this transition are discourses on national security, domestic, and regional politics. Using the theory of securitization, the study finds that assumptive blames on forced migrants expose them to greater vulnerabilities, while failure to recognize the challenges facing host states also undermines the management of forced migrants. The author concludes that the principles of global cosmopolitanism should underlie response and that when critical national interests necessitate stricter limitations on the extent to which forced migrants can enjoy certain rights and freedoms, then the international community must strive to play a greater role to minimize risks to both host nations and forced migrants.

A Global, Democratic, Institutional and Humble Cosmopolitanism? Response to Contributors in Symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan

Abstract This article engages contributions from Cricket Keating, Natasha Behl, Fred Lee and Jaby Mathew, and Brooke Ackerly’s introduction, in a symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan. It first notes insights taken for the development of a democratic cosmopolitanism oriented to political humility from the work of Indian Dalit-rights champion and constitutional architect B.R. Ambedkar, and from interviews conducted with globally oriented Dalit activists. It then considers Mathew’s concerns about accommodation of the moral importance of local democratic practices, and Keating’s about the book’s emphasis on advancing institutional over attitudinal changes. It addresses issues Behl raises around attention to alternate conceptions of citizenship, e.g., ones which would center Dalit women’s voices; and Lee’s concerns about whether the model can recognize the importance of subaltern nationalisms. Responses focus on ways in which the model seeks to enable individuals to challenge political arrogance from a position of co-equal citizenship in regional and global institutions.

Editorial

Populism, like nationalism, can be found on the right as well as on the left-wing of the political spectrum. However, current political debates demonstrate how in recent years, nationalist and populist movements have advanced the preservation of Christian “roots” against a global cosmopolitanism. Right-wing populism thus tends to present itself as a guardian of Christian culture, or Judeo-Christian culture. However, there is a struggle over the definition and the ownership of this religious heritage. Whilst it is certainly possible to identify sources within the Protestant tradition that may legitimise support for right-wing populism, the questions this struggle raises often relate to particular intersections of culture, theology, perspectives on history as well as political thought. This special issue explores and critiques these intersections, employing theological, historical, and sociological methods. While the main perspective is that of cross-disciplinary reflections on the fraught relationship between Protestantism and right-wing populism, it also examines the evolution of broader connections between Christianity and nationalism through time.

Statism and Cosmopolitanism on Global Justice and Universal Fundamental Rights

This review paper critically assesses the two main theories of global justice, statism and cosmopolitanism, according to which fundamental rights, and their corresponding duties, ought to be differently upheld, and enforced, at the global level. Its main aim is to go beyond the limitations of these theories defending the equal relevance of both fundamental civil and political rights and socio-economic rights, and their corresponding duties, at the global level and the need for the assessment of their implementation according to the level of their justification. To pursue this objective, the paper argues for the conceptualization of a fair (common) mean among these two categories of rights which can be morally and politically constructed on the very basic right to reciprocal and general justification. Accordingly, the focus is posed on the interconnection as well as conflicts between these two categories of rights, and their corresponding duties, establishing a measure according to which their justification can be assessed, and their implementation and enforcement be ensured. This paper seeks also to prove that this conceptualization of fundamental rights and duties, which takes together Aristotles conception of justice and Forsts critical theory of political and social justice, can provide a sketch on how a fair implementation and enforcement of peoples and persons rights and duties ought to be conceived at the global level.

Beyond language fluidity: the role of spatial repertoires in translingual practices and stancetaking

ABSTRACT In Research Group Meetings (RGM) and other professional activities, sometimes positions are fluid, but stances illustrate international scholars’ bilingual competence in an RGM in Microbiology. In stances, people index sociocultural values by evaluating discursive figures in talk, proffering epistemic/affective assessments, and positioning each other [Jaffe, A. 2009. “Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance.” In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by A. Jaffe, 3–28. New York, NY: Oxford University Press]. I show how international scholars troubleshoot and problem-solve with senior colleagues as they enact stances to maintain relationships. Competence entails language fluidity and diverse semiotic resources, or translingual practices [Canagarajah, S. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London, UK: Routledge], in stances. While existing stance models stress verbal resources [Du Bois, J. W. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, edited by R. Englebretson, 139–182. Amstderdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company], they overlook the role of spatial repertoires. This micro-interactional analysis of RGMs demonstrates how diverse semiotic resources inform stances, and argues for stance methodologies and analyses which include multimodal, gestural, and semiotic repertoires. Findings indicate that power relations are managed through scholars’ use of verbal and semiotic resources in interpersonal stances. I argue that bilingual competence should acknowledge the role translingual practices play in stance taking, and the management of professional relationships in such meetings.

Caveats and criteria: intercultural courtships of shengnü (‘leftover women’) and Western men in urban China

The phenomenon of shengnü (‘leftover women’) has attracted much attention in recent years. Many of these single, never-married women have adopted the alternative partner choice strategy of choosing Western men, in the belief that they would be more open-minded about their accomplishments than patriarchal Chinese men. In this study of 17 shengnü’s intercultural courtship experiences in Shanghai, it was found that they faced many caveats. In reality, it was difficult for them to find equally accomplished Western men who were looking for serious relationships. Those who were high-flying executives were often orientalist or licentious, and those who were unambitious were resented and scorned (by the women). Economic criteria aside, one key criterion that the Western men had to fulfil was to know Chinese in order to communicate with the women’s parents. The topic of intercultural courtships brings to light the haigui (overseas returnee) identity of the shengnü who straddle the world of a global cosmopolitan professional elite, and the world of a developing Chinese economy where traditional features like filial piety and guanxi (social connections) still endure.

Blushing at the Fair: Indigenous Workers, Academics, and Competing Modernities in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

Blushing at the Fair: Indigenous Workers, Academics, and Competing Modernities in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Douglas K. Miller (bio) David R. M. Beck, Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xxviii + 299 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Talking to a reporter at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, James Deans, a collector and agent for the Pacific Northwest Kwakwaka’wakw people, claimed, “A more honest people never lived, and their love of home and family would put many a civilized nation to a blush” (p. 13). As a stakeholder in Kwakwaka’wakw success at the fair, Deans might have been trying to rhetorically pit his favored “civilized” people against a “treacherous” people, as he characterized Sioux people, also in attendance. It could also be that he sought some credit for the romanticized attributes of the Indigenous people with whom he collaborated, or some sort of esteem through association. But then, twenty years after the Panic of 1873, thirty years after the Battle of Gettysburg, ninety years after the Louisiana Purchase, 110 years after the Treaty of Paris, 120 years after the Boston Tea Party, and 401 years after Columbus “sailed the ocean blue . . . ” (fair organizers missed their target date of 1892), here stood in Chicago Indigenous workers and tourists from the far side of the continent, exhibiting the virtues that perpetually eluded settler newcomers through all of those formative experiences. Maybe Deans was not boasting or bluffing. Maybe he was blushing. Harvard anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam was certainly cynical about the implications that colonization (he used the euphemism “contact”) held for Indigenous peoples. “It’s the real old Native things that I am after,” he instructed a fair exhibit collector. “That which relates to the life and customs of the Indians before their art was ruined by contact with the whites” (p. 70). On one hand, Putnam confessed the corrupting power of colonization. At the same time, he implied that Native people could only produce reputable art in a state of isolated purity, and that Native art could not withstand, let alone reflect, history and change over time. Somehow in the context of a global [End Page 283] cosmopolitan event, he failed to understand that global cosmopolitanism was relative, but not unique to Western European people. Or the irony that individuals like him who fetishized notions of purity did as much to harm the value and potential for Native American art as did its subjection to cash economies. Putnam was probably not blushing. The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition portrayed an America ascendant, but purportedly founded on traditions dating back to the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Fair organizers arranged living exhibits of supposedly dying cultures—Arabs, Africans, Aztecs—in a fashion that rendered them support acts for the more magnificent main attractions, including Juicy Fruit gum, a 264-feet Ferris Wheel, and the Canadian Mammoth—an eleven-ton block of cheese that earned a diploma at the fair. Bear with me as I ask the obligatory following question: Were these the hallmarks of civilization? From the fair’s glaring “White City” buildings coated in cheap Acme cement plaster, to Inuit actors being forced to wear sealskin clothes that they had never worn before, to Nikola Tesla’s magic dynamo in the Electricity Hall, to the Lakota actor Short Bull posing as a Potawatomi person for a Carl Rohl-Smith sculpture because he supposedly looked more “Indian,” was it all an illusion? Not entirely. The significant number of Indigenous peoples present at the fair challenged illusory celebrations of humanity, civilization, and progress. But the power was real. How and why Native peoples attempted to harness and conduct currents of power, like those exhibited in the fair’s Electricity Hall, is the central story in David Beck’s splendid and important new book Unfair Labor? In the context of the Second Industrial Revolution, with a selective and exaggerated past on display for millions of people to consider and an uncertain future on the horizon, fairgoers above all confronted modernity, or at least some version of it defined by cash, consumerism, and colonialism. This...

Introduction: Ulrich Beck: Risk as Indeterminate Modernity

This serves as an introduction to this section on Beck and as a standalone essay. In it we see that the writers in this section understand Beck's risk as modernity itself. And in this context risk's reflexive modernity is understood as ‘indeterminate modernity’. The essay thematizes a radically subjectivist reading of Beck's risk. It sees reflexivity as opposed to the objectivism and positivism of Kant's (first) critique of pure reason, and instead in terms of the subjectivity of Kant's third aesthetic critique. Thus, Beck's subjectivist risk and indeterminate modernity focuses not on Kantian and positivist first-modernity ‘cause’ but instead on second and indeterminate-modernity ‘consequence’. This entails significant levels of (Kierkegaardian) anxiety on the part of individuals as well as the possibility of enhanced happiness. The latter is understood in terms of, again, the subjectivist psychology of Daniel Kahneman's behaviouralist economics. This is a substantivist (and not formalist) economics and dovetails with Weber's Methodenstreit between the substantivism of the Historical School and the formalism of neoclassical economics. The essay closes with a look at how this radically subjectivist and substantivist reflexivity is the basis for a panoply of non-normative institutions in Beck's vision of global cosmopolitanism.

Immigrant Narratives: The Ottoman Sultans’ Portraits in Elisabeth Leitner’s Family Photo Album, circa 1862–72

Abstract This article is a study of the family photo album of Elisabeth Leitner (ca. 1842?–1908), a Hungarian immigrant in the Ottoman empire. The album contains a complete set of cartes de visite portraits of the Ottoman sultans by the Abdullah Frères. As the only surviving example of such a collection with a known provenance, it provides a rare opportunity for understanding how such images were used in the context of identity formation and social mobility undertaken by a member of the immigrant population. The album, which has never been studied before, is also a fascinating source for investigating the history of Hungarian immigrants in the Ottoman empire who were displaced after the 1848 Revolution. The article approaches the intriguingly autobiographical album by means of a close reading of Elisabeth Leitner’s diaries and unfinished autobiography. My interpretation serves to dismantle notions of a carefree global cosmopolitanism and exposes a historiographical bias that privileges men and their collections of images and ethnographic artifacts over those of women. Elisabeth Leitner’s writings and photographic collection also represent a vast and entirely untapped resource for investigating cultural contacts between Europe and the Ottoman empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

‘Life finds a way’: mapping a post-positivist marxian science

The rise of populist ethnonationalistmovements – and the breakdown of global liberal cosmopolitanism – caught most political analysts and theorists by surprise. This article takes this failure of political expertise as a challenge to reconsider radical Left approaches in making sense of political turmoil, economic crises, and class. Specifically, this article examines two key Marxian concepts, class and crisis, in relation to chaos. The authors argue that political expertise fails because the infinite velocities of chaos cannot be indefinitely contained categorically for three reasons: (1) because chaos understood as unpredictability is a property inherent to reality; (2) because there is no Archimedean point from outside of being in the world to objectively observe the world; and (3) because observing the world is always linked to intervening in it, a process through which the observer and the observed are both changed. To this end, the authors seek to augment crisis and class as concepts with a capacity to capture the nonlinear ways in which existing class struggle has developed across space and over time. To capture these complexities, the authors develop dadascience, a scientific apparatus of constant abandonment designed to account for determinations in relation to indeterminacy.

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

AbstractBranded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.

Between Afropolitans and new Sankaras

Using the notion of Afropolitanism, which refers to highly mobile and well-connected “Africans of the world,” this article examines the relative privileges of university graduates within Burkina Faso across generational divides. Comparisons emerge between cohorts graduating in the 1970s and the 2010s. While graduates of the 1970s enjoyed access to a privileged status through their local university education and a related network of global cosmopolitan qualifications and credentials, contemporary students have only limited access to this route of class mobility. The frustration engendered by this helps to explain the shape of the uprising that ousted the president of Burkina Faso in 2014, as the diminishing access to Afropolitan identities pitches the younger generation of students into different emerging constellations of political mobilization.

Marketing diversity: selling school districts in a racialized marketplace

Schools in the US and across the globe are increasingly engaged in marketing practices to attract and retain students and families. This study examines why and how administrators and school board members in two public school systems in the US seek to market their schools. Using in-depth case studies, a socio-cultural approach to policy, and critical race perspectives, I trace administrators’ and school board members’ logics about marketing, and specifically their emphasis on marketing the racial ‘diversity’ of their students. I find that despite differences in economic circumstances and community orientations to racial inclusion, leaders in these two competitive, under-resourced, and demographically changing school districts target upper- and middle-class White families, draw on discourses of global cosmopolitanism, and commodify racial diversity as a competitive advantage for upper- and middle-class White families that leaders believe do not see inherent value in students of color. This attempt to use racial diversity as a ‘selling point,’ varies in its particularities in each district–one district acknowledges and emphasizes how all students may gain from interracial and intercultural interactions and knowledge while the other district leverages abstract notions of diversity, removed from actual children of color – a consequence, in part, of district leaders’ uniquely racialized marketplaces. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings.

Adaptation of Contract Models of Oil and Gas: A Comparative Study

Differences in law systems, constitution, legislation, and regimes in oil and gas business across the world enforce to have a comparative study by extending laws in oil and gas. It is, from global perspective, implemented a constant demand to the law to take essentialization categories as its base. Nature required universalism, an analysis of valid and constant law sifted toward cosmopolitan law. Manifestation of globalization was transformed and corresponded to natural regulations in adapting a contract model. Oil and gas and its exploring development within global law systems included Civil Law, Common Law, Socialist Law, Scandinavia Law, and Islamic Law. Important discoveries in oil and gas sector, therefore, might have changes by universally global cosmopolitan law.