Subaltern Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

Cosmopolitan Subaltern: Transnational Spatial Agency on the Fringe of the Worlding Cities of the Global South

Kampung is a historical form of vernacular urbanism in Indonesia with similar typologies occurring across Southeast Asia. As an urban form, it plays a crucial role in absorbing rural–urban migration symptomatic of not only postcolonial urbanisation in the Global South, but also precolonial and colonial trade networks. Kampung’s adaptability in accommodating diverse aspirations and cultural influences makes it no less cosmopolitan than the formally planned cities it was situated in. This paper examines kampung’s urbanism in contemporary Indonesia and theorises it as a form of subaltern cosmopolitanism. It reveals the interlaces of a localised regional practice of bottom-up urbanism with subnational and transnational professional design networks on the fringe of Indonesia’s most rapidly “worlding” urban centre outside Java: Makassar. It reveals how urbanity is produced through a coalescence of sub-national diversity, mobile intellectual actors, and transnational network of design activism that spans the developing urban region of the Global South.

The Conviviality of the Fandango: Living with Difference in the Music and Dance of Southern Veracruz, Mexico

This article argues that conviviality (convivencia) is an alternative, performance-based epistemology that is enacted in the music and dance of the son jarocho from southern Veracruz, Mexico. In its traditional settings, son jarocho is played in a participatory musical celebration called a fandango. This article provides an ethnographic perspective of how marginalized musical communities of Veracruz enact an subaltern cosmopolitanism from below through an affective sociality encapsulated in of the fandango that has direct ramifications for how daily life is constructed in the region.

Democratizar la democracia: el programa descolonizador del cosmopolitismo subalterno

En este trabajo presentamos dos formas en las que puede enunciarse un programa descolonizador en el cosmopolitismo subalterno, la plataforma crítica de Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Partiendo de la crítica a una modernidad en confluencia con el capitalismo, enmarcamos este programa como una práctica descolonizadora frente a las pulsiones fascistas de la sociedad. Para conseguir este propósito explicaremos la manera en la que la modernidad extendió la desigualdad y la exclusión como mecanismo de integración, estableciendo una racionalidad colonial de límites radicales. El programa descolonizador del cosmopolitismo subalterno representa, frente a este pensamiento colonial, un campo de ampliación e intensificación democrática basada en un principio ético, político y epistemológico fundamental identificado con la ecología de saberes y las epistemologías del Sur.

La tradizione giuridica contro-egemonica in Ecuador e Bolivia

This paper aims to analyze the constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) highlithing the legal meaning of Buen vivir, the native peoples’ cosmovision which permeates these texts. The Introduction provides an overview of the native cosmovision, which implies an armonic life of individuals, communities, and nature. Section II gives an explanation of the concept of subaltern cosmopolitan legality; in the counter-hegemonic globalization, the law is conceived in terms of revalutation of the chtonic tradition and of the extension of legal pluralism. In Section III, the meaning of traditions and the values of the counter-hegemonic legal tradition are illustrated. Section IV is devoted to the analysis of the positivization of the Andean cosmovision in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. Section V illustrates the characteristics of the new Plurinational States. An analysis is carried out with regard to the explanation of the rights conferred to the Mother Earth in Section VI. The final Section is dedicated to the illustration of the results of the comparative analysis and to the potential diffusion of the counter-hegemonic legal tradition from Ecuador and Bolivia to other legal systems.

Restablecimiento del Buen Gobierno en Cherán K'eri. Del cosmopolitismo subalterno a una lectura decolonial

This paper aims to analyze the reestablishment of the Good Government in Cheran’sindigenous community under the criteria of the subaltern cosmopolitanism and the decolonialoption. Refers to Cheran’s insubordination in order to rebuild the restitution of an ancient politicalsystem based on a community democracy, centered on assemblies and participation.

Justicia epist�mica y epistemolog�as del Sur

In this paper, I will make a synthesis of the epistemological dimension of Boaventura de Sousa Santos work. Starting from the idea of Epistemic justice and injustice, I will reconstruct the methodological dimension of its critical platform, namely, the ecology of knowledges. I will try to establish the relation between epistemic injustice and colonialism and to argue the decolonial particularity of the practices included in the epistemologies of the South and the Subaltern cosmopolitanism.

Buen Vivir and Subaltern Cosmopolitan Legality in Urban Cultural Governance and Redevelopment Frameworks: The Equitable Right to Diverse Iterations of Culture in the City and a New Urban Legal Anthropological Approach

In the international development sphere, critical theorists question the prevailing development approaches imposed by Western and Eurocentric dominant legal and development frameworks for their failure to respect the diversity of knowledges and cultures of the spaces and countries that are the subject of development discussions. I suggest that alternative proposed approaches and reactions to development — namely the notions of buen vivir and subaltern cosmopolitanism, as viewed prevalently throughout the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos — carry potential for application at the urban municipal redevelopment context where dominant urban redevelopment strategies in cities such as Toronto currently rely on particular iterations of “culture” and its commodification in order to attain sought after global creative city status that tends towards gentrification and can function to the detriment, exclusion, and marginalization of the diversity of knowledges and ways of being within the city space.

Cochin Creole and the perils of casteist cosmopolitanism: Reading Requiem for the Living

This article takes issue with prominent ways of interpreting the cosmopolitanism often attributed to Kerala State, India. By virtue of its geographical location, from medieval times Kerala developed deep historical connections with European, Arabian, and South-East Asian societies. However in contemporary evocations of Kerala’s cosmopolitanism, the historical connections to South-East Asian societies are conspicuous by their absence. Caste Hindu legacies have been privileged implicitly in these and, as a result, hybrid communities can only be perceived as “miscegenated”. They are, therefore, excluded from the legacies of national culture. Johny Miranda’s recent novella Requiem for the Living (2013), tries to end this invisibility by articulating the present of one such community, the Parankis of Cochin. On the one hand, it both challenges and complicates existing identities such as the “Anglo-Indian” and the “Luso-Indian”, revealing their elite moorings and dualistic conception of hybridity. On the other hand, it departs from the long history of the implications of novel-writing in projects of caste-community identity construction in Malayali society. In doing so, it directs our attention towards the possibilities of unearthing “subaltern cosmopolitanism”, which may indeed be more appropriate for contemporary challenges in the specific postcolonial context that is contemporary Kerala.

A Genealogy of the Ibis Trilogy: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Bengali Culture

A Genealogy of the Ibis Trilogy: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Bengali Culture The tension between a local dimension and a more cosmopolitan one has become increasingly crucial in Amitav Ghosh’s writing. Whereas his earlier works,such as In an Antique Land, tended towards what was defined as a “subaltern cosmopolitanism” (Hawley 2005; Grewal 2007), more recent novels show attention for a local dimension as well: Bengal. In Bengali cultural tradition, nationalism and cosmopolitanism have always been at the centre of poetic reflection. The influence of this cultural and artistic tradition on Ghosh’s works can hardly be overestimated. Therefore, an examination of how nationalism and cosmopolitanism were dealt with by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray will contribute to the full understanding of Ghosh’s work.In particular, this paper will demonstrate how Amitav Ghosh, despite his increased focus on the local, does not embrace nationalism, as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, but reproduces the situation of “ideological liminality” (Saha 2013: 21) between the local and the global that can be found in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.

Cosmopolitismo(s) em Tempos Midiáticos: um Desafio Contemporâneo

An Eurocentric conception of cosmopolitanism is questioned by thinkers as K. , Appiah, Walter Mignolo, Silviano Santiago among others, to search possible ressemantizations of the term in the contemporary context, marked by the globalization, the multiculturalism and the expansion of the new technologies of communication. Considering this confrontation of comopolitanisms, this paper inquires how are several interpretations of Brazil, at the beginning of century XX, when the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism had grown up. This research, on the other hand, aims to confront such interpretations with those that appear at the beginning of century XXI, when the nation is anymore the center of a system of signification, at heterogeneous time and of globalization, when is it possible to speak in “cosmopolitismo do pobre” (subaltern cosmopolitanism) formulated by Silviano Santiago.

Subaltern cosmopolitanism, racial governance and multiculturalism: Britain, c. 1900–45

This discussion is about cosmopolitan subaltern sociality in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world. Its main focus is Britain. Put simply, its main argument is that the precocious forms of so...

From the Octagon to the Courtroom: The Right to Fight, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and Public Interest Litigation as Tool for Mixed Martial Arts as a Community/Cultural Normative System

Jones v. Schniederman, public interest litigation, and MMA legalization issues in New York State through a theoretical lens.

Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Concept and Approaches

‘Cosmopolitanism is back’, proclaimed David Harvey presciently in 2000 ( Harvey, 2000 : 529). In the face of injustice, inequality and violence emerging from globalization processes, the last decade has witnessed a cascading interest in the vision of a world community in which sameness and difference are harmoniously dealt with. Across the humanities and social sciences, there have emerged multiple ways of understanding what exactly cosmopolitanism means for research. To push this concept to greater rigour, scholars have tried to demarcate its conceptual boundaries by underlining its conjunctural nature ( Werbner, 2006 ). Thus we have such notions as rooted cosmopolitanism, working-class cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism, ethnic cosmopolitanism, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. Of all these conjunctural terms, subaltern cosmopolitanism has gained noteworthy attention of late. In one of her articles published in 2010 about the old baggage and missing luggage of cosmopolitan theory, for example, Glick Schiller claims that the possibilities of strengthening cosmopolitan theory lie in ‘a further development of a subaltern cosmopolitanism’ (2010: 414). In this Viewpoint, I will first present an overview of how subaltern cosmopolitanism has been deployed by scholars, and then evaluate its particular purchase in cosmopolitan studies, and finally suggest fortifying the critical sinew of this concept by drawing on conversations about other weighty issues that concern the humanities and social sciences of today.

Black Internationalism, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and the Spatial Politics of Antifascism

This article explores black internationalist articulations of antifascism in the 1930s through a discussion of the “maps of grievance” mobilized by African American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. It interrogates how African American volunteers linked the conflict in Spain to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and to struggles against white supremacy in the United States. Through making such linkages, black internationalist intellectuals and political activists have made significant, if frequently neglected, theoretical and political engagements with fascism and antifascism. By decentering the national in internationalism and situating forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism as constitutive of internationalist political activity, it reconfigures aspects of the spatial constitution of internationalism.

CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENTAL DISPLACEMENT AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

AbstractThis paper addresses the rights of environmentally displaced persons. The motivation is the compelling humanitarian imperative to ensure that those displaced have a minimum of rights, and the focus is on interpretations of existing law that the author considers in line with de Sousa Santos' subaltern cosmopolitanism. The paper draws on both scholarly debates and policy and practitioner discourses. To protect and strengthen the rights of environmentally displaced persons, we should fully exploit existing law by applying a dynamic and context‐oriented interpretation of internally displaced person law, refugee law and human rights law. It would be useful to develop a soft law instrument that could provide authoritative guidance in this respect, drawing on the possibilities as well as remedying the limitations of existing law. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Human Rights, Movements and Law: On Not Researching Legitimacy

This article explores the relationship between social movements, human rights and law at different scales. I compare ‘global constitutionalism’ and ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ as approaches to movements, rights and law. As sociologists, we are especially well placed to address certain assumptions on which these inter-disciplinary approaches rely. I argue that assumptions about the relationship between social movements and human rights that are fundamentally normative limit our understanding of the diversity of organisational forms through which human rights are being defined, and of the complexity of multi-scalar law through which claims to justice are being made. In particular, the importance of the state and national law for institutionalising human rights norms should not be neglected by privileging either local or international law as the legitimate focus of democratic claims for justice.

Scholar/Activists and Regimes of Truth: Rethinking the Divide between Universities and the Streets

AbstractChallenging the divide between political activism in the streets and in the University that is frequently made by US academics, this commentary links insights about regimes of truth to the concept of scholar/activism. Three different forms of scholar activism are delineated: (1) direct political engagement; (2) acting as a public intellectual; and (3) creating a critical scholarship that directly challenges the dominant theoretical frameworks, solipsisms, mystifications, and silences that underlie neoliberal regimes of truth. The article notes that opposition to methodological nationalism is key to a scholar/activism relevant to world‐wide struggles against oppression. It highlights an emerging subaltern cosmopolitanism that draws on experiential histories of oppression to bring together simultaneous cultural rootedness and openness to common aspirations for social and economic justice. [regimes of truth, scholar activism, methodological nationalism, subaltern cosmopolitanism, Antionio Lauria]

Reframing Cultural Studies: Human Rights as a Site of Legal-cultural Struggles

In the twenty-first century, after more than 60 years of development1 since its rise to prominence worldwide, the modern human rights system has become a common, even popular, public and policy dis...

Getting to the Root of Grass Roots – A Few Reflections

This paper is built on the idea that when public participation in health policy decision making is meaningful, it improves the health of the members of those involved in such participation. The goal of this paper is to explore the idea of when public participation in health policy decision-making is meaningful and when it is not. Along this vein, I will suggest that methods of participation that are more inclusive at the grass roots level are more meaningful. To this extent, the paper will be defending a “subaltern” and “cosmopolitan” interpretation of meaningful participation. In the analysis, I explore Boaventura dos Santos's concept of “subaltern cosmopolitan legality”. I expose a gap in Santos’ discussion that raises the question about what conditions distinguish a legal mobilization that is genuinely “subaltern” (i.e. from a non-colonial perspective) and one that is not. I consider this question in contrast with examples of public mobilizations that are “puppet-mastered” by elitist non-subaltern interests. The paper will emphasize the importance of distinguishing between movements that are mobilized by hegemonic interests “on behalf” of subaltern groups and those forms of mobilization that arise directly from the authentic participation of individual subalterns.

Environmental Ethics, Livelihood, and Human Rights: Subaltern-Driven Cosmopolitanism?

Through a case study of an anti-cola struggle in a south Indian village, this paper promotes the conceptual treatment of subaltern cosmopolitanism in the contemporary context of anticorporate social movements. In this situation the multiple issues raised by a local movement, such as livelihood, sustainability, and human rights, sensitize each of the new social agencies involved, within and outside the borders of the local state, and help forge a solidarity network across borders with their universally relevant concerns of environmental ethics and livelihood rights. It is further suggested that it is precisely the new politics of ecology and culture articulated by the subalterns that constructs an enduring and viable future for social movements.