Cosmopolitan Vision Research Articles

‘Palermo is a mosaic’: cosmopolitan rhetoric in the capital of Sicily

Abstract The political messaging of Leoluca Orlando, who served five terms as mayor of Sicily's capital, Palermo (most recently, until 2022), articulates a cosmopolitan vision of local identity. Orlando seeks to emphasise Palermo's ‘tolerant’ values, invoking the city's history to foster this image, as well as using a variety of rhetorical strategies. He portrays Palermo as having a true ‘essence’, which is necessarily multicultural. I analyse Orlando's pronouncements on his official Facebook page, as well as observing his audience's reactions to his messaging, both supportive and critical. I examine how Orlando articulates the narrative that Palermo has historically been a ‘mosaic’ of various cultural influences, proposing that the contemporary city is the ‘true’, welcoming face of the Mediterranean. As well as exploring the political utility Orlando sees in such arguments, I analyse the risks inherent in this essentialising project.

“Eating the Barrio”: Gastronomy and urban change in Santa Cruz, Lima

This article explores the impact of the gastronomic boom on gentrification processes in Lima, Peru, during the last two decades. It is an ethnographic study conducted in 2012, 2014, and 2016 in the Santa Cruz housing development, which used to be a working-class neighborhood located in the Miraflores district. The central focus is the analysis of the personal narratives of change and belonging of residents, workers, and visitors, supported by photographic practice. In particular, it is based on the experience of Carlos, a young actor who after living several years in London returns to Peru to start a business and, taking advantage of competitive prices in Santa Cruz, opens a gourmet bakery in the neighborhood. Using the notion of “cosmopolitan imagination,” we show the different ways in which Carlos recontextualizes his experience in London in the specificity of La Mar, negotiating the limits, meanings and values of the places, people, and cultural practices that arise from inhabiting this space of change. Ultimately, Carlos’s bakery becomes a meeting point for linking or negotiating different strategies and experiences of belonging to the area, materializing power dynamics that emerge inside and outside the business, thus shaping the commodification of Santa Cruz.

Optimalisasi Tata Kelola dan Peningkatan Komitmen Organisasi: Studi Pada Pelatihan Kepemimpinan di PCIM Malaysia

Muhammadiyah, as an Islamic movement with a moderate and cosmopolitan vision, faces unique challenges in managing ethnic, cultural and religious diversity in various countries. The leadership of the Special Branch of Muhammadiyah (PCIM) in Malaysia, which oversees 10 Special Branch Leaders of Muhammadiyah (PRIM), faces obstacles in organizational commitment and governance. To overcome this, PKM-KI UMS proposed a solution through three training programs: Achievement Motivation Training, PDCA Training, and Islamic Leadership Training, with a focus on developing leadership modules. This program aims to increase organizational commitment and governance in PCIM and PRIM Malaysia, as well as strengthen the Muhammadiyah community in Malaysia in facing organizational governance challenges and promote Muhammadiyah's moderate and cosmopolitan vision amidst socio-cultural dynamics across nations and countries. Program methods include initial surveys, needs analysis, training design, evaluation, and program sustainability. The program results show that leadership training can significantly increase commitment and effectiveness of organizational governance. This program provides new insights into the importance of leadership training that focuses on aspects of Islamic motivation, management and leadership in the context of cross-cultural organizations.

Human Rights for Export Only? Non-Elite Human Rights Advocacy in West Germany, 1977–2000

This article analyzes the non-elite human rights vision promoted by the Russell III Tribunal and the Committee for Fundamental Rights and Democracy (Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie, Grundrechtekomitee). The article centers on leftists who utilized human rights to challenge state power since the late 1970s. The III Russell Tribunal (1978–79) brought international scrutiny to the West German state's restrictions against civil employment for suspected subversives. Policymakers, politicians, and liberal public intellectuals rejected the use of human rights rhetoric to address domestic wrongs. In their view, the sobriquet ‘human rights abuse’ was befitting solely to the cruelties committed by the National Socialists and in countries in the Global South and Eastern Europe. Veterans of Russell III founded the Grundrechtekomitee in 1980 to challenge this limited understanding of human rights. The second part of the article focuses on the Committee's engagement against Helmut Kohl's asylum policy and domestic racism. While focused on West Germany, the Committee mobilized a cosmopolitan vision of human rights that mobilized Holocaust memory to advocate for the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. The article argues that Russell III and the Grundrechtekomitee saw domestic human rights advocacy as a bulwark against undemocratic and xenophobic tendencies in Germany.

Black Arts/West and the ironies of development in Seattle’s ‘Other America’

ABSTRACT It is now commonplace to weave arts initiatives into community planning and development efforts. One historical foundation for this practice was the U.S. federal Model Cities programme, which promoted a role for the arts in the demonstration projects it funded. The reasons and purposes for doing so were worked out not by federal officials, but by funded projects on the ground in specific places. This essay tells the story of a federally funded performing arts programme in Seattle – Black Arts/West – and the intellectual landscape its supporters navigated to make a case for art’s role in neighbourhood development. That case was based on a belief that the Black Arts could contribute not only job training and consumer dollars to neighbourhood development, but also a cosmopolitan vision of a welcoming and diverse city. Ironically, even as Black Arts/West helped root the Black Arts in Seattle’s Central Area, it helped establish ways of thinking about the arts and diversity that would contribute to the neighbourhood’s gentrification.

NATIONALISM AS A CONTEMPORARY MENACE: READING TAGORE’S THE HOME AND THE WORLD AS A COSMOPOLITAN TEXT

As the calls for global peace and peaceful coexistence grow louder, nationalism, often tearing apart the oldest and largest democracies, emerges as one of the formidable menaces to mankind today. It is a resurgent force in major democracies across continents. In Asia and particularly in the Indian subcontinent, it emerges in response to the colonial hegemony and the emulation of Western values. But it soon assumes a religious dimension. Tagore, in its rise as a global phenomenon, sees a threat to global peace and fraternity, an onslaught on human dignity, and calls it a 'destructive enthusiasm,' an 'epidemic of evil,' an edifice of illusions, and moral annihilation. Against the background of fragile peace and shattered human existence. This study investigates how nationalism dehumanizes people, kills a human character, distorts perceptions, divests them of moral ideals, reduces a man's life to a mechanical existence, and releases a demon of ethnonationalist violence by using text analysis as its research method. The study shows how the author's cosmopolitan vision is capable of guiding mankind in these troubled times. Besides, it shows how his vision can help people overcome this mass delusion and foster global understanding and peaceful coexistence.

Welcoming refugee children with a moral, rather than merely legal, right to education: Ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education

In this paper, we argue for the moral and not merely the legal right to education for refugee children. National education in many countries is challenged by refugee flows and influx of displaced people. However, there is a tendency to think of refugee flows as isolated events rather than parts of the dynamics of a world society that national education systems needs to respond responsibly to and build capacity for. Consequently, there is a gap between the legal right to education for refugee children and its practical realization, and granting refugee children access to national education systems is becoming part of the problem and not only a solution to the de-territorializing and cosmopolitan challenges of refugee flows and displaced people. We argue that education for children of refugees’ need to meet with a cosmopolitan design of education in order to respond responsibly to the right to education for refugee children. In the first part, we discuss the legal right to education for refugee children, and moral challenges with regard to its practical realization in nation-centred school systems and schools. In the second part, we discuss de-territorializing effects of refugees in education by reviewing research on refugee education, refugee children’s experiences of education and by discussing refugee education in Sweden as a case. In the final part, we discuss ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education. We argue for a moral commitment to the education of refugee children in order for us to respond responsibly to their legal and moral rights and situation, but also to the legal and moral rights, and situations of those affected in host countries. We also argue for the importance of critical cosmopolitan imagination in education that does not restrict education to norms of national loyalty and national integration, or to economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness.

Between Nationalist and Cosmopolitan Visions of Fraternity. The Prefigurative Role of the French Revolution in Victor Hugo’s introduction to «Paris guide» (1867) and Robert Hamerling’s «Danton und Robespierre» (1871)

This article analyses the ways in which fraternity is imagined in Victor Hugo’s introductory essay to Paris guide (1867) and Danton und Robespierre (1871), by the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling. Both texts use the French Revolution as a pretext to articulate a cosmopolitan vision that has to be understood as a reaction to the political tensions in the prelude to and aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). By reconstructing how Hugo and Hamerling intervene in a broader debate on the question of nationalism and internationalism, this article sheds more light on how literature was a vehicle for cosmopolitan views.

Cosmopolitanism and Decolonization: Contradictory Perspectives on School Reform to Advance Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples

Canadian school jurisdictions have taken steps to accommodate objectives to advance cosmopolitan education reflecting principles such as global citizenship, compassion, tolerance, responsibility, and respect within school curricula and educational practice. At the same time, a parallel set of reconciliation-related educational reforms, aligned with the Calls to Action that accompanied the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report, have also gained urgency. Elements of reconciliation processes complement visions of cosmopolitanism, including objectives to foster dialogue and understanding between groups and advancements towards more holistic orientations to pedagogy and knowledge. However, conceptually and in practice, several tensions emerge, especially in a context in which educational priorities are contested. In this paper, we explore these connections and tensions with reference to findings from our research examining public perspectives on educational reforms to support reconciliation.

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.

From Imperialism to the “Golden Age” to the Great Lockdown: The Politics of Global Health Governance

This article reviews the state of the literature on the politics of global health governance and associated political dynamics of actors involved in this issue space. We identify seven eras in the field, beginning with the period of empire and colonialism and ending with the COVID-19 outbreak. The field of global health has long had a focus on infectious disease, often rooted within a state-centered approach to transnational global health problems with recurrent debates about whether and how restrictions on trade and travel should be imposed in the wake of disease outbreaks. This statist focus is in tension with more cosmopolitan visions of global health, which require broader health system strengthening. In the mid-2000s, a golden age emerged with the influx of new financing and political attention to addressing HIV/AIDS and malaria, as well as reducing the risk posed by infectious disease outbreaks to economies of the Global North. Despite increased awareness of noncommunicable diseases and the importance of health systems, events of recent years (including but not limited to the COVID-19 outbreak) reinforced the centrality of states to global health efforts and the primacy of infectious diseases.

HAM SOK HON'S SSIAL COSMOPOLITAN VISION. By Song‐ChongLee. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Pp. xii + 173. Hardback, $95.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 49, Issue 1 p. 98-98 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: East Asia HAM SOK HON'S SSIAL COSMOPOLITAN VISION. By Song-Chong Lee. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Pp. xii + 173. Hardback, $95.00. First published: 24 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16400Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume49, Issue1Special Issue: Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and BeyondMarch 2023Pages 98-98 RelatedInformation

Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Decolonization and Democracy in Leslie Marmon Silko’sGardens in the Dunes

AbstractOver the course of the 1990s, the reception of Almanac of The Dead’s (1991) strident decolonial allegory propelled Leslie Marmon Silko to the center of debates about the future of both liberal democracy and Indigenous sovereignty struggles. This article revisits how and why Silko was cast as a representative of liberal multiculturalism by scholars who championed and critiqued US liberalism in the wake of the Cold War, and reads her 1999 Gardens in the Dunes, a novel she describes as forming, with Almanac, a diptych “about capitalism and the effects of capitalism” (“Conversations” 118), in relation to these critical debates. It argues that the conclusion of Gardens in The Dunes engages with the Western genre as an allegorical means toward situating Silko’s commitment to Indigenous sovereignty in relation to the questions about the relation among law, violence, and democracy that animate so many Cold War westerns. The political orientation that emerges from this unlikely engagement with settler colonialism’s most recognizable genre is an allegorical vision of an Indigenous cosmopolitanism committed to both decolonial struggle and the universal liberatory ideals that liberalism espouses yet inevitably betrays.Through an oblique but unmistakable engagement with the Western genre . . . Gardens in the Dunes reaffirms Silko’s commitment to a broad vision of decolonization celebrating the universal liberatory ideals that US liberalism has betrayed.

China's collectivist cosmopolitanism: Harmony and conflict with Western conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism rooted in individualistic notions of human rights

Just as leading Western countries have begun withdrawing from the neoliberal Washington Consensus that paved the way for economic globalization over the last 40 years, China has proposed an ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, or One Belt One Road, outlining its vision for global development. President Xi's vision of collectivist cosmopolitanism is centered on the principle of sovereign equality between nations, emphasizing civilizational uniqueness rather than universal human rights. In this view, economic and social development are path dependent, and in China's case, prioritize decolonization and national sovereignty. Xi's view in major speeches is cosmopolitan but collectivist, emphasizing economic growth, openness, dynamism, and an “avowed respect” for the integrity of other cultures, while saying nothing about individual human rights or groups within China. This approach positions ancient Chinese traditions like Confucianism as playing a central role in cultivating individuals’ and society's moral qualities so that person, society, and governance are bound together as a mutually beneficial and interconnected whole. It forms the theoretical basis of a Chinese view of cosmopolitanism, which could be the basis of dialogue with Western cosmopolitanists. The challenge is reconciling the different emphasis accorded to human rights versus national sovereignty in the two views. Empirical results of a new measure of Cosmopolitan Orientation that correlates positively rather than negatively with nationalism and religiosity provide insights into the specific basis for this dialogue to become beneficial rather than conflictual.

“Our Brother’s Blood”: Interreligious Solidarity and Commensality in Indian Jewish Literature

Abstract: This article argues that contemporary Indian Jewish literature recovers a narrative of lost, Indigenous cosmopolitanism, which effectively reframes the history of the Indian subcontinent. More specifically, it contends that interreligious commensality, particularly between Jews and Muslims, forms the center of this cosmopolitan vision, thereby reimagining the home—rather than the public sphere—as the center of cosmopolitan experience. This gendered focus on food as a site for cultural syncretism and remembrance renders the home as a space that redefines Jewish identity and community, thereby challenging the patriarchal authority of both Jewish law and the Indian state. These texts (fiction, drama, poetry and creative nonfiction) preserve and transmit forms of Indian Jewish identity that are marginalized within India and little known by Jews outside the subcontinent. Despite the precipitous decline in the size of India’s Jewish communities, that loss is not defined primarily by externally imposed trauma. Indian Jewish literature therefore offers a distinctive model for remembrance that also challenges contemporary truisms about relationships between Jews and others. The memory of past commensality offers a note of both caution and hope as contemporary Indian Jewish writers wrestle with Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Middle East, where the majority of Jews of Indian descent now reside.

Editorial

Editorial Joshua Howard The second issue of 2023 presents four research articles and one review essay. Hongling Liang explores how the “Paris group” of Chinese anarchists theorized education in their journal, the New Century, which circulated between 1907 and 1910. In contrast to contemporary educational reformers and a historiography that has linked education to nation building, the anarchists stressed a new kind of education based on scientism, the supralanguage of Esperanto, and moral enlightenment. Although Liang recognizes that the anarchists shared with practitioners of Confucianism a belief in the transformative power of education, she concludes that their cosmopolitan vision of education was significant for breaking free of existing traditions and imagining revolutionary and democratic forms through which education and learning could be implemented. Drawing on memoir literature of underground women operatives active during the Chinese Civil War, Amanda Zhang demonstrates how narratives that highlighted personal sacrifice and physical and psychological hardships were employed as an ideological tool. They refuted gender norms of the “fragile woman” prevalent during the 1940s but could also reproduce tropes of gender inequality. Above all, as part of the operatives’ political rehabilitation during the 1980s, such narratives served to affirm these women’s loyalty to the Communist Party. Emily Wilcox’s fine-grained study of a leading Japanese ballet company’s interpretation and production of The White-Haired Girl and its reception in China during a celebrated 1958 tour reveals more than just a critical missing chapter in the historical evolution of this iconic revolutionary drama. The exchanges ensuing from this instance of Sino-Japanese cultural diplomacy under Maoism, serving several purposes, were productive in multiple ways, not least as a means for audiences in China to “project international aspirations” through the “embodiment and imagination” of a Japanese “people” sharing a yearning for revolution. Zixian Liu’s attention to the material aspect of one popular brand of bedsheet in socialist China supports an argument for a method and a perspective that render visible and tangible the “endeavor to create a distinctive material culture” within the economic system of the Mao era. The Minguang “national bedsheet,” as designed, manufactured, consumed, used, and desired, evoked Maoist “values, sentiments, and ideals” during and long after this period. In his review essay, Edward Tyerman discusses three recent publications about the Sino-Russian border that examine the construction of differences across the borderland, as well as tensions between local and centralizing forces. The works include Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey’s On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border, [End Page 87] Mark Gamsa’s Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography, and Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Daniel Asen’s review of Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu is available online at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Emily Wilcox is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes a link for free access to her article, “Sino-Japanese Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s: The Making and Reception of the Matsuyama Ballet’s The White-Haired Girl.” [End Page 88] Copyright © 2023 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc

Education as Revolution: Theorizing Education and Learning in Xin Shiji (1907–1910)

Xin shiji was a Chinese journal published in France by Chinese anarchists and revolutionaries from 1907 to 1910. This article examines the views of education and learning and views of Chinese language and script expressed in Xin shiji. Xin shiji presents a cosmopolitan moment of educational imagination in the late Qing and early Republican period of China that has been largely ignored in the scholarly literature on education of this period, which has focused instead on the role of education and educational transformation in state building. Dispassionate about disseminating ideas about citizenship and about exploring the role of education in creating new citizens, writers for Xin shiji emphasized the connection of an autonomous individual member of society who is not bound by the nation-state. This cosmopolitan vision of education did not situate itself within an existing tradition or presuppose the institutional and political forms through which education and learning should be implemented.

Bringing Erasmus home: the European universities initiative as an example of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’

ABSTRACT In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’ on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich’s ‘Everyday Nationhood’, Billig’s ‘Banal Nationalism’, Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ and Beck’s ‘Cosmopolitan Vision’. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up ‘everyday’ processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance ‘FORTHEM’ as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of ‘Everyday Europeanhood’: ‘Talking Europe’, ‘Choosing Europe’, ‘Performing Europe’ and ‘Consuming Europe’.

Hospitality: A Taste of Eternity

The article explicates the biblical ethic of hospitality – the welcoming of the stranger into one’s midst –as adumbrating the inclusive theological sensibilities of Judaism and Christianity, ultimately setting the ground of Kant’s cosmopolitan vision of eternal peace.

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors