Cosmopolitan Vision Research Articles

A Non-Orientalist Representation of Pakistan in Contemporary Western Travelogues

Travel writings by Western visitors of the Orient have often been rebuffed for disseminating a stereotypical discourse on the people and the culture of the East. The rationale for the collective dismissal of such narratives, however, is built upon a limited canon whose myopic perspective creates a monolithic Orient. It is argued that since this dominant discourse leaves nearly no room for non-conformism, it has conveniently overlooked a large body of travel writings of western writers that adopt a non-Orientalist approach to appreciate cultural differences. To pursue this argument, the present study aims to explore Jürgen Wasim Frembgen’s At the Shrine of the Red Sufi: Five Days & Nights on Pilgrimage in Pakistan (2011) to examine how the autobiographical narrator’s travel accounts present an alternative narrative about the East that subverts prevailing discourses on travelogues as apparatuses to reinforce colonial/Western norms. To achieve this goal, the study benefits from Debbie Lisle’s (2006) theories on the cosmopolitan vision of a travel writer as well as Edward Said’s (1978) theory of Orientalism. Frembgen’s cosmopolitan vision throughout the narrative neutralizes negative perceptions about Muslim communities in Pakistan as uncultivated and declining by offering a counter view of the country that underscores its vibrant and positively transformative qualities. The celebration of Eastern culture and religion in Frembgen’s travel writing indicates the need for the re-examination of the Orientalist thought that has, wittingly or unwittingly, dismissed a significant segment of western works about the east in order to legitimize its theoretical and hypothetical cases.

Silko’s Cosmopolitan Vision: Community Writing in Gardens in the Dunes

The American Indian novel, Gardens in the Dunes, tells the story of the decline of the tribal community located on the Colorado River, the resistance of the pan-Indian community, the syncretism of the Indian-white community, and the construction of the global community in the late 19th century, which reveals the fluid character of community and Silko’s cosmopolitan vision. In the novel, Silko describes the attempts and efforts of the endangered Sand Lizard tribe to find safety in an insecure world, pointing out that the community must insist on solidifying the base as well as making innovations, incorporating new landscape into the existing body of knowledge, revising and supplementing it. Silko interprets her thought on the survival and development of the nation, calling for the coming of a harmonious, balanced, open and inclusive community in which the local and the global coexist.

The Cosmopolitan Evergreen and the Global Digital

Examines how Patrick Geddes’s The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal used the affordances of fin-de-siècle print culture to imbricate the regional and the transnational, and shows how the magazine’s digital remediation on Yellow Nineties 2.0 makes its cosmopolitan vision newly accessible to global audiences today.

On Everyday Natures and Enchanted Landscapes: Worldmaking Practices and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Guatemala’s Western Highlands

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how different meanings attached to social and natural landscapes in Guatemala’s Western Highlands inspire a sense of cosmopolitan imagination among those who are potentially less mobile and rooted in their own environment. I show how different manifestations of rooted cosmopolitanism in Chicabal and Santa Cruz la Laguna are mediated by residents’ engagements with these landscapes and how diverging human-environment relations shape cosmopolitan worldviews as they intersect with and encounter tourism dynamics. The landscapes in which these processes take form are described as dynamic realms of encounter between both local and global and human and nonhuman actors. By looking into the potentialities of rooted cosmopolitanism mediated by ideas of global connectedness, I seek to extend the notion of cosmopolitanism beyond tourists alone and, instead, examine how such interactions bring worldmaking practices of Maya inhabitants and nonhuman actors into the equation.

Poétique et enjeux d’un cosmopolitisme transmigratoire

«How do new arrivals and their hosts [...] build a shared world? What vision of contemporary cosmopolitanism can literature offer us?» This article explores these key questionsby examining the notions of «ordinary cosmopolitanism» (Agier, 2019) and « shared world» (Tassin, 2003) in order to define the concept of «transmigratory cosmopolitanism». Moreover, through studying two works, Mur Méditerranée by Louis-Philippe Dalembert (2019) and Les Lumières d'Oujda by Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe (2020), we aim to show that a pragmatic approach to poetry is used in order to engage the reader and present an image of cosmopolitanism: a resolutely transversal, action based concept; a far cry from the usual identity politics and inequal power dynamics, condescending attitudes and national obsessions which strives to construct the world both collectively and politically.

Turning to the East, Rescuing the West: Sufism and Humanism in Ivan Aguéli’s Thought

ABSTRACT Ivan Aguéli became a celebrated painter in Sweden, his native country. However, his pioneering role in the rapprochement between West and East in the early twentieth century has remained largely unexplored. Aguéli’s universal humanism, with Sufism as its main lever, is analysed and located within a transnational intellectual landscape through networks of people, ideas and print media. By attracting Western pilgrims, Sufism served as a nexus of cultural transfer from the Middle East to Europe, thus casting doubts on the prevailing paradigm of Western enlightenment as the backbone of global intellectual history. Sufism was presented by Aguéli as a spiritual philosophy that dealt with the liberation of man from materialism and selfishness. The article deals with a number of issues: How did Aguéli transform Islam and Sufism into a cosmopolitan vision? To what extent was his humanism nurtured by anarchist philosophy, which promoted a just society? Did Aguéli reconcile the anarchist perception of human beings as free creatures with the Sufi perception of total submission to a Sufi master? Consideration of these questions will shed light on a moralist intellectual, whose own personal experience captured a defiant European mood, intertwining rationalism and esotericism, material progress and universal brotherhood.

Encountering Shakespeare in avant‐garde Kun opera

AbstractIn commemoration of the quater‐centenary of William Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu in 2016, A Shakespearean Handan Dream, a Sino‐British theatrical co‐production, was staged in London, with Ke Jun and Leon Rubin as co‐directors. The play contains four acts of Tang’s Handan Meng (The Handan Dream), into which 12 Shakespearean episodes are inserted. Instead of merely representing cultural differences, the play is seen as an active performance event to shape the cross‐cultural aesthetic experiences of the audiences and their cosmopolitan visions. As an avant‐garde experiment, the play features a specific kind of “new interculturalism” in world theater, which challenges the existing modes of interpretation of intercultural theater. With reference to new developments in intercultural performance theory, this essay is concerned with the singularity of the intercultural performance, its social and political significance, and its contemporary relevance.

Better in Pictures

Better in Pictures

Discursive activism in the age of BBS: revisiting overseas Chinese protests during the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay

The escalation in geopolitical tensions between China and the United States raises the critical issue of revisiting cyber nationalism in various contexts. A topic of critical inquiry, recent scholarship addresses the changing face of Chinese cyber nationalism since the 2010s, focussing on its connection with fan communities, cosmopolitan visions and the interplay of multifarious stakeholders. However, the ways in which emerging forms of cyber nationalism connect with its predecessors remain to be studied. To explore the historical connections of cyber nationalism across media platforms, this article investigates the role that MIT BBS, one of the most influential forums among overseas Chinese communities, played in organising pro-China protests during the 2008 Beijing Olympics torch relay. An examination of online political expressions not only unravels the multifaceted dimensions of nationalism, but it also deepens scholarly understanding of discursive activism, which emerged from text-based platforms prior to the dominance of mobile communication applications.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s The Disillusioned African: Rigidizing Cosmopolitan Borders, Binarizing Cosmopolitan Opportunities

ABSTRACT This paper draws on Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s The Disillusioned African to argue that thinking beyond cosmopolitan borders should be an essential dimension of a cosmopolitan imagination and cosmopolitan politesse that defines the relationship between African leaders and the African masses and Africa, the West, and the rest. Nyamnjoh’s novel affirms that the maintenance of fluid cosmopolitan borders would facilitate cultural encounters and engender cosmopolitan opportunities, which would blur the us/them dichotomies that define and confine relationships between African leadership and Africans and between Africa and the West or the rest. Analyzing the novel from this perspective affirms Nyamnjoh’s belief in nimble-footedness and flexibility in belonging. It is a perspective that foregrounds the author’s informative concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and thus the importance of reciprocal acknowledgment of the Other in her/his otherness among Africans, and between Africans and the West or the rest. The paper argues that this can indeed become the most potent feature and future of a common global cosmopolitan identity.

African Political Theology and Post-Nationalist Nationalism: The Case of the Cameroon Anglophone Conflict

ABSTRACT This article is a Christian theological interrogation of the war in the Anglophone region of Cameroon between Cameroon’s army and Anglophone separatists who seek separation from Francophone Cameroon. It problematizes a facile understanding of Anglophone identity that places Anglophones on the one side and Francophones on the other, arguing that these identities are complex. It critiques theologies that appear to defend Anglophone separation arguing that these theologies are rooted in an inadequate understanding of liberation theology and a limited doctrine of providence. It proposes an African political theology that calls into question the theological legitimacy of the nation-state and seeks to transcend the binaries that often otherize and separate. This political theology, it is suggested, should have a pan-African and cosmopolitan vision.

Cosmopolitan Visions and Intellectual Passions: Macanese publics in British Hong Kong

AbstractFrom the lens of two Macanese publics, this study rethinks cosmopolitanism as a diverse identity and pursuit that can vary from one individual to another. It complicates what we know about polyglot Asian publics often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions. I argue that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to shifting global contexts, generational differences, and personal experience. On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework. My first subject, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques, saw Hong Kong as a liberal ground to disseminate Darwinism across southern China's Lusophone public sphere during the 1880s, whereas Hong Kong-born José Pedro Braga worked to preach an internationalist vision of racial equality through a wider Anglophone public sphere and an emerging transnational associational culture in the early twentieth century. This study also aims to further our understanding regarding Hong Kong as a vibrant port city and explore the diversity of cosmopolitan publics in the context of transitioning internal and external worlds.

Customary Law and the Revival of Natural Rights Reformism in Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray

This essay investigates the role of natural law within the philosophical debates in 1790s Britain over the origins and applicability of citizens' rights, an issue amplified by memories of the French Revolution. It marks Amelia Opie’s 1805 novel Adeline Mowbray as representative of a counterrevolutionary faction focused extensively on the rights of citizens, yet fully distinct from the theoretically grounded cosmopolitan vision of both the French Jacobins and their radical British counterparts. The novel serves as evidence that the British counterrevolution was not intrinsically opposed to reform, and that reform itself was not incompatible with moral duty and social good nor antithetical to a more nationalistic - though broadly based - conception of "rights." In fact, it seems to be presented by Opie as a conscious alternative to revolutionary theories of universal right, by 1805 viewed by many as the progenitor of the political violence that had ensued following the fall of the Bastille sixteen years earlier.

Catholicity Under Heaven: Reformed Ecclesiology and Chinese Visions of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract Reformed catholicity suffers from a fragility that causes it to easily fragment over comparatively small differences. This study wagers that an important resource that can be useful for addressing this problem is the Chinese philosophy of tianxia. The article introduces the idea of a ‘Reformed catholicity under Heaven’ by placing a more liberal interpretation of tianxia in conversation with the problems in Reformed approaches to the church’s catholicity. In doing so, the article demonstrates tianxia’s ecclesiological usefulness while articulating two dimensions of ‘Reformed catholicity under Heaven’ that can deepen how Reformed churches inhabit catholicity in ways that promote unity.

Global citizens, cosmopolitanism, and radical relationality: Towards dialogue with the Kyoto School?

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a constructive reconstruction of these core premises of European cosmopolitanism. In resisting the ontologizing of autonomous individualism and abstract universalism, Kyoto School thinkers offered an alternative tripartite structure that drew greater attention to the specific (nation-state): individual and universal are inevitably mediated by the ‘logic’ of specific histories, languages, institutions, and communities. Rather than naïve nationalism, this view emerged within a radically relational worldview: ‘continuity-in-discontinuity’ emplaced within absolute nothingness. Kimura Motomori, a leading Kyoto School educational thinker, explicitly extended these Nishidian ideas to challenge Rousseau’s contracting individualism, Kantian abstract universalism, and Hegelian teleological temporality, thus offering a fresh vision of cosmopolitanism: self-aware citizens engaging concretely in the task of (re)opening their specific societies. In conclusion, in part to demonstrate the very forms of critique we envisage, we trace historically the impacts of Kyoto School cosmopolitanism ideas on postwar policy in Japan and lament the recent regressive closing.

Making History: the Australian history curriculum and national identity

History is a key site for the negotiation of national identity, with the ability to define the past shaping the national narrative on who “we” were, who “we” are, and, crucially, who “we” should be. As such, the teaching of history is a site of intense political debate. This paper examines the history module of the Australian Curriculum to understand the extent to which the history curriculum moves beyond Eurocentric, colonial imaginings of Australia's history towards a more inclusive, multi‐cultural, globally‐oriented, cosmopolitan vision of society. Both the curriculum and teaching resources were examined to ascertain the identities and orientations these materials could provide. The research finds that — despite improvements in presenting a diversity of representations, in particular a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Australia and some orientation to diverse migrant histories, the environment, and Asia — the main thrust of the curriculum is a focus on the nation‐state at the expense of global engagement. The funnel structure which deals with broader world history in earlier years, relegates the rest of the world to a temporal and spatial distance, leaving a somewhat myopic narrative that perpetuates traditional, Anglo‐centric narratives, maintaining the perspectives of “Others” as peripheral.

UBUNTU AS FOREIGN POLICY: THE AMBIGUITIES OF SOUTH AFRICA'S BRAND IMAGE AND IDENTITY

South Africa's 2011 White Paper on foreign policy, "Building a Better World", is predicated on the far-reaching ambition of how Ubuntu (humanity) and Batho Pele (putting people first) together with their underlying humanist principles will guide the country's external relations. However, while noble, this calculus is poorly conceived as an approach to global issues. The article argues that while still a relatively successful nation brand if measured by marketing indicators, South Africa's normative currency and agency in foreign policy has depreciated considerably, with a direct bearing on its nation brand and identity. These are examined with regard to the security of citizens and the personality of the state and provide a register of the branding and image deficits of the White Paper. Such deficits are then considered in terms of the cosmopolitan vision in South Africa's foreign policy and its moral and normative underpinnings. The article provides examples in both the domestic and global regimes to demonstrate the extent to which South Africa has lost its normative resilience in the conduct of its foreign policy, thus giving rise to ambiguities in its brand image and identity.

<em>Fortress Besieged</em>: Cynicism and Qian Zhongshu's Narrative of the Modern Chinese “Self”

As a means of national salvation and mass education, modern Chinese literature gained its cultural and social prominence during the May Fourth Period. However, although one of the most celebrated modern Chinese novels, Fortress Besieged has long been ignored by critics after 1949 and only began to receive renewed attention in the 1980s, largely due to the relaxing political milieu. The novel's marginalization following 1949 occurred largely because Qian did not align himself with his more reform-minded contemporaries and represents a different strand of literary modernism. With a soul significantly enriched by his cosmopolitan visions and literary sensibilities, Qian can be said to possess an alternative understanding of modernity, one which makes this novel a counterdiscourse during an age when literature of the War of Resistance and the Revolutionary Literature constituted the hegemonic narrative modes. Most notably, in Fortress Besieged, Qian de-idealizes the "new women" who are often portrayed as active forces in various progressive projects during and after the May Fourth Movement. Moreover, by calling into question the lofty ideals and taken-for-granted conceptions lauded by his contemporaries, Qian also reveals a profound cynicism, which is itself another factor that made the novel's acceptance politically untenable during the revolutionary period. Thus, in reconsidering the literary space carved out by Qian, we can deepen our understanding of not only the formation of the author's own subjectivities, but also the development of modern Chinese literature more generally.

Nussbaum’s Concept of Cosmopolitanism: Practical Possibility or Academic Delusion?

In this paper, we explore Martha Nussbaum’s version of cosmopolitanism and evaluate its potential to reduce the growing global discord we currently confront. We begin the paper by elucidating the concept of cosmopolitanism in historical and contemporary terms, and then review some of the major criticisms of Nussbaum’s position. Finally, we suggest that Nussbaum’s vision of cosmopolitanism, in spite of its morally noble intentions, faces overwhelming philosophical and practical difficulties that undermine its ultimate tenability as an approach to resolving international conflict.

Cosmopolitanism in Dubai’s Pan-Arab Drama

Abstract Pan-Arab dramas (Ar. al-drama al-ʿarabiyya al-mushtaraka) are a recent trend in Arabic drama series (Ar. musalsalat); they portray an ensemble of characters of various Arab nationalities in a transnational narrative setting. By considering transnational television a factor that contributes to the cosmopolitan imagination, and given the argument that Gulf cities are replacing historical Arab capitals and becoming ‘new centers’ for Arab culture, education and business, we explore the manner in which cosmopolitanism is represented in transnational Arab drama content. We do this through a case study of ‘04’ (Zero Four), a pan-Arab drama series that tells the story of four young expatriates of four Arab nationalities, experiencing their personal, professional and private lives in modern-day Dubai. We find that the boundaries of the cosmopolitan imagined community encompass the Arab world, resulting in a cosmopolitan imaginary that seems to favor Arabs over non-Arabs.