Cosmopolitan critics attack the scope-limitation of justice of egalitarian liberal theorists to states. They treat justice as the production of a given set of outcomes for people regardless of location or relationship. However, in doing so they either ignore the relevant agent towards whom principles of justice are addressed or see the question of agency as a practical, derivative question, of a secondary character. This paper argues that a principle of justice without a clearly justified agent is not a (...) genuine principle at all. This is what writers like Rawls mean by the "subject" of justice (analogous to the grammatical subject of a sentence, i.e.,the agent). We should reflect on agents and why they would or would not justifiably carry certain burdens for others and what kind of benefits or goods they are able to secure. The answers to those questions explain why the idea of cosmopolitan global justice is incomplete, either requiring a global basic structural agency or not applying because no relevant agent is present that can create cooperative arrangements between individual persons across the globe. Other moral principles will still apply globally, but they will be distinct from those that apply to basic-structural agencies. This account is not a practice dependence account, as it bases the distinctness of moral and political principles on purely moral and value-based considerations. (shrink)

One of the most influential research and teaching programs to emerge in the new science of ecology in the early twentieth century was that which developed at the University of Chicago under the direction of botanist Henry Chandler Cowles. Not a prolific writer, Cowles was nevertheless author of two of the seminal papers in American plant ecology. On the basis of those early contributions, as well as his considerable abilities as field guide, he was able to draw numerous students into (...) Chicago’s new plant ecology program for both introductory and advanced work. No small part of the attraction of the program was Cowles’s ability to interpret successional changes in vegetation in terms that fitted in well with the forward-looking, reform-minded mood of the educated elite of the nation and the city of Chicago during the early decades of the century. Cowles’s favorite outdoor laboratory, the region of sand dunes along the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, provided the ideal setting for his vivid telling and retelling of the story of the struggles and transformations of plant communities toward the establishment of the inevitable climax community. Both this dramatic tale of progressive change and the unusual diversity of species and communities at the dunes reflected qualities of Chicago itself, and Cowles interpreted these ecological phenomena in a manner that bore a striking resemblance to the frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents seeks to address the kinds of challenges that cosmopolitan perspectives and practices face in a world organized increasingly in relation to a proliferating series of global absolutisms--religious, political, social, and economic. While these challenges are often used to support the claim that cosmopolitanism is impotent to resist such totalizing ideologies because it is either a Western conceit or a globalist fiction, Gunn argues that cosmopolitanism is neither. Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn (...) shows how cosmopolitanism has been effective in resisting such essentialisms and authoritarianisms precisely because it is more pragmatic than prescriptive, more self-critical than self-interested and finds several of its foremost recent expressions in the work of an Indian philosopher, a Palestinian writer, and South African story-tellers. This kind of cosmopolitanism offers a genuine ethical alternative to the politics of dogmatism and extremism because it is grounded on a new delineation of the human and opens toward a new, indeed, an "other," humanism. (shrink)

Summary A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nations in terms of the actual uses of the (...) texts in a variety of historical contexts. In pointing to an array of evidence against Kant's widely accepted claim, I develop a different and more historical way of assessing the relation between the two writers. Kant, I argue, should be approached as a political metaphysician whose conception of cosmopolitan justice formed part of a factional theological and philosophical attack on the law of nations tradition. Vattel, however, was a diplomatic official whose text operates within the horizon of the European state ensemble and functioned as a summative abstraction of a wide variety of post-Westphalian public-law treaties and diplomatic rules and conventions. This accounts for the wide distribution, use, and influence of Vattel's work in a variety of Anglophone contexts from the late eighteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth, where Kant's text was marginal to discussion. (shrink)

The liberal conception of the state is marked by an insistence upon the equal civil and political rights of each inhabitant. Recently, though, a number of writers have argued that this emphasis on uniform rights ignores the fact that the populations of most states are culturally diverse, and that their inhabitants have significant interests qua members of particular cultures. They argue that liberals should recognize special, group-based cultural rights as a necessary part of a theory of justice in multicultural (...) societies. In this thesis I examine the idea of special cultural rights. In the first part, I begin by setting out some of the different conceptions of culture and multiculturalism that are involved in the debate over cultural rights. I then discuss three claims made by supporters of special cultural rights: that having culture is an essential part of individual autonomy; that people have morally significant interests qua members of particular cultures; and that these interests are inadequately protected by existing liberal conceptions of human rights. Although I conclude that is correct, I argue that both and are mistaken. Among other things, I suggest that the version of culture relied upon by supporters of special cultural rights is an implausible one and I outline what I take to be a more plausible, cosmopolitan conception of culture. In the second part, I begin by looking at specific instances of cultural rights-claims, and analyzing the concept of cultural rights qua rights. I consider the practical and conceptual difficulties with special cultural rights at great length. But the core of my thesis is that our interest in culture lies in its contribution of worthwhile goals and options, and that this interest lies in culture generally rather than in particular cultures. Hence, adopting a special or group-based distribution of any right to culture would seem to be inconsistent with liberal egalitarian principles. If there are such things as cultural rights, I argue, they are general rather than special rights. I conclude by offering a very preliminary account of what a cosmopolitan conception of cultural rights might involve in the case of the right to free association and language rights. (shrink)

1. In the Fall Issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Choo’s (2017) ‘Globalizing Literature Pedagogy’ makes the case for ‘applying cosmopolitan ethical criticism to the teaching of literature’. S...

Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The (...) very nature of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of mass migration and the conditions of hybridization for early 21st century Western societies in texts dealing with migrantexperiences. The novel Goodbye Lucille (2007) by the Afro-cosmopolitan writer Segun Afolabi will be explored with respect to the crucial problem of an ethics and politics of belonging, related to the recent controversies surrounding multiculturalism and issues of migration. This text deals with the “in-between world” of migrants and negotiates questions of identity, alienation and belonging in (...) a so-called transcultural/transnational context. The issues raised in Segun Afolabi's fiction are addressed by employing the ways of thinking developed in political philosophy, including recent phenomenological attempts to theorize the notion of “home” and “belonging” (e.g., by Karen Joisten, but also Martin Heidegger) in order to deal with the complexities of the issue. The question, “What constitutes the good life for the individual and the political community?”, needs to be considered by taking into account the current plurality of approaches to forging identitiesin the political sphere as well. The subtlety of literary accounts of this phenomenon – literature may indeed be one of the best diagnostic instrument for studying a society – sheds light, I suggest, on the conditions of politically relevant identity formations. A close reading of literary texts such as those by Afolabi offers an important contribution to a realistic, and therefore complex and complicating, account of our overall situation in the Western world with respect to the politics of belonging. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Cultural Imperialism in Rawls's Law of Peoples Rawls's Answers to the Charge Conclusion: Peace or Justice? Acknowledgements Notes.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a staunch cosmopolitan who, after the catastrophe of World War I, campaigned for peaceful cooperation between the peoples of Europe. He considered the biography of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a definite enemy of every kind of fanaticism, to be exemplary. In his novel “Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam” (1934) he portrayed him as an antithesis to Luther, whose religious radicalism combined with nationalistic tendencies he detested. Zweig contrasted the cosmopolitan humanism of (...) Erasmus with the German Reformation of Luther. Under the impression of the political seizure of power by the National Socialists, which forced him to emigrate, Zweig's interest in the history of the Reformation in Europe grew. After “Maria Stuart” (1935) he saw in his novel “Castellio against Calvin” (1936) in Castellio an heir to Erasmus, who defended human freedom of conscience against the repressive theocratic Geneva regime. For Zweig, Calvin became a tyrant who in many ways resembled Hitler. (shrink)

The history of international relations is characterized by widespread injustice. What implications does this have for those living in the present? Should contemporary states pay reparations to the descendants of the victims of historic wrongdoing? Many writers have dismissed the moral urgency of rectificatory justice in a domestic context, as a result of their forward-looking accounts of distributive justice. Rectifying International Injustice argues that historical international injustice raises a series of distinct theoretical problems, as a result of the popularity (...) of backward-looking accounts of distributive justice in an international context. It lays out three morally relevant forms of connection with the past, based in ideas of benefit, entitlement and responsibility. Those living in the present may have obligations to pay compensation insofar as they are benefiting, and others are suffering, as a result of the effects of historic injustice. They may be in possession of property which does not rightly belong to them, but to which others have inherited entitlements. Finally, they may be members of political communities which bear collective responsibility for an ongoing failure to rectify historic injustice. Rectifying International Injustice considers each of these three linkages with the past in detail. It examines the complicated relationship between rectificatory justice and distributive justice, assesses the appropriateness of judging the past by contemporary moral standards, and argues that many of those who resist cosmopolitan demands for the global redistribution of resources have failed to appreciate the extent to which past wrongdoing undermines the legitimacy of contemporary resource holdings. (shrink)

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts (...) to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket. (shrink)

Political Beckett? In September 1941, one of the twentieth century’s most apparently non-political artists secretly took up arms against fascism. Samuel Beckett, who with exquisite timing for a notorious pessimist was born on Good Friday 1906, had been living in Paris since 1937, self-exiled from his native country in the manner of many an eminent Irish writer. The Irish, unlike their erstwhile colonial proprietors, have always been a cosmopolitan nation, from the nomadic monks of the Middle Ages to the (...) corporate executives of the Celtic Tiger. If the oppressiveness of colonial rule turned some of them into nationalists, it turned others into citizens of the world. Joyce, Synge, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy, men already caught between two or three cultures and languages, were to flourish in the rootless, polyglot, ambience of high-modernist Europe, rather as half a century later their compatriots were to embrace the European Union. It helped, in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never be taken for granted. (shrink)

The period from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C. was one of extraordinary creativity in the Greek-speaking world. Poetry was a public and popular medium, and its production was closely related to developments in contemporary society. At the time when the city states were acquiring their distinctive institutions epic found the greatest of all its exponents in Homer, and lyric poetry for both solo and choral performance became a genre which attracted poets of the first rank, writers of (...) the quality of Sappho, Alcaeus and Pindar, whose influence on later literature was to be profound. This volume covers the epic tradition, the didactic poems of Hesiod and his imitators, and the wide-ranging work of the iambic, elegiac and lyric poets of what is loosely called the archaic age. The contributors make use of recent papyrus finds to fill out the picture of a cosmopolitan and highly sophisticated literary culture which had not yet found its intellectual centre in Athens. (shrink)

In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material. Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed (...) second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali. To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand and Northern Thailand. These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular. (shrink)

This short essay takes stock of H.L. Mencken's portrayal of Samuel Johnson as the "first Rotarian" and as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the prejudices and defender of the authorities of his time. I suggest by contrast that Johnson was fully appreciative of the need for the writer to be at a distance from the prejudices of his age and that rather than a mind blinkered by deep national prejudices Johnson was in fact a "Good European" as cosmopolitan (...) in spirit as he was English in his character. (shrink)

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions—among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi— Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of (...) a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and British Deism, or religious reformation. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization. (shrink)

Critical readings of the novels and essays by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid tend to emphasize the social and political aspects of his work. In his discussion of Hamid's best known novel, Peter Morey, for example, affirms that "in both its form … and its content, The Reluctant Fundamentalist addresses contemporary questions about national vs globalized structures of power."1 He then goes on to cite Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen, for whom the novel "is concerned with subjects like cross-cultural romance, (...) transnational capitalism, and the limits of cosmopolitan space."2 As they see it, the story of Changez, the novel's protagonist, "is about the resurgence of inter-national politics from within the carapace of... (shrink)

À partir d'une première analyse d'un corpus d'environ 60 000 messages de solidarité, provenant du monde entier et recueillis à la gare d'Atocha depuis les attentats du 11 mars 2004 jusqu'à mars 2005, cet article présente trois registres d'expression de l'émotion en réaction à des attentats. Ce qui caractérise chacun d'eux, c'est la façon dont le scripteur définit sa relation avec les victimes, dont il répond à la question: en quoi les victimes et moi sommes-nous pareils? Si c'est en tant (...) qu'ils vivent ensemble à Madrid ou en Espagne, il adoptera un «registre communautariste». Si c'est parce qu'ils appartiennent à l'humanité, il s'orientera vers un « registre pacifiste». Si c'est parce qu'ils sont chacun des personnes singulières, sa réaction pourra s'exprimer au travers d'un « registre cosmopolitique ». Mais ce cosmopolitisme du coeur ne se confond pas avec l'universalisme de raison qui sous-tend le registre pacifiste.From a first analysis of a corpus of about 60,000 messages of solidarity from around the world and collected at the Atocha since the attacks of 11 March 2004 until March 2005, this article There are three registers expression of emotion in response to the attacks. What characterizes each of them, this is how the writer defines his relationship with the victims, it answers the question: how victims and me are we the same? If it is as they live together in Madrid or Spain, it will adopt a "communitarian register." If it is because they belong to humanity, it will move towards a "pacifist register." If it is because they are each unique individuals, the reaction can be expressed through a "registry cosmopolitan." But this cosmopolitan heart not to be confused with the universal reason underlying the pacifist register. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 659-676 [Access article in PDF] Adam Smith's "Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review" Jeffrey Lomonaco One of Adam Smith's first publications was a letter addressed to the editors of the Edinburgh Review, printed anonymously in the second issue of the semiannual periodical in 1756. 1 The compact text entitled "A LETTER to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review," which (...) has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, offers valuable insight into Smith's work and career, and not merely because it confirms that Smith was an unusually widely-read man of letters long before he was the retrospectively anointed founder of the discipline of economics, though it does that. Indeed, the thirty-two-year-old writer presumes to pass judgment on the writing and learning of Europe as a whole and specifically assesses the only recently published work of Rousseau, the Encyclopédie project still in progress, and the work of Réaumur, Buffon and Daubenton, Descartes, Newton, and others. In this text (whose authorship was known well before Dugald Stewart noted it in his biographical account in the early 1790s) Smith delineates a space of learning that is at once Scottish, British, and European, mapping out a set of relations of complex rivalry between France, England, and Scotland in order to articulate and advocate a cosmopolitan patriotism. 2 He suggests that while England occupied the preeminent position in learning in the past, France does so in the present, and Scotland is in a position to do so in the near future, if it is properly incited. Smith's careful [End Page 659] rhetorical incitement of his Scottish contemporaries to fulfill this promise of future primacy in learning also reveals his own ambitions and how he proposed to realize them.My reading of the text will throw into relief Smith's strategy and show how, although Smith does not name his good friend David Hume, he subtly expresses his own allegiances to the Humean science of man as the way for Scotland to achieve primacy in the world of learning, and he indicates that the most important task facing the world of knowledge—the task he takes as his own—concerns the proper systematic organization and presentation of moral knowledge. That Smith's is a subtle writerly performance which calls for attention to the grain of the text is itself part of the point of my interpretation, especially since the rhetorical care Smith took in composition is generally underestimated, or at least not adequately attended to in detail. 3 Judging Rivals The Edinburgh Review was a project begun by a number of members of the Select Society, one of those social vehicles of improvement and enlightenment that flourished throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. 4 Smith was a founding member of the Select Society in 1754 and may have been one of the initiators of the periodical, to the inaugural 1755 issue of which he contributed a review of Johnson's Dictionary. 5 The preface of the opening issue of the Review, probably written by the editor Alexander Wedderburn, a close friend of Smith's, positioned the Review as Scotland's somewhat belated contribution to the widespread European print enterprise of bringing advances in knowledge to the attention of the public. 6 The purpose of the periodical, Wedderburn's preface declared, was to demonstrate "the progressive state of learning in this country" and thereby to incite Scots "to a more eager pursuit of learning, to [End Page 660] distinguish themselves, and to do honour to their country." 7 To these ends each issue of the Review was going "to give a full account of all books published in Scotland within the compass of half a year; and to take some notice of such books published elsewhere, as are most read in this country, or seem to have any title to draw the public attention." 8 The title page of the first issue, which appeared on 26 August 1755 and which covered books published between 1 January and... (shrink)

Against the background of a profound critique of human rights, cosmopolitan universalism and humanistic political agency offered by writers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Jenny Edkins, this essay seeks to recover and rethink the figure of humanity. Arguing that the critique of biopolitics and sovereignty unwittingly frustrates visions of human dignity and agency that can serve as a resource against its abuses, the essay argues that a vision of interdependent, indebted, and dispersed human being – (...) one that can never be reduced to the ego or subject or an arc of history – is both an undeniable global fact and a normative resource. Conceived as a primary value that should normatively precede and condition politics, even as it never escapes it, humanity is a system of relations with animals, ecosystems, and physical/cosmic environments which occasions profound collective responsibilities. Always intertwined with the powers and terrors of human capacity and action, such a vision is at once a source of philosophical hope and an endless task of critical political work. (shrink)

The environment and sociopolitical contexts in which we dwell shape our approach to the world. Islands, following Pádraig Ó Tuama, trigger an openness to other persons and sites. They fuel the comity of their inhabitants, motivate their interconnection with others, and thus sharpen their sense of morality. The Caribbean islands, and the Americas writ large, are also sites of both genocide and of a novel way to embrace the world. The peoples of the Caribbean islands have used the predicaments of (...) isolation, displacement, and genocide to initiate a mode of living that is best articulated, in the contemporary period, through the concept of créolization. The authors considered in this essay have expanded our understanding of the créolization. They have made specific the experiential thread of resilience that undergirds the meaning of créolization. In Condé’s work, the resilience is highlighted through the individual writer’s creativity. Sealy, for her part, expands the meaning of créolization to model a prospective inclusionary polity in the form of a créolizing nation. As we know, nations are not isolated entities; they are part of a conglomeration with other nations. Getachew completes the study to show that the cosmopolitan world that we might aspire to reach can benefit from the post-World War II efforts of Caribbean and African postcolonial nations. In truth, we realize with these authors that a moral and equitable international environment has been the articulated goal of Caribbean peoples since arguably the sixteenth century. It is a goal consonant with all of the perennial humanist ideals of modernity. (shrink)

H. G. Wells’s The Rights of Man —which provided the groundwork for the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights—has been re-released with a new Introduction by novelist Ali Smith, who reminds us of Wells’s political prophetic call for “a real federation of mankind,” and of the fact that we have still failed to meet the future he envisioned. If we are to catch up with Wells, we must, however, examine the foundations of Wells’s “cosmopolitan” vision, which requires examining both (...) his scientific non-fiction and his scientific romances. Looking to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in particular, and the influence of Wells’s early scientific essays on Moreau’s narrative, we get a picture of Wells as a writer and a man who is anxious about the identity and future of the human species, but who nevertheless puts his faith in the “apparatuses” of “education and moral suggestion,” which are held together by “common faith.” Much like Charles Taylor and Simon Critchley, Wells calls for more than a political reconstitution, or institution, of right: he calls for a new cosmic imaginary, or supreme fiction, that has the potential to redeem and preserve the human species. (shrink)

The trope of Kuwait runs through numerous stories by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, including his well-known novella, Men in the Sun. Using Deleuze's clinical methodology, this paper maps Kanafani's Kuwait stories symptomatically to determine what the legacy of the Kanafani effect might be for contemporary Kuwait. It considers what his textual conjunction of affects and percepts did at the time and whether they can do anything now. Kanafani's position as a seminal figure within Palestinian national and resistance literature is well-recognised; (...) however, his specific location in Kuwait at a key period of its development is generally overlooked. His clinical diagnosis of the relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 1950s can provoke a reconsideration of that early period, especially relevant in light of post-1991 events. In addition to his writing, his actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s expresses an early promise of Kuwait as an open and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and today mostly forgotten. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is interviewed by an uncomprehending journalist and driven to desperation (...) by the philistinism of Australian society. But his own arrogance, unexamined white and male privilege, and illusion that just because he practices what he calls cinema vérité he has in fact attained the truth mean that he is part of the problem as well. Kinsella examines the problematics of social critique in a neoliberal world, noting their ironies while still believing in their possibility and necessity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses As Rushdie’s Love Letter to IslamFeroza Jussawalla (bio)Meheruban likhoon ya dilruba likhoon hyran hoon ke apke khat me kya likhoonYe mera prempatr padh kar ke tum naraz na hona ke tum meri zindagi ho ke tum meri bandagi ho[Should I address you as respected one Should I address you as beloved one I am so distraught about how I should address youWhen you read (...) my love letter You should not be disappointed Because you are my life and you are my “life’s work”]—Popular Hindi film song from Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) [my translation]Salman Rushdie has been classified as a postcolonial 1 writer whose fiction depicts the hybrid nature of postcolonials in their migrations and movements, their merging and mixing. Rushdie has variously been called a “Third World Cosmopolitan” [Brennan, Salman Rushdie viii], a “metropolitan intellectual,” and “a hybrid” but most often a [End Page 50] “postcolonial,” because of his “birth” as a “Midnight’s child”—a child born as India was gaining independence at midnight on 14 August 1947 2 —his subsequent education in England, and the making of his home in metropolitan London. Such a perspective is eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie’s complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a “post-British” colonial but also a “post-Mughal” colonial.The British were not the only colonizers of India. In fact, Indian historians have traditionally identified several waves of colonization. Journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre best summarize the two major waves of colonization as follows:Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the North to wrest the subcontinent from its ancient Dravidian inhabitants.... The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus’ hold on the great Gangetic Plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.[Freedom at Midnight 36]While the British were actually occupying India, post-Mughal colonialism in the form of Persian poetry, literature, and the general “sumptuousness” of its art and architecture held sway. The Persian language begot Urdu, often described by linguists as a “camp language” of the Muslim invaders of the Subcontinent. However, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi had come together to create a new language for the poetry, literature, arts, and in general the “high culture” of today’s Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his definitive history of India entitled Discovery of India, wrote,The Mughals were outsiders and strangers to India and yet they fitted into Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.... Their dynasties became completely Indianized with their roots in India, looking upon India as their homeland, and the rest of the world as foreign.[236]A synthesis worked itself out: new styles of architecture arose; food and clothing changed; and life was affected and varied in many other ways.... The Persian language became the official court language and many Persian words crept into popular use.[237]Persian was the lingua franca of the incoming Muslims from AD 1193 onward, and Persian literature became the favored literature of India for approximately five centuries [Ali 3–4].It is in this tradition of post-Mughal Urdu high culture that Rushdie grew up. In a 1983 interview with Michael Kaufman, Rushdie said,My grandfather, my father’s father, was a good Urdu poet. My father is not a writer but he’s a very literary and literate man, a student of both Arabic and Persian Literature and of Western Literature. At Cambridge he was quite scholarly. So I grew up in an atmosphere of books. And both my parents, in their different ways, were very gifted storytellers. [End Page 51]My mother, in common with most Eastern women and perhaps even women of the West, was the... (shrink)

This essay examines the persistent engagement with cosmopolitan inclusivity through the endorsement of indigenous sacredness in works of ethnographic fiction. I focus on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, James Cameron’s Avatar, and Taiwanese writer Ming-yi Wu’s science fiction The Man with the Compound Eyes, three iconic environmental representations of indigenous knowledge. These texts illustrate how indigenous thinking has very often been transformed from place-bound, locally-embedded cultural traditions to an embodiment of Euro-American eco-spirituality that overturns both national boundaries (...) and the humannature divide at the turn of the twenty-first century. In settler environmental narratives, the insistence on the ethnographic mode strengthens the desire for authenticity and intimacy. (shrink)

After a thorough classical education, Chen Duxiu went on to be a pioneering reform writer and activist, leader of the New Culture movement, Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Beijing University, and cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party. His writings are usually brief and polemical, and he rarely pauses to expound on the meanings of central theoretical terms. He is nonetheless an astute and coherent author, not easily pigeonholed as "nationalist," "individualist," "cosmopolitan," or any of the numerous other (...) categories under which scholars have filed him. Prior to 1921 his writings regularly touched on rights and human rights; the following well-known essay provides a flavor of his concern for equality and individual self-determination. Chen moved away from talk of human rights during his career as a leader in the Chinese Communist Party, although he did return to the ideas of freedoms and rights later in life, after expulsion from the Party. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers how various European novels written and published around the turn of the millennium may be grouped together as an historically and geographically contingent literary genre, while also reflecting on the implications of this. In doing so, this essay coins the term ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’ to best describe this genre of literary works. Ultimately, this genre suggests, first of all, that the sense of melancholy obsolescence articulated by European writers at this time is not confined to discrete (...) national literary contexts. Moreover, this essay argues, it implies a form of solidarity among these writers and their works, such that they encapsulate the possibility of working through the melancholy of history precisely through the aesthetic similarities among their literary explorations of it. Contemporaneous melancholy works of European literature are understood here as ‘cosmopolitan’ in a hermeneutic sense: their aesthetics resonate with each other beyond discrete national literary contexts, while also exemplifying individually assumed poses of melancholy amid a broader collective. In construing European melancholy aesthetics as a form of cosmopolitanism, then, the literary genre proposed by this essay suggests that mutual articulations of melancholy in various European novels collectively embody a potential for the melancholy of history to be overcome. (shrink)

The author reveals Fyodor Dostoevsky's works main features, his importance for Russian and world philosophy. The researcher analyzes the concept of "Russian Idea" introduced by Dostoyevsky, which became a study subject in Russian philosophy's subsequent history. The polemics that arose regarding the characteristics of Dostoevsky's soilness ideology and his interpretation of the Russian Idea in his Pushkin Speech and subsequent comments in A Writer's Diary are unveiled. The author concludes that Dostoevsky overcomes the limitations of soilness and comes to universalism. (...) The universal for him does not have a rootless cosmopolitan character but is born from the national's heyday. Diversity adorns the truth, and national diversity enamels humankind. People's real unity is in that all-human value that is found in the highest examples of each national culture. The truth is not in rootless cosmopolitanism or nationalism - it is in the "golden mean," which, in our opinion, the writer-philosopher sought to express. Dostoevsky wanted to rise above the dispute, to recognize the points of view of the Slavophiles and Westernizers as one-sided, to get out of any particularity to universality. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on (...) premises that upset Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)

Introduction -- Cosmopolitanism -- Collective self-defense -- Subsistence wars -- Humanitarian intervention -- Commodified wars -- Asymmetrical wars -- Conclusion.

This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and reparative justice, (...) the punishment of war criminals, the resort to transitional foreign administration as a means to govern war-torn territories, and the deployment of peacekeeping and occupation forces. It also outlines various reconciliatory and commemorative practices which might facilitate the emergence of trust amongst enemies and thereby improve prospects for peace. The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples. (shrink)

I defend the cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession, according to which a group has a right to secede only if this would promote cosmopolitan justice. I argue that the theory is preferable to other theories of secession because it is an entailment of cosmopolitanism, which is independently attractive, and because, unlike other theories of secession, it allows us to give the answers we want to give in cases like secession of the rich or secession that would make things (...) worse for minorities. I defend the view against the objections that it allows for colonialism and annexation, that it is not a distinct theory, and that it is impractical. (shrink)

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.

This article examines how the historian deals with ‘information’ broadly conceived, especially its acquisition, retention and loss. Ammianus details a complex interplay between those who control information and those who must work with an information deficit. Just as this dialogue plays out within the text, however, so too does it with respect to the author's methodology, which dances between the poles of incomplete and complete information depending on circumstance. Ammianus thus becomes an author as hard to pin down as many (...) of his characters, by turns the omniscient narrator and the dumbfounded participant. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan political theorists hold that our obligations to distribute resources to others do not halt at state borders, but most do not advocate a restructuring of the global system to achieve their distributive aims. This article argues that promoting democratically accountable economic and political integration between states would be the most effective way to enable cosmopolitan, or routine, tax-financed, trans-state distributions. Movement toward a more integrated global system should encourage the view that larger sets of persons have interests (...) in common that should be protected and promoted in common. Democratically accountable integration also should enable those within less-affluent states to more vigorously press trans-state distributive claims. The still-evolving E.U. is examined as a partial model for the integrated alternative in other geographic regions, as well as, in the much longer term, for some form of democratic global government capable of ensuring that any person born anywhere would have access to adequate resources and life opportunities. (shrink)

Increasing global economic integration and recent military interventions in the name of human rights have forced questions of global justice into political discussions. Is the unequal distribution of wealth across the globe just? What's wrong with imperialism? Are the most indebted countries obligated to pay back their loans to international financ.

Jeremy Waldron’s essay centres around Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on cosmopolitan education: Nussbaum argues that we should make ‘world citizenship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, the focus for civic education’. The essay provides just a few examples to illustrate the concrete particularity of the world community for which we are urged by Nussbaum to take responsibility, with the aim of refuting the view of those who condemn cosmopolitanism as an abstraction. The arguments for and against Nussbaum’s idea are presented, (...) and one of the opposing views highlighted: that cosmopolitan moral education is not just an education in moral ideas; it is an education in the particular ways in which people have inhabited the world. The different sections of the chapter look at how a society becomes multicultural, the infrastructure of cultural interaction, the identification of citizenship, the language of citizenship, and its concrete reality and its cosmopolitan dimensions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to outline a Kantian form of cosmopolitan law and the jurisprudence involved in the creation of a cosmopolitan constitution. This article explores and discusses Kantian cosmopolitan law, the idea of cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality and a Kantian approach to constitutional cosmopolitanism. In doing so, the article argues beyond Kant's discussion of constitutionalism, suggesting that a written constitution not only articulates many of Kant's cosmopolitan concerns, but also provides (...) a reasonable ethical foundation for an international society. Throughout this discussion, more particular aspects of Kant's legal conception of cosmopolitanism are examined, focusing on the possibility of an ethical cosmopolitan order based on jurisprudence, the necessity of a minimal consensus bound by constitutional provisions, and the corresponding legal obligations maintained by cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)