Cosmopolitanisms

by Bruce Robbins, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bruce Robbins (Editor)

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.

Genres: Philosophy

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Bruce Robbins is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993) and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993) and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2009).

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really good anthology of essays on cosmopolitanism in its various forms, concerns, rooted local variants, philosophical histories, etc. One thing that works really well here is how diverse these essays are, often presenting various sides of central issues in cosmopolitan philosophy (like the role of the city, of travel, or of globalized economics), or to specific local versions of cosmopolitanism (especially Afropolitanism, which has both a philosophical instantiation--theorized particularly by Achille Mbembe--as well as practical applications that often involve elite Africans reproducing European culture with an "African" twist--a version critiqued by Emma Dabri and, to a lesser extent, Ashleigh Harris). Having contrasting voices or opinions on multiple points is really useful for illustrating the complexity of cosmopolitan discourse and highlighting the basic premise laid out in the introduction that cosmopolitanism is not a single unified theory, but really needs to be presented as localized cosmopolitanisms.