Cosmopolitanisms
Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock
There must be some way out of here.
Cosmopolitanism comprises some of today’s most challenging problems of academic analysis and political practice, especially when analysis and practice are seen—as they are seen in the essays that make up this collection— as a conjoint activity. For one thing, cosmopolitanism is not some known entity existing in the world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant, that simply awaits more detailed description at the hands of scholarship. We are not exactly certain what it is, and figuring out why this is so and what cosmopolitanism may be raises difficult conceptual issues. As a practice, too, cosmopolitanism is yet to come, something awaiting realization. Again, this is not because we already understand and can practice it but have not—a mode of action whose rules we are familiar with and need merely to apply. Cosmopolitanism may instead be a project whose conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only as yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do.
The indeterminacy of how to achieve a cosmopolitan political practice feeds back into the problem of academic analysis. As a historical category, the cosmopolitan should be considered entirely open, and not pregiven or foreclosed by the definition of any particular society or discourse. Its various embodiments, including past embodiments, await discovery and explication. In this way, the components of the linked academic-political activity of cosmopolitanism become mutually reinforcing: new descriptions of cosmopolitanism as a historical phenomenon and theoretical object may suggest new practices, even as better practices may offer a better understanding of the theory and history of cosmopolitanism.
The foregoing assessment is not always acknowledged, let alone explicitly argued, in various recent contributions to the discussion of cosmopolitanism.1 These texts do serve, however, to suggest that the sense of timeliness or even urgency about the question of cosmopolitanism that has motivated the editors of this special issue of Public Culture is widely shared. And it is worth pausing a moment, before exploring further the approaches adopted in the essays that follow, to consider what accounts for this renewed concern. Three closely related forces that are powerfully at work in the contemporary world seem especially pertinent: nationalism, globalization, and multiculturalism.
The twentieth century ended much as it began, convincingly demonstrating that nationalism, whether of an ethnic or religious or other stripe, has lost little of its power for producing evil in the world. In recognizing the harm that nationalism does in promoting territorially based identities, we do not suggest that it has been always and only a negative force. It is famously Janus-faced, and nowhere more so than in the non-West. The emphasis of anticolonial nationalisms on boundaries and territories has something to do with how European colonialism was experienced by the colonized. For many, colonialism was an acute experience of displacement. Some people were literally displaced (indigenous peoples, but also the so-called nomadic in many countries). Others, in particular those excited by and open to the newly introduced European knowledges, underwent a powerful cultural experience of being dislodged from “tradition.” Think only of the various culture wars, typical of many non-Western nationalisms, over the merits and demerits of Westernization.
These experiences gave meaning to nationalist emphases on a family of ideas all of which, in the end, connected identities to imaginations of place: home, boundary, territory, and roots. These imaginations were not always tied to fixed geographical places. Pakistan, for instance, while definitely imagined from as early as the 1920s as a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, had only the vaguest geographical referent for a long time in its career as a concept. Yet it was powerful in its capacity to address the experience of cultural and political displacement that colonialism had meant for many Muslims in South Asia. Thus, the nationalist search for home and authenticity may have been modern— and vulnerable, therefore, to postmodern critiques of all static, reified, and bounded imaginations of place and home—but it was not, for that reason, inauthentic or illegitimate in itself.
Granting a legitimacy to nationalism does not, however, take away from the point that the modernist (and nationalist) insistence on territorialized imaginations of identity has produced horrendous conflicts in recent history. Besides, in a world increasingly deterritorialized by migration, mediatization, and capital flows, modernist nationalisms with their tendency to connect cultures and identities to specific places have become an ever more retrograde ideology, even as they retain ever greater power to produce history.
This is not, to be sure, precisely the same history over and over. The events at the end of the twentieth century that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia are not easily brought under the same explanatory umbrella as those at its beginning that accompanied the breakup of the Habsburg Empire. Nationalism is not just Janus-like but is also protean. Degrees of popular support, emotional cathexis, and official manipulation differ from case to case. In addition to this multiform phenomenology of nationalism, there are countless other factors that serve to differentiate the Sarajevo of 1994 from the Sarajevo of 1914. Not the least is that, the second time around, the cosmopolitan character of the city and all that it stood for were finally destroyed.
But we would have to be fussy pedants to allow finer points of historical differences to obscure the overpowering and deeply disquieting recognition of repetition and even intensification. Moreover, the morphing of empire into nationstate and nation-state into national-statelets is no longer just a Balkan game but a universal one. Some of its most deadly serious participants are the new players of the postcolonial world, those, for instance, who seek an independent Kashmir— a failed state in the making if there ever was one—in the perilous space between two brand-new nuclear powers. It is not simply that we are going forward into the past; we are going into a past that is at the same time somehow new, a grotesque caricature of the past where the propositions of Western modernity, now catastrophically universalized, are being re-enacted. We are headed toward a League of Nations with ten thousand fractious and anxious expansion teams.
This is not a good way to organize human life.
There’s too much confusion,
I can’t get no relief
Emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism are riven with deep historical ironies about what it means to live in our times. What defines our times? What times are ours? It is too easy to name our moment as post–Cold War or transnational. It is fundamentally facile to claim (as many do) that new media and market technologies have ushered in undreamed of possibilities of access and connectivity on a global scale, rendering the postcolonial paradigms of justice and redistribution obsolete in the face of choice, opportunity, and enterprise. Yet despite our discontents and discomfitures, we are properly resistant to a radical revanchism that seeks a return to the certainties of a world of the either/or: either First or Third World; either communism or capitalism; either planned economies or free markets; either the secular or the sacred; either class politics above all other differences or a betrayal of the spirit of History itself.
Cosmopolitanism, in its wide and wavering nets, catches something of our need to ground our sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition. The twilight of Transition, rather than the dawn of millennial transformation, marks the questions of our times: Do we live in a post–Cold War world tout court, or in the long shadow of that disastrous postwar experience of superpower collusion and competition that deformed the development of the rest of the world? Is South Africa free or is its anxious emancipation still caught in the unresolved pursuit for truth and reconciliation? Is one measure of the (lack of) success of New Labor in Great Britain its inability to deal with the old colonial problem of Northern Ireland? Is the nuclear contest between India and Pakistan part of the newly found confidence of postcolonial nations or the endgame of the trials of Partition?
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Notes
All epigraphs are taken from Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower.
- 1. See, for instance, Martha Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); Kimberly Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther, eds., Cosmopolitan Citizenship (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Roel Meijer, ed., Cosmopolitanism, Identity, and Authenticity in the Middle East (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999); and Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Apparently unknown to the authors in Cosmopolitics is the remarkable series of studies by the historian of science Isabelle Stengers, which argues for a form of politics no longer contained within the separation of nature and society that characterizes Enlightenment and modernity. Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, 7 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1997).