“Cosmopolitanism and Knowledge”, Cyrus R. K. Patell
What makes someone a cosmopolitan? And why might it matter to how one lives and learns? In my keynote address I will introduce the history, theory, and practice of cosmopolitan thought, while also exploring how cosmopolitanism might serve as a productive approach to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
Originating in the idea of the world citizen, cosmopolitanism offers not only an alternative to nationalism, but also a way of mediating between the often conflicting claims of universalism and multiculturalism. For some cosmopolitan thinkers, human difference represents an opportunity to be embraced rather than either a problem to be solved or a fact to be tolerated.
My discussion will focus in part on the relation between cosmopolitanism and the liberal arts model of education in the context of the globalization of knowledge, information, and culture in the twenty-first century.
As women have moved across national borders, whether physically as migrants, workers, small business owners, expatriates, tourists (heritage and leisure), scholars, or psychologically, as individuals dreaming of one day “taking a tour” (Jamaica Kincaid), they have pondered, verbally as well as in print, the catalysts, implications, and foremothers of their border crossings.
Through in-depth examinations of the treatment of the international in autobiography, fiction, poetry, scholarly writing, and music lyrics by women, especially Afro-descendent women, we will consider the benefits and the drawbacks of employing cosmopolitanism as a way of reading and discussing women’s cross-border movements.
“The Future of Cosmopolitanism? Examples from the Americas”, Nicole Waller
My contribution will build on the Potsdam RTG’s conception of “minor cosmopolitanisms,” namely the acknowledgement of a multitude of locally and historically specific ways of envisioning a world and conceptualizing a sense of belonging beyond the nation. In this context, both the imperial histories of European conceptions of cosmopolitanism and the anti-, de- and postcolonial challenges and alternatives to these histories must be taken into account.
In this spirit, I will examine theories and practices that engage in acts of worlding and question current forms of the nation-state, but may nevertheless sit uneasily even with contemporary revisions of cosmopolitanism.
Examples will be drawn both from the field of Caribbean studies and the field of Indigenous studies in the Americas. In some Caribbean texts, the Caribbean as a “meta-archipelago” (Benítez-Rojo) is connected to places all over the world via complex histories of colonization and displacement, resulting in the necessity of what Benítez-Rojo calls multiple readings that accommodate both anti-colonial nationalism and global conceptions beyond the nation. In the work of anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla, the contemporary Caribbean appears both as a space of failed sovereignty and as the site of envisioning non-sovereign futures.
In indigenous studies, the ongoing existence of settler-colonialism is frequently at the center of analysis, often resulting in critiques of celebrations of multiculturalism and immigration that fail to acknowledge the urgency of decolonization. In the U.S. context, scholars like Jodi Byrd or Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang are currently engaged in sorting through the connections and “incommensurabilities” of postcolonial and multicultural versions of cosmopolitanism with Native agendas of decolonization.
In Indigenous conceptions of community and polity, there are multiple themes that both reverberate with and trouble theories of cosmopolitanism: a concern with planetary stewardship, the questioning of Euro-American conceptions of the nation-state, the revisiting of indigenous epistemologies of travel and connection, but also examples of the necessity of rootedness, sovereignty, and indigenous nationhood.
My presentation will give an overview of some of the ways in which these theories and practices both enrich contemporary debates on cosmopolitanisms and, at the same time, have the potential to radically rethink or even surpass notions of the cosmopolitan as relevant for conceptions of planetary futures.