*New course offering:

CLST 2007: Special Topics in Humanities

Rethinking Cosmopolitanism

Spring 2010

Coordinated by Jonathan Arac (ENG)

With visiting scholar Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)

One (1) credit seminar: Credit/No Credit grading            

Organized around the Humanities Center visit of senior fellow Bruce Robbins in early May, this seminar will include four Thursday meetings before the visit of Prof. Robbins (12:30-2:00 on 1/21, 2/25, 4/1, 4/22), and five meetings during his visit (11:00-1:00, May 3-7). Credit will be awarded for attendance and participation in all meetings. No paper required, although the opportunity for a later piece of writing growing from the seminar is anticipated, in conjunction with a workshop organized around a return visit by Prof. Robbins.

The recent growth in references to "cosmopolitanism" as a term of value and virtue, a growth which has been explosive and extraordinarily wide-ranging across various zones of intellectual labor, makes this a good moment to stop and scrutinize both the functions the concept is currently serving and how it might be made to do new and perhaps more desirable sorts of work. That is what is proposed here. Two decades of attention to "descriptive" or "actually existing" cosmopolitanism have extended its cast of characters far beyond the leisured, privileged Europeans to whom the label, whether as sign of honor or of treachery, was initially attached. But this extension raises a host of questions, not the least of them how far the concept’s classical normative sense– a primary or overriding allegiance to humanity as a whole– remains relevant to the political actions and attitudes of the diasporas and other groups to whom it is now applied. What forms of multiple citizenship result from the forms of multiple loyalty and multiple belonging that are so distinctive of our era? To what extent does one "belong" globally via the foreign commodities one buys, the job one loses (or finds), the protest one voices against distant human rights abuses? What is the discourse of cosmopolitanism doing on the global scene? For example, what is one to make of the fact that on the one hand indigenous peoples are now described as cosmopolitan, and with good reason, while on the other hand, cosmopolitanism is one of the most powerful ideological weapons leveled against the claims of indigenous peoples, as in Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism?

The example of indigenous people, who often speak in terms of "how things have been since time immemorial" (Ward Churchill), also helps raise the question of what cosmopolitanism would look like if applied to create not just a non-Eurocentric intellectual space, but also a more inclusive or self-questioning sense of belonging (or detachment) in time.

Cosmopolitanism has often been presentist, as it is in Appiah. That has been essential to its moral appeal. But it seems clear that we cannot rely on the assumption that cosmopolitanism is the natural or inevitable cultural endpoint that accompanies the process of globalization– a more acceptable version of "modernity." If we are to take cosmopolitanism seriously, the meta-narratives or "big stories" will have to be re-written. Marcus Aurelius, the stoic cosmopolitan, fought "the barbarians" along the Danube (the indigenous peoples of his day) and back in Rome had Christians tortured and executed. But of course the Christians were not kinder and gentler to Jews, pagans, and heretics, and the so-called barbarians along the Danube no doubt had much to answer for themselves. Inspired by the indigenous revival, temporal cosmopolitanism widens the field of ancestors who can be honored. But it also confuses further the identity of the colonizers and the colonized, of the indigenous themselves, and thus of the act of bestowing honor. What would a temporal cosmopolitanism look like? Is there a sense of responsibility to people and events distant from us in time that runs parallel to our recently aggravated sense of responsibility to people and events distant from us in space?

These are some of the questions that will be raised by means of a survey of cosmopolitanism both across the disciplines (anthropology, sociology, philosophy, geography, literature) and across the dimensions of time and space.

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