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This collection addresses broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the framework of vernacular cosmopolitanism. With a common anthropological focus, the essays map literary and artistic practices involving cross-cultural transactions shaped by social forces, institutions, and the multiple mediations of the imagination. Some essays are based on community-based fieldwork, while all encompass an affective immersion in the places we inhabit, and the claims these make on the body’s intelligibility. The authors consider the role of artists, writers, and literary scholars as cultural actors in a variety of settings, grassroots, regional, trans-regional, and global. Topics include: the role of social and cultural activism; the problematic dimensions of national belonging; the plurality of knowledge-systems and inter-language environ-mental learning in South Africa; the vernacular imagination in Papua New Guinea Anglophone fiction; pulp fiction and chick lit in India; transformative artistic motifs of Australia’s nomadic Tiwi community; life writing as a reconfiguring of postcolonial or cosmopolitan paradigms; southern African supernatural belief-systems and the malign magic of the global economy; Canadian First Nations literature read against the struggle for self-determination by India’s castes and scheduled tribes; feral animals in relation to the indigenous exotic; and the imbrication of the vernacular, national, colonial, and cosmopolitan in perceptions of homecoming in the eastern Mediterranean. The collection as a whole thus provides manifestations of poesis in relation to theory and praxis and articulates perspectives that expand, challenge, strengthen, and renew the potential for growth in contemporary world literature and culture.
A fresh assessment of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory.
In late nineteenth-century South Asia, the arrival of print fostered a dynamic and interactive literary culture. There, within the pages of Urdu-language periodicals and newspapers, readers found a public sphere that not only catered to their interests but encouraged their reactions to featured content. Cosmopolitan Dreams brings this culture to light, showing how literature became a site in which modern daily life could be portrayed and satirized, the protocols of modernity challenged, and new futures imagined. Drawing on never-before-translated Urdu fiction and prose and focusing on the novel and satire, Jennifer Dubrow shows that modern Urdu literature was defined by its practice of self-critique and parody. Urdu writers resisted the cultural models offered by colonialism, creating instead a global community of imagination in which literary models could freely circulate and be readapted, mixed, and drawn upon to develop alternative lines of thinking. Highlighting the participation of readers and writers from diverse social and religious backgrounds, the book reveals an Urdu cosmopolis where lively debates thrived in newspapers, literary journals, and letters to the editor, shedding fresh light on the role of readers in shaping vernacular literary culture. Arguing against current understandings of Urdu as an exclusively Muslim language, Dubrow demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Urdu was a cosmopolitan language spoken by a transregional, transnational community that eschewed identities of religion, caste, and class. The Urdu cosmopolis pictured here was soon fractured by the forces of nationalism and communalism. Even so, Dubrow is able to establish the persistence of Urdu cosmopolitanism into the present and shows that Urdu’s strong tradition as a language of secular, critical modernity did not end in the late nineteenth century but continues to flourish in film, television, and on line. In lucid prose, Dubrow makes the dynamic world of colonial Urdu print culture come to life in a way that will interest scholars of modern Asian literatures, South Asian literature and history, cosmopolitanism, and the history of print culture.
Gathering scholars from five continents, this edited book displaces the elitist image of cosmopolitan as well as the blame addressed to aesthetic cosmopolitanism often considered as merely cosmetic. By considering aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a tool to understand how individuals and social groups appropriate the sphere of culture in a global world, the authors are concerned with its operationalization on two strongly interwoven levels, macro and micro, structural and individual. Based on the discussion of theoretical perspectives and empirically grounded research (qualitative and quantitative, conducted in many countries), this volume unveils new insights, on tourism and food, architecture and museums, TV series and movies, rock, K-pop and samba, by providing resources for making sense of aesthetic preferences in a global perspective. Contributors are: Felicia Chan, Vincenzo Cicchelli, Talitha Alessandra Ferreira, Paula Iadevito, Sukhmani Khorana, Anne Krebs, Antoinette Kujilaars, Franck Mermier, Sylvie Octobre, Joana Pellerano, Rosario Radakovich, Motti Regev, Viviane Riegel, Clara Rodriguez, Leslie Sklair, Yi-Ping Eva Shi, Claire Thoumelin and Dario Verderame.
The book captures key moments in the critical and creative dialogue of literary scholars, poets and artists with poet, author, documentary film-maker and literary scholar Stephanos Stephanides. Employing a polyphonic and cross-disciplinary perspective, the twenty-three essays and creative pieces flow together in cycles of continuities and discontinuities, emulating Stephanides’s fluid and transgressive universe. Drawing on the broad topic of borders and crossings, Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders offers critical material on themes such as space and place, dislocation and migration, journeys and bridges, movement and fluidity, the aesthetics and the politics of the sea, time, nostalgia and (trans)cultural memory, identity and poetics, translation and translatability, home and homecoming. An invaluable reference for anyone interested in the crosscurrents between the poetic, the cultural and the political.
With the majority of the world's population now living in cities, questions about the cultural and political trajectories of urban societies are increasingly urgent. Media and the City explores the global city as the site where these questions become most prominent. As a space of intense communication and difference, the global city forces us to think about the challenges of living in close proximity to each other. Do we really see, hear and understand our neighbours? This engaging book examines the contradictory realities of cosmopolitanization as these emerge in four interfaces: consumption, identity, community and action. Each interface is analysed through a set of juxtapositions to reveal the global city as a site of antagonisms, empathies and co-existing particularities. Timely, interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival, Media and the City will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies and sociology, and of interest to those concerned with the growing role of the media in changing urban societies.
Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands, at its heart lies the question of interpreting and understanding encounters between the western colonial powers and the nations across the globe that they colonized. Colonization was not just an economic, military or political process, but one that radically affected culture and identity across the world. It is a field in which interpretation comes to the fore, and much of its force depends on addressing the complex legacy of colonial encounters by careful, sustained attention to the meaning of the traces that they left on colonized cultures. What Bhabha’s writing, like so much postcolonial thought, shows is that the arts of clarification and definition that underpin good interpretation are rarely the same as simplification. Indeed, good interpretative clarification is often about pointing out and dividing the different kinds of complexity at play in a single process or term. For Bhabha, the object is identity itself, as expressed in the ideas colonial powers had about themselves. In his interpretation, what at first seems to be the coherent set of ideas behind colonialism soon breaks down into a complex mass of shifting stances – yielding something much closer to postcolonial thought than a first glance at his sometimes dauntingly complex suggests.
At a time when social and political reality seems to move away from the practice of cosmopolitanism, whilst being in serious need of a new international framework to regulate global interaction, what are the new definitions and practices of cosmopolitanism? Including contributions from leading figures across the humanities and social sciences, After Cosmopolitanism takes up this question as its central challenge. Its core argument is the idea that our globalised condition forms the heart of contemporary cosmopolitan claims, which do not refer to a transcendental ideal, but are rather immanent to the material conditions of global interdependence. But to what extent do emerging definitions of cosmopolitanism contribute to new representative democratic models of governance? The present volume argues that a radical transformation of cosmopolitanism is already ongoing and that more effort is needed to take stock of transformations which are both necessary and possible. To this end, After Cosmopolitanism calls for an understanding of cosmopolitanism that is more attentive to the material reality of our social and political situation and less focused on linguistic analyses of its metaphorical implications. It is the call for a cosmopolitanism that is also a cosmopolitics.
"Reimagines the vernacular as a critical concept for rethinking world literatures"--
Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.