Cosmpolitanism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch... more
The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.
The practices and concepts of Muslim cosmopolitanism are rooted in Islamic ideas, providing the foundations for informal “comings together” that foster new kinds of ethical communities. Muslim cosmopolitanism transgresses global normative... more
The practices and concepts of Muslim cosmopolitanism are rooted in Islamic ideas, providing the foundations for informal “comings together” that foster new kinds of ethical communities. Muslim cosmopolitanism transgresses global normative aspirations of the liberal West that attempt to impose a singular way of being a global citizen. The informal, ethical communities that are inherent to a Muslim cosmopolitan vision also reject the absolutist visions of Islamists, such as those promoted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which, like Western liberal aspirations, attempt to impose a singular vision of the global. The article traces Muslim cosmopolitan ethics in the transgressive, informal, fluid, and temporary coming together on Tahrir Square in Cairo in the January 25 Revolution.
an essay on cosmopolitanism as a keyword in Asian American Studies
The word 'diaspora' signifies the dispersal of people from the place of their birth. The Greek word 'diaspeirein' means "to scatter about" or "disperse" is a combination of 'dia'-"about, across" and 'speirein'-"to scatter" (Online... more
The word 'diaspora' signifies the dispersal of people from the place of their birth. The Greek word 'diaspeirein' means "to scatter about" or "disperse" is a combination of 'dia'-"about, across" and 'speirein'-"to scatter" (Online Etymological Dictionary). The Greek translation of the Old Testament uses 'diaspora' concerning the dispersal of Jews all over the world; a dispersion of originally localized culture. During late twentieth century, the term acquired new meanings. It no longer limits to dispersal and longing for return; it is rather constitutive of notions such as acculturation, assimilation, nostalgia, belongingness, hybridity, and transculturalism. Postcolonial studies view the concept of diaspora as a fluid construct. This paper seeks to work out how various theories such as postcolonialism, cultural studies, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism impact as well as influence fluid construct called diaspora which besides being inclusive also seems eclectic in its scope and operation. It attempts to renegotiate the notion of diaspora as a generative network rather than being a static point of reference. My paper also questions confining the notion of diaspora to nation-specific considerations. It also takes into account how scattered and hybrid subjective identities interrogate as well as unsettle existing paradigms of the concept of diaspora. Finally, diaspora's multi-perspectival assessment reemphasizes the need to challenge the restriction posed by nation-centric views, via turning attention towards the queries of globalization; looking forward towards a more nuanced and attentive conceptualization. Kaywords: Diaspora, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.
In this study, I argue that new media discourse has facilitated the enregisterment of orthographies for languages that were primarily oral in the ‘pre-network society’ age. Specifically, I will look at this phenomenon as it applies to... more
In this study, I argue that new media discourse has facilitated the enregisterment of orthographies for languages that were primarily oral in the ‘pre-network society’ age. Specifically, I will look at this phenomenon as it applies to Trinidad English Creole, a formally oral Creole language from Trinidad and Tobago. I will investigate the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural choices, and how such practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities, and relationships (Jaffe et al 2012). Prior to 1990, Trinidad English Creole rarely appeared in written form apart from fictional speech in postcolonial dialectal literature or as indirect speech in newspaper articles. Coinciding with ‘the rise of the network society’ (Castells 2000), Trinidad English Creole is increasingly being employed by diasporic members for written personal communication in computer-mediated discourse. Through the utilization of theoretical frameworks that have been posited by social scientists in regards to our interactions in this new ‘mediascape’ (Appadurai 1996), I intend to show that (i) computer mediated communication is facilitating the enregisterment of Trinidad English Creole, a formally oral language, and (ii) these orthographic choices are employed metapragmatically as a means of enacting a subversive identity, and more particularly, a cosmopolitan postcolonial identity.
The ongoing cosmopolitan discourse is one in which political theorists, ethicists, and philosophers are engaged seeking to find to see a way of living together in a globalized, capitalized cosmos so as to enable flourishing for all.... more
The ongoing cosmopolitan discourse is one in which political theorists, ethicists, and philosophers are engaged seeking to find to see a way of living together in a globalized, capitalized cosmos so as to enable flourishing for all. Within this discourse the theological voice is almost absent—particularly the Christological theological voice. This paper is a contribution to the cosmopolitan discourse from precisely that vantage point. In it I propose a cruciform cosmopolitanism one that is Christological: seeing in the incarnation of Jesus a divine form of cosmopolitanism that is to be embraced by his disciples in order to see the flourishing of our cosmos. This cruciform cosmopolitanism is kenotic in disposition, has compassion as its ethos, and finds its manifesto for social existence in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
This study analyzed news stories published on the online sites of CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Sputnik to investigate how the transnational news outlets framed the human suffering associated with the Syrian war. Unlike prior studies that... more
This study analyzed news stories published on the online sites of CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Sputnik to investigate how the transnational news outlets framed the human suffering associated with the Syrian war. Unlike prior studies that have tended to be based on traditional nation-state paradigms, this research approached the analysis from a cosmopolitan perspective. The findings revealed that in concert with standard journalistic routines and news values, all three news outlets commonly employed a mass death and displacement frame to depict human suffering inside Syria. The adoption of this frame suggests that in telling the story of human suffering, the three media outlets focused on brief facts and shocking statistics without detailed depictions of the human suffering. The meager presence of a cosmopolitan outlook in the news coverage indicates that although transnational media target a global audience with English as Lingua Franca, they cannot be completely independent of geopolitics.
« Le droit international public est traditionnellement défini comme le droit des relations internationales, conçues comme se confondant avec les relations inter-étatiques, ou de la société internationale, considérée elle-même comme ne se... more
« Le droit international public est traditionnellement défini comme le droit des relations internationales, conçues comme se confondant avec les relations inter-étatiques, ou de la société internationale, considérée elle-même comme ne se distinguant pas de la société des Etats. »1
Cette définition «traditionnelle» du droit international, comme la qualifie Michel Virally, restait jusqu’il y a peu communément admise.
"However uncertain I may be and may remain as to whether we can hope for anything better for mankind, this uncertainty cannot detract from the maxim I have adopted, or from the necessity of assuming for practical purposes that human... more
"However uncertain I may be and may remain as to whether we can hope for anything better for mankind, this uncertainty cannot detract from the maxim I have adopted, or from the necessity of assuming for practical purposes that human progress is possible. This hope for better times to come, without which an earnest desire to do something useful for the common good would never have inspired the human heart, has always influenced the activities of right-thinking people."-Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practice, p. 89 The moral imagination of global civil society extends beyond the parochialism of the bordered nation-state. It manifests itself as the face of a new cosmopolitanism. Does it have the potential to transform the third millen-nium? Indeed, the acceleration of globalization's revolutionizing of space and time, and the "intensification of worldwide social relations, which link distant localities"(Giddens, 64) has established a global network of information and exchange unlike that of any other era. "We have come to a point where each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our six billion conspecifics and sending that person something worth having ; a radio, an antibiotic, a good idea"(Appiah, xii). Conversations across boundaries of identity-whether national, religious, or other, allows for an evolving cosmopolitan worldview, where human plurality is valued. Through a multiplicity of differences we find a shared language of principle and hope, or at the least, toleration for the beliefs of others that we may fail to understand. Thus, in cosmopolitanism we find seeds of equality and peace, as well as an ethical paradigm of global distributive justice that contests the prevailing realities of this twenty-first century's poverty, war, oppression, and radical religious fundamentalism.
Presentation at the Historical Materialism Barcelona Conference, 28-30 June, 2019
Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad... more
Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes in the country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America. Contributors include Mitchel Aboulafia, James Bohman, Robert Brandom, David Kim, Eduardo Mendieta, Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., Max Pensky, Richard Rorty, Tommie Shelby, Shannon Sullivan, Robert Westbrook, and Cynthia Willett.
This paper examines the relationships among salesclerks and other lower-level commercial and domestic employees in inter-war and post-Second World War urban Egypt, especially Cairo. It argues that the Italians, Greeks, local Jews,... more
This paper examines the relationships among salesclerks and other lower-level commercial and domestic employees in inter-war and post-Second World War urban Egypt, especially Cairo. It argues that the Italians, Greeks, local Jews, Armenians, Syrian Christians, Maltese, Coptic Christians and Muslims who often worked side by side on the floors of department stores and private homes participated in multiethnic occupational subgroups, formal unions and leisure cultures that created a series of networks linking lower-middle-class people in workplaces, public and neighbourhood space as well as commerce. These networks spanned ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, and they reveal a complex shared Mediterranean culture, underpinned by a juridical system shaped by European colonialism. Although historians have documented the vertical relations within ethnic groups and the horizontal relationships among the business elite of different communities, horizontal relationships among the lower and lower-middle classes of locally resident foreigners or Egyptians, who made up the bulk of the different communities, evidence both deep entanglement and regular conflict. The history of lived Mediterranean or cosmopolitan experiences thus challenges contemporary uses of both terms.
Keywords: cosmopolitan; Egypt; salesclerk; domestic employee
- by JULE GOIKOETXEA and +1
- •
- Liberalism, Nationalism, Nationalism And State Building, Secession
This article presents the core ideas of Ulrich Beck and his legacy is evaluated. The first part introduces the most widely known concepts, disseminated in the national and international contexts, centered on the works from the period... more
This article presents the core ideas of Ulrich Beck and his legacy is evaluated. The first part introduces the most widely known concepts, disseminated in the national and international contexts, centered on the works from the period following the publication of his book "Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity". The quest for transforming sociology, both theoretically and methodologically, was a central drive in the approach proposed by Beck, questioning the zombie concepts permeating the area. From social theory, Beck started to significantly influence other areas within the discipline, highlighting environmental sociology and risk theories. The second part presents more recent works, focusing on the cosmopolitanization concept. This is not part of a normative proposal, but rather an analytical one of a process that has seized our contemporary world, largely independently of our intentions. Reading this part of his work is highly relevant to understand both the intellectual and political challenges permeating the complex metamorphoses of our time. The axle of the final part is his last research into climate change and how Beck and his team were facing the need of empirically translating the richness of the sociologist's ideas and insights. Fundamentally, the aim of this article is to highlight how his legacy opens innumerable and creative possibilities of recreating the social sciences field.
When I first wrote about Caribbean Cosmopolitanism and the potential for ethnographies of cosmopolitanism in the 1990s the ideas involved perhaps seemed strange and out of place. Nowadays cosmopolitan perspectives in social inquiry and... more
When I first wrote about Caribbean Cosmopolitanism and the potential for ethnographies of cosmopolitanism in the 1990s the ideas involved perhaps seemed strange and out of place. Nowadays cosmopolitan perspectives in social inquiry and the notion of methodological cosmopolitanism are commonplace and ubiquitous. This essay looks at some of the theoretical contexts for that change in the study of the Caribbean and some of its implications. This is a contribution to the 2018 revised edition of Gerard Delanty's Routledge Handbook in Cosmopolitan Studies.
Nuruddin Farah's most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism on subject... more
Nuruddin Farah's most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism on subject formation, personal and family relations and opens up questions of sexuality in a postnational context. Connections between individual subject and nation formation have been considered across Farah's career beginning with his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, that marked the double emergence of the autonomous individual and the nation-state, to, most notably Maps, that completely deconstructs the " mythical " foundations of the Somali nation. Hiding in Plain Sight presents an idealized, postnational cosmopolitanism with no apparent collective affiliation that is presented as the automatic outcome of constitutive hybridity and global hyper-mobility. Paradoxically, the new postnational cosmopolitanism simultaneously reconstitutes versions of ethnic, racial and religious identities as it liberates itself from these affiliations that are linked with the nation. Crossbones, Farah's previous novel, reflects the hybridity, hyper-mobility and transnationalism of global terror and criminal networks. However, the constitutive structural similarities of the utopian ideals of cosmopolitan postnationalism and dystopian realities of transnational crime and terror are not foregrounded in the novels. Two life narratives are used as a counterpoint to Farah's novels. Inside the Global Jihad, an autobiography of a spy using the nom de plume, Omar Nasiri, underscores the idea of the transnational constitution and reach of terrorism, opened up in Crossbones. Farah's novels are also contrasted with Jonny Steinberg's A Man of Good Hope, the biography of a Somali refugee in South Africa, that presents a different conception of transnational cosmopolitanism formed out of the affiliations associated with the nation.
Classic authors in nations and nationalisms studies recognize mainstream media as crucial for the construction of nations and spread of nationalisms. While the media landscape in their works is confined to traditional media, in this... more
Classic authors in nations and nationalisms studies recognize mainstream media as crucial for the construction of nations and spread of nationalisms. While the media landscape in their works is confined to traditional media, in this theoretical chapter Szulc rethinks the relationship between nations, nationalisms and the media in the digital age. Zooming in on the concept of banal nationalism, which refers to unconscious and unnoticed reproductions of both individual nations and the world as a world of nations, he examines the role of the internet for everyday reproductions of nations and nationalisms. Each section of his chapter starts with a specific point of criticism of banal nationalism—related to methodological nationalism, sociological essentialism and technological determinism—and continues by applying the criticism to the internet.
This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian... more
This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian diasporic literature. I argue that this critical framework not only challenges the notion of literary canons and classifications which consolidate national identity, but also offers a critical recognition of the South Asian diaspora in the United States by re-envisioning an American identity that is responsive to an age of migration, mobility, and transnational connections.
This article analyzes literary world-making in Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes against the background of current debates about globalization and from a planetary studies perspective. Performing a particular response to... more
This article analyzes literary world-making in Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes against the background of current debates about globalization and from a planetary studies perspective. Performing a particular response to time-space compression and to imaginaries of cultural homogenization, Ransmayr’s text expands what is intelligible as part of the planetary condition and decelerates the pace at which it can be perceived. The text’s poetics favor isolation over interconnection; they suspend temporal linearity and instead emphasize a layering through which different histories, at times even different temporalities, are present at the same time in the same place. Through its representation of history and geography, Atlas destabilizes Eurocentric meaning-making. It constructs an imaginary of planetary belonging that goes beyond cosmopolitanism’s anthropocentric framework while never moving explicitly into ethical or political spheres.
Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy have not received much critical attention. To fill this void, this article analyses the representations and poetics of urban everyday... more
Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy have not received much critical attention. To fill this void, this article analyses the representations and poetics of urban everyday mobilities in two francophone African diasporic novels, Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps (1996) and Alain
Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs (2012), through a mobility studies perspective. I focus on the protagonists’ use of urban mobility systems and the narratives’ ways of producing urban cartographies as means for inscribing the newly arrived irregular African migrants in the metropolis, and argue that the texts give articulation to a practical cosmopolitanism. The texts’ poetics of mobility – manifest in their uncanny and thrilleresque qualities – and the protagonists’ journeys to peripheral dead-ends convey the anxious aspects of their attempts to claim Paris as their city through mobility.
_Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu; winner of the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association 'René Wellek Prize for the Best... more
_Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ (co-edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu; winner of the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association 'René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Collection") is a collection of innovative interdisciplinary essays on cosmopolitanism, written by leading scholars from different continents who engage with paramount aesthetic, ethical, political, historical, and pedagogical issues.
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.
In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the relationship between nation-states and globalization. Today’s aspect of global mobility lies with the logistics of people and goods within... more
In this essay, I will discuss the political economy of global mobility through an analysis of the relationship between nation-states and globalization. Today’s aspect of global mobility lies with the logistics of people and goods within and beyond the national governmentality. These logistics flows construct the supply chain locally and globally with infrastructures, people, goods, and information. What must be stressed here is the new role of nation-states in the rise of globalizing logistics. Following the neoliberal model, each nation-state takes on a crucial role in creating markets. In this situation, the dialectics of tourists and the multitude is noteworthy. While the multitude does not belong to the nation-states any longer, tourists as consumers are entrapped to the category of the labor force, i.e., the commodification of labor power. If people want to move from one nation-state to another nation-state, they have to choose whether to be a labor commodity or a consumer. The working class is the moveable population and portable labor force, yet they are legally obliged to stay within a specific territory. It is not labor force but money or a commodity that is permitted to travel around. Although a commodity can be exchanged with money, they are not the same. The monetary circulation brings out the capitalist mobility of production, whereas a commodity completes its final function when it is consumed. In other words, consumption means the withdrawal of a commodity from the circulation. When a commodity is consumed, its function is done, its form finally annihilates, and then money moves from one territory to another in search of different commodities. Global mobility is fueled by the monetary flow, the financial flux in a global scope; nevertheless, its real excursion cannot be withdrawn from the political economy of the Urstaat. I contend that this double-binding relationship is the political deadlock of the Empire and the nation-states.
Prado, G., & Moura, M. Cosmopolítica e Antropofagia: a psicologia das relações heterogêneas. In: Lemos, F. et al. (org.) Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari e Lourau: encontros com a arqueogenealogia, esquizoanálise e análise institucional.... more
Prado, G., & Moura, M. Cosmopolítica e Antropofagia: a psicologia das relações heterogêneas. In: Lemos, F. et al. (org.) Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari e Lourau: encontros com a arqueogenealogia, esquizoanálise e análise institucional. Curitiba: CRV, 2021. pp. 255-274
For well over a hundred years, migrants to the US were expected to assimilate as a foreign body into the dominant imaginary of a white, Rockwellian Protestantism. In the novels and nonfiction writing of Moroccan-born Laila Lalami and... more
For well over a hundred years, migrants to the US were expected to assimilate as a foreign body into the dominant imaginary of a white, Rockwellian Protestantism. In the novels and nonfiction writing of Moroccan-born Laila Lalami and Mexican Valeria Luiselli, however, a transnational migrant asserts the full rights of the global citizen, one who changes the local culture in which she finds herself as much as she is changed by it. The end of nationalist isolationism comes only with the end of borders—cultural, geographic, linguistic, religious or sectarian.
Ali Shariati (1933–77) has been called by many the 'ideologue of the Iranian Revolution'. An inspiration to many of the revolutionary generation, Shariati's combination of Islamic political thought and Left-leaning ideology continues to... more
Ali Shariati (1933–77) has been called by many the 'ideologue of the Iranian Revolution'. An inspiration to many of the revolutionary generation, Shariati's combination of Islamic political thought and Left-leaning ideology continues to influence both in Iran and across the wider Muslim world. In this book, Siavash Saffari examines Shariati's long-standing legacy, and how new readings of his works by contemporary 'neo-Shariatis' have contributed to a deconstruction of the false binaries of Islam/modernity, Islam/West, and East/West. Saffari argues that through their critique of Eurocentric metanarratives on the one hand, and the essentialist conceptions of Islam on the other, Shariati and neo-Shariatis have carved out a new space in Islamic thought beyond the traps of Orientalism and Occidentalism. This unique perspective will hold great appeal to researchers of the politics and intellectual thought of post-revolutionary Iran and the greater Middle East.
In eighteenth-century Galata, Western diplomats sought to build a cosmopolitan community based on being Europeans within the Ottoman Empire. But among the lower orders national differences could ignite violent conflicts. In 1729 two... more
In eighteenth-century Galata, Western diplomats sought to build a cosmopolitan community based on being Europeans within the Ottoman Empire. But among the lower orders national differences could ignite violent conflicts. In 1729 two French chefs provoked Venetian anger: one was injured by Venetians at a wedding; the second retaliated by attacking a Venetian barber, who then killed him. These events were predicated on national identity in the most literal fashion. Venetians were attacking French nationals simply for being French, and vice-versa. National identity, perhaps surprisingly, in certain respects meant more to the lowest social orders than it did to the highest among early-eighteenth-century western Europeans stationed in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. For the servants, national origins defined who they were and how they related to one another. For the ministers, nation defined their official positions, yet they worked together to restore harmony.
Writing about fascism and aviation has stressed the role technology played in Mussolini's ambitions to cultivate fascist ideals in Italy and amongst the Italian diaspora. In this article we examine Francesco De Pinedo's account of... more
Writing about fascism and aviation has stressed the role technology played in Mussolini's ambitions to cultivate fascist ideals in Italy and amongst the Italian diaspora. In this article we examine Francesco De Pinedo's account of the Australian section of his record-breaking 1925 flight from Rome to Tokyo. Our analysis of De Pinedo's reception as a modern Italian in a British Australia, and his response to that reception, suggests that this Italian aviator was relatively unconcerned with promoting Fascist greatness in Australia. De Pinedo was interested in Australian claims to the forms of modernity he had witnessed in the United States and which the Fascists were attempting to incorporate into a new vision of Italian destiny. Flight provided him with a geographical imagination which understood modernity as an international exchange of progressive peoples. His Australian reception revealed a nation anxious about preserving its British identity in a globalising world con...
This article focuses on the place that Galicia occupies in the writings of the Jewish author and essayist Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (Rebb Binyomin, 1880-1957), who was one of the main figures in the binational Zionist movements and... more
This article focuses on the place that Galicia occupies in the writings of the Jewish author and essayist Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (Rebb Binyomin, 1880-1957), who was one of the main figures in the binational Zionist movements and advocated the rooting of Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine in the cultural and religious affinity between Judaism and Islam. The central role that RB attributed to Galicia suggests that his Galician life experience influenced the crystallization of his approach to multinationalism. As opposed to the Jewish perceptions of binationalism that were developed by RB's future companions in the binational movements in Palestine, who were members of the Prague circle, the Galician orientation of RB's writing is an orientation toward a different Jewish perception of multinational coexistence: one of Habsburgian origin that is based not on existential inbetweenness but on a framework of coexisting centers of identification. This perception is also manifested in the resulting esthetic forms that are characterized by traditional and popular comic storytelling that challenges the image of a unified subject and questions the very concept of authenticity.
_Crazy Rich Asians_ (2018), a box-office hit in North America, provoked celebration particularly from Asian American commentators and actors. Shot in Singapore and Malaysia with an Asian and Asian American cast, it was a success too in... more
_Crazy Rich Asians_ (2018), a box-office hit in North America, provoked celebration particularly from Asian American commentators and actors. Shot in Singapore and Malaysia with an Asian and Asian American cast, it was a success too in Singapore itself and in territories such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia but not in East Asia’s largest markets, those of China, Japan and South Korea. Focusing on the phenomenon of _Crazy Rich Asians_’ release, particularly its engagement with and circulation in East and Southeast Asia and its polarized reception among different Asian American and Asian communities, this article traces a series of discursive flashpoints to understand the film’s position in Asian and Asian American film culture. Arguing that the fortunes of US releases with Asian and Asian American casts reveal cosmopolitanism’s invisible borders, the article proposes a model of pan-Asian screen cosmopolitanism. This model recognizes that even globally hybrid screen texts such as _Crazy Rich Asians_ bear cultural markers that may inhibit their appeal in territories with shared ethnic heritages but discrete social histories.