Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures

The rise in anti-migrant xenophobia, Islamophobia, and so-called populist nationalism in recent years has demonstrated the consequential effects of colonialism, nationalism, and globalisation in our contemporary world. Through the increasing interdependence and accelerating interconnection afforded by global media – especially social media – daily reports of violent conflicts reveal how entire communities and populations continue to be disenfranchised and excluded from the security and belonging that have conventionally been tied to citizenship and territoriality (Razack 2008, 2015; Povinelli 2011). In particular, non-European migrants, Muslims, Black and Indigenous peoples remain vulnerable to dispossession and death, often at the hands of nation-states that otherwise espouse a commitment to universal values and human rights. Hannah Arendt’s (1951) prescient claim in The Origins of Totalitarianism that histories of anti-semitism, ‘scientific’ racism, and imperialism contributed to the rise of totalitarianism seems even more relevant today.

In Canada, where we editors are currently based, the prevailing rhetoric of liberal democracy, multiculturalism and respect for human rights provides a thin veneer that partially obfuscates the ongoing legacies of colonisation. Alongside Canada’s proclaimed commitment to multiculturalism, the violence of settler colonialism thrives and persists: the dispossession of Indigenous people through unresolved land claims, the intergenerational toll of residential schools, and unceasing struggles over sovereignty (Coulthard 2014); inconsistent policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers; the ongoing violence directed at Black and Brown communities (Thobani 2007; Maynard 2017); and disputes over resource extraction and environmental degradation highlight the scale of colonial violence (Short 2016). In many ways, these struggles are microcosms of what Lisa Rofel (2001) and others have called ‘discrepant modernities’. As Rofel puts it, discrepant modernities constitute ‘a world of forced and violent interactions in which emerges an imaginary space that produces deferred relationships to modernity. Modernity is something people struggle over because it has life-affirming as well as life-threatening effects’ (Rofel 2001: 638). These troubling global conditions raise critical questions as to how we might reckon with the colonial past and present, while demanding new ways to imagine collective and planetary futures.

In recent decades, cosmopolitanism has been widely invoked, debated, and celebrated in scholarly and public discourse as a possible, even necessary, response to the urgencies of the global present and the limits of the nation-state (Pollock 2000; Nyers 2003; Gilroy 2004; Cheah 2007). Though the term cosmopolitanism, with etymological roots in universal notions of the cosmos and cosmology, is drawn from European intellectual history, more recent debates have sought to recast it as a set of ethical and collective practices that engender solidarities beyond national, ethnic and/or racial boundaries. For some, including Ulrich Beck (2009), cosmopolitanism is the only possible future as the proliferation of global connectivity in culture, economics, and politics has created risks and dangers that cannot be adequately addressed within the parameters of the nation-state. In this regard, we might consider environmental crises such as climate change and resource depletion, the ongoing violation of human rights around the world, the struggles of Indigenous peoples, and the deeply entrenched structural inequalities that entrap many in the global South in poverty and desperation, as only a few of many global flashpoints that demand responses and solutions that exceed national frameworks (see also Young 1990). As Beck wrote almost a decade ago, there is at present

no global state or international organisation capable of regulating global capital and risk […] Instead, we can observe a complex reconstitution of political authority, with which to organise the mechanisms of global economic regulation, risk management and control in ways characterised by new forms of political interdependence … . (Beck and Grande 2010: 410)

At the same time, critics of cosmopolitanism have argued that given its history in Greek thought, the global visions of cosmopolitanism have long privileged Eurocentric norms, values, and assumptions. Indeed, Beck’s (2009) own context for cosmopolitanism is the increasingly beleaguered European Union. A cosmopolitanism that merely rearticulates structures and geographies of western colonial knowledge and dominance cannot but recapitulate the marginalisation of groups that have been excluded from modernity’s so-called benefits. For scholars and critics concerned with the conditions and struggles confronting Indigenous peoples, ethnic and racial minorities, and displaced migrants, cosmopolitanism can appear as an elite and metropolitan discourse that fails to address the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Building on these critiques, more recent discussions have sought to reconfigure cosmopolitanism as a vision of the future that can engage respectfully with social difference without imposing universal norms. At a time when globalisation continues to be a violent force of economic and cultural homogenisation, critics have underscored the need to recognise, in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the distinction between the global and the planetary:

The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed are it. (Spivak 2012: 339)

Alternative articulations of cosmopolitanism attend to the inherent ‘alterity’ of our co-belonging in the world. For Skrbis and Woodward, such an approach to cosmopolitanism

involve[s] having access to repertoires of universalism, though such discursive resources and everyday practices are not necessarily articulated or deployed in universal and consistent ways but rather have an emergent and performative quality, depending on the facilitating contexts of environment and social setting. (2013: 129)

These performative and emergent ‘repertoires of universalism’ have been taken up in diverse contexts as ‘demotic,’ ‘discrepant,’ ‘vernacular,’ and ‘abject’ cosmopolitanisms, or as ‘cosmopolitanisms from below’ (Pollock 2000; Nyers 2003; Gilroy 2004).

Written at a historical moment that has witnessed Trump’s victory in the US, dramatic support for Modi’s re-election in India, Brexit in the UK, and the rise of populism globally, the essays in this special issue reflect on and intervene in debates about the viability of cosmopolitanism as a planetary project in the troubled global present. We do this by taking up a number of provocations raised in Sneja Gunew’s (2017) recent book, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators. Engaged in the debates that we have outlined above, Gunew argues that writings by Indigenous peoples, migrants, and refugees might offer a ‘cosmopolitan mediation and translation between the nation-state and the planetary’ (2017: 11). Her key intervention, as we read it, is to highlight how these communities – with different experiences, histories, and relations to European colonialism – may direct us away from overly simplistic dismissals of universality as inevitably Eurocentric by providing articulations and translations of the universal and how it may be reimagined in the future. In doing so, Gunew’s analysis ‘break[s] down the global reach of cosmopolitanism’ and instead works to signal ‘its historical contingencies, internal differences and discrepant modernities’ (Gunew 2017: 31).

As Gunew observes, state imposed modes of managing difference, including multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, have consistently failed to attend to the diverse cosmologies that operate within Indigenous, migrant, and refugee communities. By ‘reversing’ the temporality of multicultural-governmentality-as-progress, minority writers and cultural producers might recover traces of a planetarity that has not yet been extinguished. This realisation in turn offers a position from which to build solidarities in the face of intensifying racial and colonial violence. As Gunew puts it, the urgent task today is an ‘ethical decolonization’ in which the

former colonizers need to put the world views (views of the world) of the excluded at the center in order to be able to abdicate their own claims to universalism and enable the Indigenous inhabitants of global empires to assert their rights to have rights and to decolonize their own history. (2017: 9)

These objectives seem increasingly unattainable in the current historical moment. However, in the midst of crises, Gunew’s work provides insight into how artists and writers employ resistant tactics by imagining alternative temporalities and other worlds in defiance of ‘prevailing neoliberal models of globalization’ (Gunew 2017: 10).

This special issue on ‘Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures’ emerged from a conference held in March 2017 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which is located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam peoples. The conference coincided with the publication of Gunew’s recent book, and participants were asked to engage with the themes of her work. One of the key questions asked by the contributors is how cosmopolitanism may enable alternative visions of futurity. Theories of cosmopolitanism have long been animated by a directional movement outward, a gaze that extends from the local, regional, and national to the international, global, and planetary. These histories of looking outward, we note, have also inspired the violent and extractive agendas of European and American imperialism. Cosmopolitan visions of the global and planetary are often marked by glaring omissions, most notably the conspicuous absence of Indigenous peoples and cultures. If cosmopolitanism implies movement, mobility, and encounter, then the lack of attention to Indigenous and non-European migrants recapitulates the violence necessary to assert homogeneity and immobility as cornerstones of the nation-state (Papastergiadis 2013). Given the uneven effects of colonisation and decolonisation, cosmopolitanism today necessitates a simultaneous looking inward and outward, within the boundaries of the modern nation-state and towards a global stage. As Gunew puts it, cosmopolitanism may be seen as ‘a pedagogical method that functions best, in general terms, as a form of denaturalization that would enable receptivity to other ways of “being at home in the world”’ (2017: 7).

On Cosmopolitan Futures

Gunew’s (2017) book, in its attention to ‘worlds at home’, gestures to different directional movements and invites other vantage points from which to explore the possibility of cosmopolitan futures. The essays in this special issue take up this challenge in different ways. While several authors invoke cosmopolitanism directly, others draw on alternative conceptual tools to think through ‘worlds at home’, and how these worlds are shaped and challenged from within and without. Read together, the essays raise a series of questions for further discussion and consideration. How might a cosmopolitan future be possible when we continue to be confronted by the reverberating after-lives of European and American colonialism? In what ways must we account for the critiques of postcolonial and Indigenous scholars regarding cosmopolitanism’s ‘eurocentrism’ and ‘universalism’? How might we reposition cosmopolitanism, as Gunew (2017) seeks to do, through the experiences of Indigenous and migrant communities, and what sorts of planetary visions might this enable? What forms of critique and solidarities emerge when the future of the planet is under threat by right-wing nationalism, extractive colonialism, climate denialism, and migrant deaths in sites ranging from the Mediterranean, Australia’s offshore detention facilities, and US border regions? How might cosmopolitanism engender different ethical-political terms and new visions to rethink our contemporary moment?

Heather Latimer’s essay ‘Queering Cosmopolitan Futurity: Sailing into the Unknown in Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma’ argues that cosmopolitanism remains a utopian project centred on humanist ideals and forms of heteronormative and reproductive futurism. Turning to theories of queer temporality, Latimer interrogates cosmopolitan claims to belonging by exposing the racialised and sexualised underpinnings of futurity and reproducibility. To explore these tensions, the article presents a queer reading of Emanuele Crialese’s 2011 film Terraferma and suggests the film’s portrayal of an Italian family’s encounter with a stranded migrant affirms humanity while refusing reproductive futurism. Interrogating the connections between migrancy, race, national belonging, and sexuality, Latimer’s analysis casts a critical eye on both cosmopolitanism and theories of ‘reproductive futurism’ through discrepant forms of kinship and queer temporalities.

In ‘National and Global Decolonial Practices: Asian and Indigenous Inter-referencing’, Christine Kim brings Indigenous and diasporic studies in Canada into dialogue with each other to propose new modes of theorising solidarity and decolonial relations beyond the settler colonial nation-state. Guided by Indigenous critiques of ‘reconciliation’ and the ‘politics of recognition’, Kim points to the limits of ‘settler of colour’ critiques for addressing the ways in which Asian and diasporic subjects are both subjects of and subject to violent settler colonial histories and forced migrations. Kim analyses SKY Lee’s 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Café as a landmark text for theorising Indigenous and Asian-diasporic relations in Canada. She suggests the novel dramatises ‘multiple forms of diasporic placelessness’ that rigid categorisations of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler’ risk eliding. Drawing on Kuan-Hsing Chen’s work in Asia as Method, Kim proposes ‘inter-referencing’ as an alternative methodology ‘for approaching the relations between diasporic and Indigenous peoples and for conceiving decolonial projects that can transform how we approach Canada.’ Not engaging with cosmopolitanism directly, Kim argues that moving beyond the politics of individual nation-states and their emphasis on a multicultural politics of recognition can allow for a more nuanced understanding of how settler colonialism in Canada and Indigenous struggles against it connect to global imperialism.

Terri Tomsky’s ‘Citizens of Nowhere: Cosmopolitanisation and Cultures of Securitisation in Dionne Brand’s Inventory’ draws on Diogenes’ theory of cynical and detached cosmopolitanism to theorise new forms of political subjectivity produced through a global crisis of migrancy and rootlessness in the twenty-first century. In contrast to models that read cosmopolitan mobility as a sign of education and affluence, Tomsky calls attention to the figure of the undocumented migrant caught within the immigration industrial complex and its network of detention centres to expose forms of negative cosmopolitanism in an era of mass displacement. Through a careful reading of Dionne Brand’s long poem, Inventory (2006), Tomsky shows how Brand’s aesthetic of detachment renders the inhuman and bureaucratic elements of the refugee crisis and its attenuating cultures of border control, securitisation and ‘sousveillance’ (Mann 2004). Rather than produce narrative portraits which humanise undocumented migrants and asylum seekers (as in the genre of the human rights story), Brand’s attention to place names, facts and figures shows the bureaucracy of detention centres, revealing the workings of the state ‘banopticon’ (Bigo 2006) while refusing a humanist mode of engagement. Reading poetry through forms of disavowal and refusal, Tomsky proposes how a negative or detached cosmopolitanism can allow for a critique of global politics and its conditions of unbelonging, or unhoming.

Margery Fee’s contribution, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics and English Literacy in the Pacific Northwest’, analyses colonial encounters between European and Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She shows how the move to designate Indigenous cultures as ‘oral’ and Western culture as ‘literate’ forecloses Indigenous knowledges and ways of speaking and writing. Guided by insights from the field of ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics,’ Fee argues that the progressive secular academy often fails to attentively and respectfully listen to Indigenous stories, choosing instead to read tales of animacy as static containers for cultural beliefs and not as vital modes of critiquing colonial modernity. Early anthropologists and ethnographers working in the Pacific Northwest collected Indigenous stories as data and excised references to Christianity, colonialism, and European culture, claiming that these traces detract from an authentic portrait of ‘oral’ cultures. This despite the fact that Indigenous peoples learned English and adopted writing to retain cultural practices and make land claims, thereby posing a significant threat to Western colonial hegemony. However, the legacy of early anthropological distinctions between orality and literacy continues to influence methods of reading in the present: early Indigenous stories are read as expressions of cultural difference, not critiques of colonial epistemologies and world views. Fee analyses the story of ‘Coyote and the Paper’ as one example of a ‘post-contact’ Indigenous story which deliberately comments on the primacy of ‘paper’ and writing in European customs of law and land ownership. Working through an historical archive, Fee proposes that the multiple resonances of such a story only become available through intentional practices of listening guided by Indigenous scholars and storytellers.

Wenche Ommundsen’s essay ‘Exoticism or Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Difference and Desire in Chinese Australian Women’s Writing’ traces everyday forms of cosmopolitanism in recent fiction by Asian Australian women writers. Guided by Mica Nava’s theorisation of ‘visceral cosmopolitanism’ and Olivia Khoo’s analysis of the ‘Chinese exotic’, Ommundsen shows how fictional representations of inter-racial relationships and cross-cultural encounters both defy norms of gendered ethnicity and reinforce forms of racial exoticisation. The essay situates recent writing by Cher Chidzey, Michelle Lee, Isabelle Li and Melanie Chen within a longer legacy of Asian Australian writing concerned with issues of gender, race, and sex. Early twentieth century writing by Australians of Chinese descent articulated a reformist agenda and revealed a persistent concern for gender relations and the status of Chinese women. Following the abandonment of the ‘White Australia Policy’ and racist immigration policies, a new generation of Asian Australian writers emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and revitalised local debates on ethnic gendering and Chinese masculinity. Ommundsen shows how contemporary fiction by Asian Australian writers challenges earlier cultural representations in complex ways: new forms of diasporic visibility centre the agency of Asian Australian subjects while continuing to enact forms of orientalism and exoticism. Examining the circuits of racialised desire within personal relationships, Ommundsen’s analysis calls attention to how cosmopolitanism, as a theory for living with difference, remains profoundly felt in everyday intimacies.

Sheila Giffen’s ‘Narratives of Global Capital and the Spirits of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead’ considers the relationship between cosmopolitanism, globalisation and secular colonial modernity. Focused on Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, Giffen shows how Silko’s anti-colonial and anti-capitalist critique is rooted in forms of spiritual resistance and resurgence. The novel represents the long history of capitalist and colonialist devastation in the Americas, while enacting alternative imaginaries for thinking dissent in communion with the sacred. Drawing on original archival research, Giffen argues that Silko’s novel is in active conversation with late Cold War imperialist conflicts across the Americas. However, Silko’s invocation of Marx as a kind of sacred text, calls attention to the limits of Marxist historical materialism for theorising capitalist-colonial violence, and more importantly for imagining resistance and rebellion. Through its evocation of spirits of rebellion and its prophetic vision, Silko’s novel disrupts secular notions of individual agency and linear temporality. Giffen’s analysis considers the limits of cosmopolitan critique and literary studies for approaching such sacred gestures of politics and resistance.

One of the major contributions of Gunew’s work is the emphasis she places on literatures written by diasporic, minoritarian and multicultural writers. These writings, she argues, can powerfully envision resistance tactics against the logics of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and globalisation. For Gunew, writers can ‘redefine and critique the nation as well as globalization’ (2017: 10) and contest the hegemony of dominant groups. Inspired by her thinking, scholars in this special issue analyse literature, film, poetry and other forms of writing and storytelling to consider how conceptions of nation, cosmopolitics and globalisation are contested and reimagined through creative expression. In an effort to bridge creative and critical voices, this collection also includes a short story by Lydia Kwa and a suite of poems by Larissa Lai. Both Lai and Kwa critique histories of colonialism and migration through forms of writing that imagine other ‘worlds at home’ beyond the human and the humanistic.

In Lydia Kwa’s short story, ‘Some Demons are Pretty’, a young woman named Erica dreams that a demon crawls onto her back. Startled awake, Erica begins to move through her day – hustling at her start-up job, contending with oblivious friends – and yet the haunting presence of ghosts and demons persists in her waking life. Kwa weaves the story of one woman’s day with a family history of migration from Malaysia to Victoria, BC, and the multiple hauntings of these histories and personal experiences.

In Larissa Lai’s suite of poems ‘Frog Diagram’, the land and the body are entwined. Engaging a poetics of anatomical precision and lexical play, Lai traces the complexities and complicities of migration in an era of Indigenous dispossession: ‘caught in the cookie jar of colonialism / our work visa on native land’. Lai reaches into an archive of colonial history to speculate about alternative futures as immanent possibility. Imagining a different history of trans-pacific migration, Lai’s speaker asks: ‘could that contact / have fed an earth modernity? / traded in spirit and body-land technologies / instead of death?’ Her poems invite speculation on present conditions of capitalist exploitation, environmental destruction, and racial fetishisation, while cracking open these very frameworks to imagine alternative ways of speaking, listening, and seeing.

This special issue concludes with an address by and interview with Sneja Gunew conducted by Christopher Lee and Renisa Mawani. The interview considers the implications of her recent book for debates in cosmopolitanism and literary studies. Gunew discusses a range of issues including: the intersecting intellectual genealogies of postcolonialism, settler colonial studies and cosmopolitanism; modes of reimagining the role of English departments through multi-lingual awareness and self-reflexive pedagogies; and the fragility of counter-archives within anti-colonial projects. Throughout the conversation, Gunew offers insightful commentary on both the alignment of state-mandated multiculturalism with neoliberal values, and the possibility of recuperating elements of multiculturalism to imagine cosmopolitan futures. Taken together, the critical and creative writings in this special issue highlight the limits and possibilities of a cosmopolitan future. ‘Worlds at Home’ is more than a cosmopolitanism from below: the contributors consider how Indigenous, migrant, and refugee communities might recast the universal in ways that may continue to ‘provincialise Europe’ and its legacies (Chakrabarty 2000).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the participants of the conference ‘Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures’ that was held at the University of British Columbia in March 2017; our research assistants, Michel O’Brien and Megan Holec; Paula Muraca and the editorial team at the Journal of Intercultural Studies; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this project. We are especially grateful to Sneja Gunew for her generosity, especially to junior scholars. We dedicate this special issue to her.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sheila Giffen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is the recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and her doctoral research considers evocations of the sacred in literary responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the US and South Africa.

Christopher Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012). He recently co-edited special issues of Canadian Literature (‘Asian Canadian Critique Beyond the Nation’) and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (‘Beyond Canada 150: Asian Canadian Visual Cultures’). He is currently Associate Editor of American Quarterly.

Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal geography. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (2009) and Across Oceans of Law (2018). With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of ‘The Travels of Law’ published in Law and History Review (2014); with Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, and Satwinder Bains, she is co-editor of Unmooring the Komagata Maru (2019); with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary of Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.