This collection of essays expands the focus of Enlightenment studies to include countries outside the core nations of France, Germany and Britain. Notions of sociability and cosmopolitanism are explored as ways in which people sought to improve society.
This book approaches the concept of cosmopolitan sociability as a cultural or territorial rootedness that facilitates a simultaneous openness to shared human emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Cosmopolitan Sociability critiques definitions of cosmopolitanism as a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality that arise from contemporary experiences of mobility and globalization. Challenging these assumptions, the book explores the degree to which a 'cosmopolitan dimension' can be practised within particular religious communities, diasporic ties, or gendered migrant identities in different parts of the world. A wide variety of expert contributors offer rich ethnographic insights into the interplay of social interactions and cosmopolitan sociability. In this way the book contributes significantly to ethnic and migration studies, global anthropology, social theory, and religious and cultural studies. Cosmopolitan Sociability was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism’s possibilities, aspirations and applications—as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents—so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.
The dream of a cosmopolitical utopia has been around for thousands of years. Yet the promise of being locally situated while globally connected and mobile has never seemed more possible than today. Through a classical sociological approach, this book analyses the political, technological and cultural systems underlying cosmopolitanism.
This open access book draws a theoretically productive triangle between urban studies, theories of cosmopolitanism, and migration studies in a global context. It provides a unique, encompassing and situated view on the various relations between cosmopolitanism and urbanity in the contemporary world. Drawing on a variety of cities in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, it overcomes the Eurocentric bias that has marked debate on cosmopolitanism from its inception. The contributions highlight the crucial role of migrants as actors of urban change and targets of urban policies, thus reconciling empirical and normative approaches to cosmopolitanism. By addressing issues such as cosmopolitanism and urban geographies of power, locations and temporalities of subaltern cosmopolites, political meanings and effects of cosmopolitan practices and discourses in urban contexts, it revisits contemporary debates on superdiversity, urban stratification and local incorporation, and assess the role of migration and mobility in globalization and social change.
As we face new global challenges – from climate change to the international political order – the need to re-examine the historical roots of cosmopolitanism and liberal principles on a global scale has become increasingly central to the political conversation. Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment brings together leading scholars in cultural history, the history of ideas and global politics in order to reassess the complexity of cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment and its various interpretations over time. Through a fresh and revisionist perspective, the volume explores issues of universalism and cultural diversity, the idea of civilization, race, gender, empire, colonialism, global inequality, national patriotism, international and civil conflict, and other forms of political discourse, challenging the simple negative stereotype that the Enlightenment was inevitably hierarchical and Eurocentric. This timely intervention into the debate about the legacy of the Enlightenment highlights both the plurality and the continuing relevance of Enlightened cosmopolitanism to contemporary global concerns.
Following the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there were considerable migration flows, the migrations and subsequent diasporas often having special characteristics given the relative lack of migration in communist times and the climate of increasing nationalism which had the potential of working against multiculturalism. This book explores these migrations and diasporas, and examines the nature of the associated cosmopolitanism.
The first book to systematically demonstrate via case studies the importance of translation to the study of cosmopolitanism and social thought, and vice versa. Provides a wide range of theoretical and methodological insights on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translation