Book reviews
Glick schiller, Nina and Andrew Irving (eds.). 2014. Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents. new York, oxford: Berghahn Books. 253 pp. Hb.: $95.00/£60.00. isbn: 9781782384458.
This book is a timely, much needed, rich and multifaceted tapestry on cosmopolitanism in today's world. I took a liberty to go through this book slowly and re-reading some essays more than once. I guess, this might be a reading pattern of many scholars who will own the book or have it in their curriculum for years to come.
The editors have indeed gathered prominent authors: the editors Andrew Irving and Nina Glick Schiller themselves have authored the conceptual introduction and several essays. Other texts and empirical papers are written by Gyan Prakash, Galin Tihanov, Jackie Stacey, Robert Spencer, Jacqueline Rose, David Harvey, Tariq Ramadan, Sivamohan Valluvan, Atreyee Sen, Heather Latimer, Felicia Chan, Madeleine Reeves, Ewa Ochman and Paul Gilroy.
It is not any easy collection to read, however, nor was it meant to be a pleasing surface-scratching illusion of belonging to the world as elites and consumers. The authors, first, are assiduously critically asking whose cosmopolitanism it is that we have found in the world and, second, what alternative ways we can develop to study existing modes of belonging to this world. Conceptually, this book claims novel ways how we can make sense of different cosmopolitanisms. It consists of two main parts. The first provides provocations and responses to contingent questions about cosmopolitanism and actors who speak for or against certain versions of it. Five chapters in this part are devoted to multiple and subaltern cosmopolitanisms: yearning for humanity, the ambivalence of self, postcolonial criticism, and disturbing realities of neo-colonial power. These provocations are then followed by five response essays. These are not symmetric responses to questions posed in previous chapters and rather stand on they own as separate essays, more on theoretical inquiries, for instance, on performativity, everyday life, differences between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics.
The second part delves deeper into the whereabouts of actually existing cosmopolitanisms, asking where, when, how and whether it can be found, defined and understood. These papers flesh out processual and situated cosmopolitanism in human encounters, landscapes, and displacements, in artistic forms and performativity in cinema, literature, and the social imagination. Altogether, 20 chapters, plus an introduction, provides an entangled reading in many tonalities, dissimilar approaches and dense contexts of (non)belonging to the world, in particular, ways.
The underpinning idea that this collection of papers pursues thoroughly is cosmopolitanism as openness and social justice, especially for those who are socially displaced in the current world. The aim of the book is to contribute relevant texts to the growth of a critical and situated cosmopolitanism that articulates the anxieties and contradictions of cosmopolitan projects. A reader may not find a clear and ready-made analytical tools to define what cosmopolitanism is. It seems that the real aim of the book was to avoid such illusionary clarity that narrows down and the world of difference. The authors insist on opening up our thinking about alternative ways of conceptualising
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cosmopolitanism as socially situated, aspirational and ever self-problematising awareness of incomplete and contested nature of cosmopolitan claims.
Prakash challenges the assumption whether cosmopolitanism is and elitist project at all and, by demonstrating that cosmopolitanism as political morality is not internally opposed to the affect and ideas of national belonging. He also describes novel ways of analysing ethnopolitical processes on the global scale. Tihanov pushes forward the cosmopolitan theory by insisting how essential it is to reveal the negative genealogies of cosmopolitanism. Harvey warns against monstrous utopian politics and asks us to imagine what happens if a universal code, like a global government, is applied to the world of difference. For him, the most essential question is how can we create peaceful ways of being together through cosmopolitics? Harvey sees cosmopolitics as a process where various actors 'negotiate issues that arise within different spaces in different ways' (p. 54). For us to be able to imagine solidarity on a cosmopolitan scale, Paul Gilroy calls for the need to rewrite fascism's history to overcome "pathological nationalism", a postcolonial and postimperial melancholia that erases others' suffering in the current world.
In sum, the book's mosaic-type contributions advance a theory of cosmopolitanism to some extent. Cosmopolitanism does give a name to the postcolonial condition, and the critical cosmopolitanism recognises the difference in the world. Furthermore, it contributes to theoretical ideas on citizenship and how we can understand cosmopolitanism as intersecting with national, urban and local belonging, and commitments in the world.
The book has a strong ethical positioning to question critically whether certain cosmopolitan projects make a better world in which everyone's potentialities can be valued and respected or they constrain our ability and will find aspects of the shared human experience. The ethics of critical cosmopolitanism concern struggle, exploitation, de-romanticising of exile and displacement as well as the unpredictability of our own uneasiness of living together, co-operating, and trusting each other when encountering the unfamiliar world, unresolved historical ambivalences with colonialism, imperialism and "winners" of wars. The book also gives fresh methodological contributions. These are especially strong on aesthetic experiences and creativity of cosmopolitanism through analysing literature, cinema as well as everyday encounters in urban settings.
Last but not least, in the current context of an asylum crisis to a scale that matches displaced people after the Second World War, this book is more than very timely for anybody engaging research and taking a practical action to create the world a better place for those who are displaced. I imagine that this book would quickly find its way into required reading lists for the growing number of researchers questioning cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism from various disciplinary angles and migration scholars, in particular. Moreover, some chapters and methodological advancements would certainly appeal to those in citizenship, memory or urban studies, as well as social inequality researchers.
AIJA LULLE
University of Sussex (UK)
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