Table Of Contentminor cosmopolitan
Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise
Edited by Zairong Xiang
DIAPHANES
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German
Research Foundation) – 265331351/RTG 2130
minor cosmopolitanisms
Preface 07
01 ENTERING THE minor COSMOS 15
Arjun Appadurai The Passport 17
Sundar Sarrukai Empty Objects 20
Marina Camargo Notes on the Representation of Time and Space 33
Mario Bellatin El palito de la jaula del pájaro de la abuela 41
02 POLEIS 45
James Miller Porosity and Planetarity: 47
On (minor) Cosmopolitan Virality
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz When You Died, the City Died with You 58
Sarnath Banerjee I Don’t Feel Postcolonial When I Wake up Every 71
Morning in Delhi (No One Here Does)
Lucy Gasser Other Europes, Past and Future 77
Sikho Siyotula On Other Poleis 92
INTERMEZZO 101
Nik Neves and Camila Gonzatto
The minor cosmopolitan weekend Remembered
03 WHO SUSTAINS THE FLOURISHING 111
OF THE WORLD?
Rosa Barotsi, Saima Akhtar, and Clio Nicastro Introduction: 113
Film, Women’s Work & Labour Organizing
Mary Jirmanus Saba Feminist Internationalism: 128
From Solidarity to Sandwiches
Vivian Price Times are Changing, Minds are also Changing: 141
Patriarchy, Neoliberalism and the Construction Industry
04 AMBIGUOUS UTOPIAS 159
Tom Holert Surrealism’s Peripheries 161
(feat. Synchronic Constellation – Le Moulin Society and its Time
curated by Huang Ya-Li et al.)
James Burton Ambiguous Utopias: 185
Science Fiction and Minor Cosmopolitanism
Hinemoana Baker Rest Home 209
05 VOICING THE minor COSMOPOLITAN 221
Irene Hilden and Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat Of Voices, Noises 223
& Colonial Traces
Liu Chuang Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities 228
Dong Bingfeng Bio-Archiving: Shenyang Underground Music as 238
History, Awareness, and Art in Action
Julian Henriques and Zairong Xiang Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, 250
Cosmopolitricks
CONSTELLATIONS 261
Mariya Nikolova: pinecones; jumpcut
Heinrich Wilke: silences
Anouk Madörin: techne
Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss: modulation
Jens Temmen: the imperial grammar of jurisdictional incongruence
Anna von Rath: convivial scholarship
About the authors 275
Acknowledgements 284
6 7
Preface
More than a year has passed since the minor cosmopolitan weekend, which I
curated together with the DFG Research Training Group (RTG) minor cosmopolitan-
isms, was held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in December 2018. A warm breeze
was just felt on the streets of Berlin.
This was February 2020. The recent memories of braving the northern wind to
line up for Berlinale screenings suddenly seemed unreal or misremembered. “It’s
not that bad, come on!,” a filmmaker from Montreal told us Berliners the other day
at a dinner table, as we casually talked about how awful the Berlin winter can be.
And he was right; it’s not that bad at all. It’s awful. Climate change has accelerated
to the extent that some predict the end of the world will come much sooner than
previously imagined. Even just one year ago, when we brought scholars, artists,
activists, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, curators, and journalists from around the
world to Berlin for a long minor cosmopolitan weekend, the ecological question,
although present, was not given a dedicated slot in the program. Yet ecological
crisis is markedly cosmopolitan—if by “cosmopolitan” we mean, minimally, ways of
thinking and living based on an assumption that the world is immensely connected
and, therefore, like it or not, we (must) live and think together. This immense con-
nection has been hailed in cosmopolitanisms big and small, major and minor, often
as an ideal to be realized.
Cosmopolitanism is a theory about how to live together. The earliest formulation of
cosmopolitanism in the West is usually traced back to as early as the fourth cen-
tury BCE in ancient Greece and specifically to Diogenes, who famously said that he
was a “citizen of the world—kosmopolitês,” an idea later picked up, among others,
by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who proposed a philosophy of a world
of “perpetual peace.” When cosmopolitanism first emerged as a political idea for
modernity in the European Enlightenment, the project embraced the liberal prom-
ises of a globalizing economy, yet remained oblivious to, and even complicit with,
capitalism, slavery and colonialism. It centered on the male, bourgeois, and white
liberal subject, without regard for the ongoing disenfranchisement, dehumanization,
and extermination of its “Others.”
6 7 In the wake of rapid globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first century, academ-
ics, politicians and other pundits were already declaring cosmopolitanism to be no
longer just a philosophical ideal, but a real, existing fact, because across the globe,
they argued, people were increasingly thinking and feeling beyond the nation, con-
sidering themselves citizens of the world. Not much remains of this euphoria today.
“If you think you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” argued
Teresa May, the former prime minister of the UK, enthusiastically, at the height of
the Brexit debate. Fast forward, as the UK has already cut itself off from Europe,
Europe is also fencing itself ever more, to the extent that its growingly aggressive,
violent and indeed murderous border regimes have brought their armies to the
Euro-Turkish border. Fortress Europe hides its favorite flags of democracy, freedom
and human rights—the West constantly chooses itself as these values’ unques-
tionable bearer—behind live ammunition, directed at human beings in dire need of
refuge from war-torn countries. The cosmopolitan ideal of imagining humanity as
One Happy Family was burnt to ashes on the Greek island of Lesvos, not very far
away from the birthplace of cosmopolitanism—at least according to the frequently
reiterated European origin story.
Another month has passed since I wrote the previous three paragraphs. A pan-
demic is devastating the world. This is March 2020. A new coronavirus (Covid-19)
seems to have become the true citizen of the world. Literally, physically, a minor
one, it appears to have realized the cosmopolitan ideal, albeit of a morbid kind. It
possesses no passport and yet is able to travel across artificial borders much more
easily and efficiently than any human being. It even seems, at first sight, to offer
everyone an equal opportunity to get infected. Perhaps we didn’t realize the cosmo-
politan premise of the bounded nature of humanity until it was too late. It was only
after the virus arrived in Europe and US America that we read words of universalism
and pledges for “global solidarity” (a very cosmopolitan idea indeed) from politi-
cians, pundits and philosophers. Judith Butler wrote on March 30th, 2020: “The
virus does not discriminate. We could say that it treats us equally, puts us equally
at risk of falling ill, losing someone close, living in a world of imminent threat. By
the way it moves and strikes, the virus demonstrates that the human community is
equally precarious.”1
These statements of viral non-exceptionalism are, of course, extremely convoluted.
No, the virus does not nod to the liberal premise of equal access. It does not affect
everyone equally. Butler rightly points out how “radical inequality” has been exacer-
bated, but it is not only the superstructures of evil (“nationalism, white supremacy,
violence against women, queer, and trans people, and capitalist exploitation”2)
that do the work. The pandemic reveals the utter failure of the Eurocentric liberal
subject. While most middle-class households could afford to “self-quarantine”
8 9
and “home-office,” many cannot. While many individuals in the Berlin conclave of
“the free world” actively resist quarantine measures by claiming their “personal
liberty” to gather in cafes, in big crowds, in “corona-parties,”—to the point that
the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had to hold a public speech to remind the
population that every life counts and that “Niemand ist verzichtbar” (no one is
dispensable)—many workers, mainly from under-privileged classes and with a
migrant background, are overworking, stocking food and toilet paper to keep up
with the euphoria of panic buying that has turned the “rational” human individual
into a hamster. Meanwhile, the verzichtbar refugees continue to be disposed of at
the border as unmournable life waiting to die—unless, of course, they are medical
workers (we’ve seen in the past weeks that those who have been kept in perpetual
bureaucratic limbo are suddenly asked to contribute their medical knowledge and
join forces to combat the pandemic), or can fill in for seasonal agricultural workers
stuck in their home countries.3
Although most contributions were written before the Covid-19 pandemic, the book
minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics and the Universe Together Otherwise,
which emerged from the minor cosmopolitan weekend, is edited against this
historic background: one of a rapidly collapsing world-as-we-know-it, as the global
ecological crisis worsens, fascism returns, the repression of disenfranchised
groups on a global scale persists, the “refugee crisis” inundates the mediascape,
and the coronavirus joins forces with neoliberal capitalism to kill the most vulner-
able. minor cosmopolitan invites scholars, activists, and artists to face the trouble,
with the questions raised, but not properly resolved, by cosmopolitanisms.
It challenges the underlying premises of major cosmopolitanism without letting
go of the unfulfilled emancipatory potential of the concept at large. It rethinks
cosmopolitanisms in the plural, and it traces multiple origins and trajectories of
cosmopolitan thought across the globe.
minor cosmopolitan takes the “ism” out of “cosmopolitanism,” for ism, even in its
pluralized version, seems to be premised on a false division between theory and
practice (a trademark of eurocentrism), which in turn saturates a colonial north-
south, east-west division for which we are paying a deadly price. The dizzying
multiplicity and complexity we are confronted with in today’s world require us to be
suspicious of any conceptual totality and monopoly that could claim a theory, and
therefore an ism, for all. Importantly, the disproportionate power of a little suffix,
like the tiny ism, teaches us that we need to use all small words, like “minor,” with
care and attention.
This small change—from ism, to no ism—engenders a big question: how do we
8 9 think about, and with, but also most importantly learn from, the minor cosmopolitan
afforded by the richness of the diverse practices, theories and ways of being in the
