Table Of ContentCosmopolitan Geographies
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ESSAYS FROM THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE
Co s mo p o l i t an Geo g r ap hi e s
NEW LOCATIONS IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Vinay Dharwadker, EDITOR
First Published in Great Britain 2001 by Routledge
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © 2001 by The English Institute
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cosmopolitan geographies : new locations in literature and culture /
edited by Vinay Dharwadker.
p. cm. – (Essays from the English Institute)
Includes bibliographical references.
0-415-92506-1 – ISBN 0-415-92507-X (pbk.)
1. Cities and towns in literature. 2. Internationalism in literature.
3. Internationalism. I. Dharwadker, Vinay, 1954- II. Series.
PN56.C55 C67 2000
809'.93321732—dc21 00-036590
ISBN 978-0-415-92506-8 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-92507-5 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-315-86572-0 (eISBN)
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Place
VINAYDHARWADKER
1. THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS 15
BRUCE ROBBINS
2. “THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN33 ״
Cosmopolitanism and Late Medieval Literature
ROBERT R. EDWARDS
3. THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 63
Balzac in Paris
DAVID HARVEY
4. ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT, 89
UNIVERSALISM AND PATHOS
SHARON MARCUS
5. CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES 133
AND POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL MEMORY
PHENGCHEAH
6. THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM 171
New Stories, Old Stages
UNA CHAUDHURI
7. COSMOPOLITAN READING 197
K. ANTHONY APPIAH
CONTRIBUTORS 229
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go especially to Karen Newman and Anthony Appiah
for their invaluable help as coorganizers of the "Cosmopolitan
Geographies" conference at the English Institute in 1998; and to
Lee Edelman, the chair of the Institute's Board of Supervisors and
Trustees that year, and Marjorie Garber and Andrew Parker,
trustees, for their timely suggestions, interventions, and words of
encouragement. My thanks go also to Monica Miller, for her hard
work as the coordinator of the conference; to Judith Butler, Jay
Clayton, John Guillory, Wahneema Lubiano, and Kendall Thomas,
all members of the board in 1997 and 1998, for their contributions
to the conception of the conference; and to Jeffrey Masten, for his
support as secretary and member of the Board over several years
before and after the conference.
I owe large debts of gratitude to earlier colleagues at the English
Institute, particularly John Brenkman, Peter Stallybrass, Nancy
Vickers, Diana Fuss, and Joseph Roach, for their generosity in
many ways; to Kim Hall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Robert Thurman,
for their papers at the conference; and most of all to Anthony
Appiah (again), Una Chaudhuri, Pheng Cheah, Robert Edwards,
David Harvey, Sharon Marcus, and Bruce Robbins for their origi-
nal papers at the conference, their revised essays in this book, and
their patience and goodwill throughout. As always, my personal
debt is to Aparna Dharwadker, for her understanding at home and
in the world, and to our children, Aneesha and Sachin, who now
have one more book to read and reinvent in the future.
Vinay Dharwadker
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INTRODUCTION
Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Place
VINAYDHARWADKER
A quarter century ago, cosmopolitanism was a point of reference in
the humanities primarily in the context of the aesthetics of early
and late modernism, whether in poetry and fiction or in painting,
sculpture, and architecture. When it appeared as a subject of inter-
disciplinary debate two decades later, it had become a flashpoint for
heated political and theoretical disagreement.1 At least three large-
scale developments around the world between about 1975 and 1995
contributed directly to this transformation of cosmopolitanism.
One was the consolidation of new types of nationalism, based fre-
quently on programs of racial, religious, or cultural purification,
both in the so-called Third World and in and around Europe.
Another was the empowerment of new immigrant communities in
the national public spheres of the North and the West, as diasporic
populations from the South and the East attained an economic and
demographic critical mass in their host societies. The third was the
accelerated globalization of capital and material production and
consumption after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which rapidly altered
the economic and political relations among old and new nations.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, each of these
multidimensional phenomena generated a large, diverse body of
discourses and counterdiscourses about it. The (re)assertion of
