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 DOI: 10.1177/146349960400400417

2004 4: 497Anthropological TheoryThomas Fillitz

Book review: Cosmopolitanism. A Millenial Quartet Book  

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Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds.2002. Cosmopolitanism. A Millenial Quartet Book. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.pp. 241. ISBN: (pbk) 0 8223 2899 2. Price: £16.95.

One of the premises of this collection of essays is that cosmopolitanism should be anentirely open and unspecified category. Responding to this assumption, and in order toextend the debates beyond the topic’s location in European thought, the editors havebrought together contributions from various sites and disciplines (language and literaryhistory, critical intellectual history, ethnography, urban studies, architectural history, andart history). A common frame of reference for all of them is constituted within the threeforces of nationalism, globalization, and multiculturalism.

Referring to the notion’s different meanings over time, the editors emphasize in theintroduction that today cosmopolitanism is predominantly represented by philanthropicindividuals like Mother Theresa. The authors propose, however, another concept ofcosmopolitanism, one grounded on our need to ‘learn to live tenaciously in terrains ofhistoric and cultural transition’ (p. 4). They consider as cosmopolitans the ‘victims ofmodernity’ (p. 6): refugees, people of the diaspora, migrants, and exiles – groups thatare distanced from any national belonging. Cosmopolitanism from such a viewpoint ismore a ‘translational process of culture’s in-betweenness’ (p. 6).

Paralleling processes that led to the idea of the plurality of feminisms, the editorspropose the concept in the plural: cosmopolitanisms – ‘the plurality of modes andhistories . . . that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history’ (p. 8). They, by approach-ing the topic from heterogeneous perspectives, support the idea that various cosmopoli-tanisms existed and exist in multiple centres of the world. Pollock compares the spreadof ancient Sanskrit and Latin literatures to show two cosmopolitanisms, one voluntaristthe other coercive. Ackbar Abbas connects the cosmopolitanisms of Shanghai and HongKong, showing that the decline of the former after 1947 enabled the resurgence of thelatter. The cosmopolitanism of Shanghai in the 1930s was built in a space of multi-valence, whereas Hong Kong’s in the late 1980s was a response to a space of disappear-ance.

The assumption of historically and geoculturally different multiculturalisms leads tothe thesis ‘that we already are and have always been cosmopolitan, though we may notalways have known it’ (p. 12). Processes such as ethnicization and nationalism most ofthe time impede our awareness of this. Cosmopolitanism is not an abstract idea butrather the site of a ‘politics of cosmopolitanism’ (pp. 12ff.). By focusing on spectralhousing – the multitude of pavement dwellers – and the prevalence of street commerce,Arjun Appadurai shows how India’s leading political party has abused the disjunctrelationship between cash and capital since the 1970s to create the idea of a purified(Hindu) national space and to ‘decosmopolitaniz[e]’ Bombay, transforming it into‘Mumbai’ (p. 78).

Two concepts seem specifically striking: Walter Mignolo’s ‘critical and dialogicalcosmopolitanism’ and Abbas’s ‘arbitrage’. Mignolo reconceives cosmopolitanism fromthe perspective of coloniality. He suggests that negotiating the coloniality of power andthe dilemmas of colonial difference should lead to what he calls ‘diversality’ (p. 181)instead of to another universality. Abbas’s notion is derived from an economic conceptof capitalizing, and refers to everyday strategies for negotiating the transnational spaces

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created by global capital, in other words for getting local advantage from the inter-connectedness of the vernacular and the global flow.

The hypothesis of our fundamental but often unnoticed cosmopolitanism (p. 12),seductive as it is, invites critical reflections. It conveys the impression that cosmo-politanism can be seen as synonymous with the Creole character of culture and leads meto wonder whether the concept of culture as creolized implies that we, the people, areautomatically cosmopolitan with only politics hindering our experience of this?

Another question concerns the concept that exiles and migrants are the cosmopoli-tans of today. This implies that movement/displacement determines the loss of thefeeling and of the practices of national belonging. Such a loss would position therefugee/exile/migrant positively as a subject freed of the one tradition and empoweredto move among whichever traditions he chooses.

The whole book challenges firstly by its notion of cosmopolitanism at large. Moreover,the concept of the ‘politics of cosmopolitanism’ enables readers to consider cosmo-politanism’s connection with social and, above all, power relations. If the emphasis todate has been on cosmopolitanism as the pleasure of repeated immersion into othercultures, here the stress is on other dimensions: such experiences may be forced on peopleand societies (p. 211), cosmopolitan may be given although framed by indifference. Thepowerful momentum of this multi-disciplinary collusion raises questions about projectsof heterogeneous conviviality in the context of power relations both in the local andbeyond.

Thomas FillitzUniversity of Vienna, Austria

[email: Thomas.fillitz@univie.ac.at]

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(4)

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