Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Concept and Approaches

Autor: Minhao Zeng
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Sociological Review. 62:137-148
ISSN: 1467-954X
0038-0261
DOI: 10.1111/1467-954x.12137
Popis: ‘Cosmopolitanism is back’, proclaimed David Harvey presciently in 2000 ( Harvey, 2000 : 529). In the face of injustice, inequality and violence emerging from globalization processes, the last decade has witnessed a cascading interest in the vision of a world community in which sameness and difference are harmoniously dealt with. Across the humanities and social sciences, there have emerged multiple ways of understanding what exactly cosmopolitanism means for research. To push this concept to greater rigour, scholars have tried to demarcate its conceptual boundaries by underlining its conjunctural nature ( Werbner, 2006 ). Thus we have such notions as rooted cosmopolitanism, working-class cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism, ethnic cosmopolitanism, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. Of all these conjunctural terms, subaltern cosmopolitanism has gained noteworthy attention of late. In one of her articles published in 2010 about the old baggage and missing luggage of cosmopolitan theory, for example, Glick Schiller claims that the possibilities of strengthening cosmopolitan theory lie in ‘a further development of a subaltern cosmopolitanism’ (2010: 414). In this Viewpoint, I will first present an overview of how subaltern cosmopolitanism has been deployed by scholars, and then evaluate its particular purchase in cosmopolitan studies, and finally suggest fortifying the critical sinew of this concept by drawing on conversations about other weighty issues that concern the humanities and social sciences of today.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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