The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism
Author: Leigh T.I. Penman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350156973

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The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800 philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians, alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of cosmopolitanism today.

World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality

World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality
Author: Gesine Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 3110641135

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From today’s vantage point it can be denied that the confidence in the abilities of globalism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism to illuminate cultural signification processes of our time has been severely shaken. In the face of this crisis, a key concept of this globalizing optimism as World Literature has been for the past twenty years necessarily is in the need of a comprehensive revision. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise offers a wide range of contributions approaching the blind spots of the globally oriented Humanities for phenomena that in one way or another have gone beyond the discourses, aesthetics, and political positions of liberal cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization. Departing basically (but not exclusively) from different examples of Latin American literatures and cultures in globalized contexts, this volume provides innovative insights into critical readings of World Literature and its related conceptualizations. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a mustread for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment

Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment
Author: Joan-Pau Rubiés
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009305344

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Offers a timely intervention into the debate about the Enlightenment and its legacy, highlighting both its plurality and continuing relevance.

Joseph Conrad, Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism

Joseph Conrad, Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism
Author: Robert Hampson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137584629

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In 1908, Joseph Conrad was criticised by a reviewer for being a man ‘without either country or language’: even his shipboard communities were the product of a ‘cosmopolitan’ vision. This book takes off from that criticism and begins by exploring the history and meanings of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. It then considers the multinational world of Conrad’s ships – and of the Merchant Marine more generally – to differentiate multinationalism from cosmopolitanism. Subsequent chapters then address nationalism, nation-formation and the concept of the nation through a reading of Nostromo; cosmopolitanism and internationalism in The Secret Agent; nationalism, internationalism and transnational activism in relation to Under Westen Eyes; and Conrad’s own transnational activism in his later essays. While drawing distinctions between cosmopolitanism, internationalism and transnationalism as the appropriate conceptual framings for Conrad’s works, this book traces Conrad’s own engagement with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnational activism in relation to the political events of his time.

Jewish Memory And the Cosmopolitan Order

Jewish Memory And the Cosmopolitan Order
Author: Natan Sznaider
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2011-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0745647952

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Natan Sznaider offers a highly original account of Jewish memory and politics before and after the Holocaust. It seeks to recover an aspect of Jewish identity that has been almost completely lost today - namely, that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, they lived in a constant tension between particularism and universalism. And it is precisely this tension, which Sznaider seeks to capture in his innovative conception of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism', that is increasingly the destiny of all peoples today. The book pays special attention to Jewish intellectuals who played an important role in advancing universal ideas out of their particular identities. The central figure in this respect is Hannah Arendt and her concern to build a better world out of the ashes of the Jewish catastrophe. The book demonstrates how particular Jewish affairs are connected to current concerns about cosmopolitan politics like human rights, genocide, international law and politics. Jewish identity and universalist human rights were born together, developed together and are still fundamentally connected. This book will appeal both to readers interested in Jewish history and memory and to anyone concerned with current debates about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the modern world.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
Author: Hala Halim
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823251764

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Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers--C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell--whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers' representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his Camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers' and filmmakers' engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

Rooted Cosmopolitans

Rooted Cosmopolitans
Author: James Loeffler
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300235062

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A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Moscow, the Fourth Rome

Moscow, the Fourth Rome
Author: Katerina Clark
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674062892

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In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Cosmopolitan Vision

Cosmopolitan Vision
Author: Ulrich Beck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745694543

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In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Cosmopolitan Archaeologies

Cosmopolitan Archaeologies
Author: Lynn Meskell
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2009-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822392429

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An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be practiced in contextually specific ways, what unites and defines them is archaeologists’ acceptance of responsibility for the repercussions of their projects, as well as their undertaking of heritage practices attentive to the concerns of the living communities with whom they work. These concerns may require archaeologists to address the impact of war, the political and economic depredations of past regimes, the livelihoods of those living near archaeological sites, or the incursions of transnational companies and institutions. The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts. Contributors. O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham