ABSTRACT
The previous chapter sought to establish the foundations of a sociology of strangerhood following the classical formulations of Simmel and Schütz’s stranger and exploring two contemporary accounts of modernity that revolve around the centrality of this figure. This chapter situates the stranger within the cosmopolitanism debate, starting from Bauman and Sennett’s seminal contributions to recent literature where the link between cosmopolitanism and strangeness has been more explicitly thematised. While agreeing with sociological accounts that point to the need to redefine the stranger in a cosmopolitan context, I view existing attempts as unsatisfactory. Here, it is argued instead that an exploration of the figure of the homecomer, as initially undertaken by Schütz but not followed up in the sociological literature, is indispensable for an understanding of strangerhood in a cosmopolitan context. The chapter starts with a discussion of the recent literature on cosmopolitanism and strangeness and introduces the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger. Then the figure of the homecomer is examined and its relevance to the cosmopolitanism debate made more explicit in the light of postcolonial approaches to the displacements of native intellectuals. A final section deals with aspects related to language and translation in relation to both the stranger and the homecomer.
