ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a recentring of cosmopolitics in which the experiences of the migrant and the slave, not the citizen, are taken as emblematic of a groundless condition of politics. It analyses the 2017 transnational movement against slavery as a world-building for which the memory of slavery, not the European tradition of citizenship and republican principles, stands at the centre of political action. The Arendtian perspective on “new begging” and political “world-building” is very fruitful in approaching migrant movements, yet Arendt fails to engage with the histories of slavery and slave revolt; thus the author turns to the geography of archipelago, as advanced by Edouard Glissant, spanning geographical borders and even non-linear frames of historicity. The cosmopolitical world-building of the 2017 anti-slavery movement is fugitive because migrants and runaway slaves generate echos-monde that encapsulates worldly plurality in the miniature of their experience and gestures towards a cosmopolitical Tout-Monde.
