ABSTRACT
The Third World migrant finds himself between a cosmopolitanism inspired
by an imperial imaginary and an increasingly medicalized Western nation-
alism. These poles both embrace and reject the migrant. While gesturing to
a smoothing of spaces, cosmopolitanism enacts a discourse that arrests the
migrant in a hierarchy of cultural differences. Though no longer dependent
upon a vertical conception of movement, cosmopolitanism has not aban-
doned the connection between movement and knowledge. It is governed by
a conception of knowledge that places the migrant in a marginal position to the ‘‘post-national,’’ globalizedworld. Put differently, theWest is cosmopolitan
only insofar as it understands its culture to be the final step in an historical
movement. Hence Western cosmopolitanism does not celebrate globalization
as flows that breed differences, but seeks to discipline the proliferation of
differences through colonial-inspired racial and spatial hierarchies. It is this
relationship to difference that explains the simultaneous celebration of a
cosmopolitan present and the rejection of the migrant evinced in discourses
about the superbug. The anxiety and fear of the superbug exhibited in Ebola and HIV illustrate how movements of Third World migrants remain
secondary to Western flows of capital and commodity.
