ABSTRACT
This essay opens with a discussion of the historic ambiguities behind the word cosmopolitanism and clarifies its difference from other concepts with which it has been confused, such as globalization. Wilde is an example of an artist who embraced the multiple perspectives of the cosmopolitan in both his life and work, and who is therefore important to the history of cosmopolitanism. Brown gives examples of the lack of common ground in discussions of cosmopolitanism in the social sciences and the humanities, and notes the tendency of much writing in both camps to neglect the lives of cosmopolitan artists. The strain of cosmopolitan thought that undergirds the chapter begins with the Stoics and Cynics and runs through many later philosophers and artists, such as Kant, Tagore, Wilde, Satyajit Ray, and Derrida. At the center of Brown’s discussion is a close analysis of two works: Wilde’s famous (and critically neglected) “The Canterville Ghost” and Ray’s last film, “The Stranger,” in which a cosmopolitan anthropologist figures. Brown finds in each of these works a theory of cosmopolitanism as a form of “hospitality divorced from home” or from private property, a theory that has much in common with recent discussions of cosmopolitanism by Derrida that are rooted in Kant’s theory of the “right of visitation.” The essay ends with a discussion of the right of visitation, relating it to Wilde’s final sojourn in the most cosmopolitan city in Europe, Paris.
