ABSTRACT
Shrill warnings of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” and their invocation as justifi cation for xenophobic patriotism and imperial invasion, have given renewed urgency to the search for emergent cosmopolitanisms, as practices of conviviality and forms of belonging and solidarity to a world community. The “cosmopolitan” ideals and projects necessary for the task do not refer to sophisticated world travel and cross-cultural expertise, the conventional sense of cosmopolitanism as no more than a “good ethical orientation for those privileged to inhabit the frequent traveler lounges” (Calhoun 112). Nor does it signal an inevitable return to Immanuel Kant’s formulation; histories of colonialism and capitalism have long since discredited the benign potential of international commerce as a stable foundation for perpetual peace. Indeed, recent commentators have criticized the predilection to begin every discussion of cosmopolitanism with a return to European intellectual history: “[i]f it is already clear that cosmopolitanism begins with the Stoics, who invented the term, or with Kant who reinvented it, then philosophical refl ection on these moments is going to enable us always to fi nd what we are looking for. Yet [we could instead] try to be archivally cosmopolitan and to say, ‘Let’s simply look at the world across time and space and see how people have thought and acted beyond the local’” (Pollock et al. 585-86).
