ABSTRACT
Like other contributions to this special issue, this article focuses on what has been called ‘actually-existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins 1998, 22-23), that is, cosmopolitanism not as a theoretical and normative ideal but as a set of practices that stem from a ‘willingness to engage with the Other’, as Hannerz (1990, 239) famously put it. More precisely, it discusses ‘micro-cosmopolitanisms’, by which I mean the ways that cosmopolitanism is practised in the ‘microcosm’ of the multiethnic city. By concentrating on the urban scale, I aim to raise questions about which kinds of movement we think are required to generate cosmopolitanism. This article begins with a call to disentangle the concept of cosmopolitanism from international mobility and resituate it as a relation between persons that does not require cross-border travel. It continues by briefly describing the aims, context and methods of my research investigating interethnic relations in multiethnic commercial streets in Montréal. In the third section, I draw on fieldwork material from this study to illustrate how intra-urban mobility – small journeys through the city – leads to encounters with ‘the Other’ that have the potential to produce cosmopolitan dispositions. In the fourth section, I argue that another kind of mobility – mobility of the imagination, or reflexivity – is crucial to the production of cosmopolitanism. I end by exploring some of the limits of
Martha Radice
Introduction
Like other contributions to this special issue, this article focuses on what has been called ‘actually-existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins 1998, 22-23), that is, cosmopolitanism not as a theoretical and normative ideal but as a set of practices that stem from a ‘willingness to engage with the Other’, as Hannerz (1990, 239) famously put it. More precisely, it discusses ‘micro-cosmopolitanisms’, by which I mean the ways that cosmopolitanism is practised in the ‘microcosm’ of the multiethnic city. By concentrating on the urban scale, I aim to raise questions about which kinds of movement we think are required to generate cosmopolitanism. This article begins with a call to disentangle the concept of cosmopolitanism from international mobility and resituate it as a relation between persons that does not require cross-border travel. It continues by briefly describing the aims, context and methods of my research investigating interethnic relations in multiethnic commercial streets in Montréal. In the third section, I draw on fieldwork material from this study to illustrate how intra-urban mobility – small journeys through the city – leads to encounters with ‘the Other’ that have the potential to produce cosmopolitan dispositions. In the fourth section, I argue that another kind of mobility – mobility of the imagination, or reflexivity – is crucial to the production of cosmopolitanism. I end by exploring some of the limits of
micro-cosmopolitanisms, including the tensions between aspirations and practices that can appear in the city.
