From Édouard Glissant’s “The Open Boat” to the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

This collection of essays offers reflections on how cosmopolitical thinking can be, and perhaps needs to be, made "new" for our contemporary global ecumene. A key premise of the collection is the recognition that in the contemporary conjuncture, our understanding of cosmopolitanism should be open to new intersections with understandings of how "race" and ethnicity are being deployed. It should consider the connections between cosmopolitanism and cultural phenomena such as multiculturalism, diaspora, migration and varieties of neo-imperialism and (neo-)colonialism. Indeed, it is necessary to think of various cosmopolitanisms, rather than a singular cosmopolitanism. The political, particularly the nation form, interrupts, or poses a check to, cosmopolitan initiatives and aspirations, yet this book maintains that ethicopolitical concerns, complicating our understanding of cosmopolitanism, also amplify our understanding of what a reformed cosmopolitanism, or what I will elaborate below as cosmopolitics, might look like. In short it is a key contribution of this volume that it seeks to reorient our thinking about cosmopolitanism. It points the way to cosmopolitics (the de-construction and re-construction of cosmopolitanism), particularly by calling our attention to how such thinking in the contemporary globalized conjuncture must engage anew with race and ethnicity.We live in an age in which we are witnessing ethnically driven civil strife within nation-states: the ongoing strife between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir; the ethnonationalist Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia; the mutual genocide in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsi; the Kurdish struggle for a homeland in Iraq that saw reprisal in the form of gas attacks targeting women and children; the ethnically motivated Arab Spring protests and the violence wreaked upon civilians in Tahrir Square; the ongoing civil war in Syria; but also-if on a different scale-the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. We are also witnessing, even more crucially, an era of more refugees than ever streaming across borders and living, more or less indefinitely, in nonpermanent camps or settlements worldwide. It is thus a newly urgent ethicopolitical imperative that contemporary cosmopolitanisms negotiate issues of race or ethnicity as they emerge as drivers of social change both within the nation-state and, simultaneously, transnationally.This cosmopolitical project also requires anticipating and responding to interests that resist social change and to the resurgence of nationalism both in its benign democratic forms and in its virulent irruptions. Instances of the former type may be identified in the desire for a nation such as Israel to rebuild itself after political trauma or Haiti in the wake of a major earthquake, although of course these may be contested by rival nationalisms. Examples of the latter type, more worrisome, may be identified not only in reactionary ethnonationalisms produced through the Balkanization © 2018 Samir Dayal This work is licensed under the Cre...