Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children: Cultural Cosmopolitan Reflection

This article aims to prove Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children as a cultural cosmopolitan novel through the lance of cosmopolitanism. Out of various types, cultural cosmopolitanism is my focus in this paper. Culturally, cosmopolitanism means openness to different cultures. Cosmopolitanism is a kind of cultural outlook involving an intellectual and aesthetic attitude of openness towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially from different nations. This type of cosmopolitanism refers to an ideal about culture or identity. Cultural cosmopolitans view that membership in a particular community is not essential for one’s social identity. It stresses that such cultural membership is irrelevant. It refers to partiality for cultures besides one’s own culture of origin as with a traveler or globally conscious person. The parochial feeling of nation and nationalism is, sometimes, an obstacle to the unity and humanitarian feeling. After the outbreak of pandemic Covid 19, people living in any corner of the world have realized- to a great extent- that the feeling of cosmopolitanism and humanism should be at the center of every human. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children evokes people, in this cosmos, cannot be confined within the boundary of limited nationalism.

Conclusion

This book has examined the nature of stigmatization and discrimination by documenting the experiences and responses of ordinary people who belong to variously stigmatized ethnoracial groups. It has explored how African Americans, Black Brazilians, Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews make sense of their predicaments and mold their situations, thus shedding light on the ways in which specific groups experience ethnoracial exclusion and respond to it. This concluding chapter reviews some of the book's major themes and the analytical gains achieved by the study in terms of accounting for the micro-experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and responses to those experiences through a macro comparison of three distinct national contexts; groupness and group boundaries; cultural membership, redistribution, and recognition; and understanding racial formations, reproductions, and transformations in Brazil, Israel, and the United States. The challenges that lie ahead as well as new venues of research are also discussed.

Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality

This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupations, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to “recognition gaps,” defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between groups in a society. I first describe how neoliberalism promotes growing recognition gaps. Then, drawing on research on stigmatized groups across several societies, I analyze how experiences of stigma and destigmatization are enabled and constrained by various contextual factors and actors, including institutions, cultural repertoires, knowledge workers, and social movement activists. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for the sociology of recognition and destigmatization, and by sketching how social scientists, policymakers, organizations, and citizens can contribute to the reduction of recognition gaps.

Drinking

This chapter continues the examination of social perceptions of disorder. To an outsider passing through the neighborhood, Riverwest’s numerous bars, pronounced public drinking and seeming tolerance of public intoxication may be seen as cause for concern. However, residents’ perceptions of local drinking establishments and activities are more varied. Bars can be serious trouble spots or valued amenities. Those with visible addictions can be nuisances or accepted neighbors. Porch drinking can degrade the neighborhood’s reputation or signal a vibrant public life. Definitions of uncivil or out-of-place practices are embedded in constructions of cultural membership and social distance. This chapter demonstrates how Riverwest residents’ sense of who and what belong in the neighborhood is shaped by their accumulated experiences and situated in residents’ framing of the neighborhood and its trajectory. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the consequences of these collective perceptions of “disorder” for neighborhood engagement, investment, and stability.

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction

This book moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. The book establishes four dominant categories of narrative—loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory—that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As it shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. The book provides a background of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, which particularly demonstrate the increasing focus on empowerment—economic, political, and sexual—within Chicana/o and Latina/o America, not within Anglo-America.