Afterword

Appiah uses a trip to attend a family wedding as a departure point for meditations on the nature of overlapping and conflicting claims of belonging.

The Pitfalls and Promises of Afropolitanism

Emma Dabiri critiques mainstream modes of Afropolitanism as a type of imperialism of cultural consumerism capitalized upon by Western markets and as primarily concerned with commodifying “African flavored” versions of Western conventions and forms. She contemplates the alternative of an Afropolitanism beyond such elite consumerism that would be guided by African precolonial modernity, epistemologies, and forms of creativity.

Cosmopolitan Prejudice

Paulo Lemos Horta provides a novel perspective of cosmopolitanism in the service of empire through the works of the famous Richard Francis Burton, self-described “cosmopolite” and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s prime example of his cosmopolitan imperative to be open to cultural difference. The Victorian explorer, diplomat, and translator considered cosmopolitan experience—his conception of which was somewhat similar to Bender’s—essential to the success of the British Empire, both politically and culturally. Yet, as Horta argues, Burton and his notion of a properly cosmopolitan empire pose problems for Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, for Burton failed Appiah’s second imperative, to recognize the equal respect of reason and moral choice in every human being. Through Burton, Horta suggests the difficulty of disentangling cosmopolitan from counter-cosmopolitan impulses in the context of empire.

Utonal Life

Speaking to the idea of imperfect cosmopolitanisms, Leela Gandhi insists on this sense of imperfection, playing upon the grammatical import of the imperfect verb form: “Unlike the preterit form, which implies an already completed past action, the imperfective aspect renders an apparently concluded (perfected) action unfinished and suddenly infinitive. In this way the imperfectionism at the core of disapparation makes the subject of ethics into a perpetual—restless—work in progress.”

Cosmopolitanism Goes to Class

Walter Benn Michaels argues that the salient issue should not be the debate between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, but rather the choice of cultural difference over economic difference that for him is implied in both. On university campuses, Michaels contends, cultural difference is considered a positive opportunity while economic difference—that is, poverty—does not define a useful identity. Cosmopolitanism cannot afford to invest in cultural difference at the expense of concern for class difference and social justice.

Other Cosmopolitans

Yan Haiping explores Kang Youwei’s Book of Great Harmony, a utopian portrait of the peoples of the earth living together without racial, national, or cultural divides that emerged, almost miraculously, at the height of Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. Placing the book into its tormented historical context, Yan Haiping takes his cue from Calhoun’s observation that “statements of cosmopolitanism as universalism echo rather than transcend nationalism.” Arguing that figures previously conceived as nationalist can also be thought of as cosmopolitans, he lays out a tradition of cosmopolitanism that is both Chinese and cross-cultural.

A Stoic Critique of Cosmopolitanism

Phillip Mitsis offers a polemical corrective to the uses of ancient philosophy in the influential reformulations of cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum. Appiah and Nussbaum deploy the Stoics in the service of liberal and progressive conceptions of cosmopolitanism. According to Mitsis, however, their readings reverse the Stoics’ original meaning. Commenting on Zeno’s biography of Alexander the Great, the Stoics admired Alexander as conqueror. He accomplished, they thought, what the philosophers could not, bringing different peoples under the same system of law. Those who see cosmopolitanism today as Western imperialism in liberal disguise would recognize the precedent.

Afropolitanism

Mbembe discusses the difficulty of defining “who is African” based on race given the continent’s long history as both the starting and end point of population movements and cultural transmissions. Addressing formations of new solidarities within the transformations taking places across African cultures and identities, Mbembe draws upon that history to posit the possibility of a transnational “Afropolitan” culture that embraces difference as it engages with the world at large.

The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor

Writing in the Luso-Brazilian context, Silviano Santiago again calls for a cosmopolitanism from below. In Portugal, he writes, elite cosmopolitanism is bound up with the legacy of empire and empire-returned captains of commerce; it tends to be found in private school and luxury hotels. For the poor who leave Portugal for Paris, by contrast, cosmopolitanism is more likely to register as an experience of loss—perhaps most poignantly, among second-generation migrants, loss of the Portuguese language itself, a closing off rather than an expansion of familial and cultural connections. On the other hand, Santiago also contrasts the Europhile and state-sanctioned cosmopolitanism of Brazilian diplomats with the vibrancy of more popular modes of cosmopolitanism that emerge from the favelas and draw upon Afro-Brazilian histories and South-South resonances.

Afropolitan Style and Unusable Global Spaces

Ashleigh Harris critiques the tendency to locate Afropolitanism in African expatriate and diaspora culture, particularly as a culture of elite consumerism. Asking if “Afropolitanism” is a useful term, Harris argues that without it, the ways in which economic inequalities shape Africans’ experience of worldliness would largely remain invisible. Beyond the consumer culture of the elite, she contends, Africans do not enjoy equal cosmopolitan freedoms as citizens of the world. In her analysis of Brian Chikwava’s novel Harare North as a dramatization of the cosmopolitan experience of being African in the world, Harris arrives at a conclusion that seems similar to Bender’s conception of the cosmopolitan as someone who is at home nowhere rather than everywhere, but is more literal: the Afropolitanism Chikwava expresses in his novel is an actual state of homelessness, rather than the possibility of being at home in the world.