Negative cosmopolitanism: cultures and politics of world citizenship after globalization 9780773550964, 9780773550971, 9780773552043, 9780773552050, 0773550968, 0773550976, 0773552049, 0773552057

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Negative Cosmopolitanism

N E GAT I V E C O S M O P O L I TA N I S M Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization Edited by EDDY KENT and TERRI TOMSKY

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston ∙ London ∙ Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 “American Good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and a Human Rights Record” by Crystal Parikh also appears in Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) © The Regents of University of Minnesota

ISBN 978-0-7735-5096-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5097-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5204-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5205-0 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Negative cosmopolitanism : cultures and politics of world citizenship after globalization / edited by Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5096-4 (cloth). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5097-1 (paper). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5204-3 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5205-0 (ePUB) 1. Cosmopolitanism – History. 2. Globalization – History. 3. Capitalism – History. 4. Cosmopolitanism in literature. 5. Globalization in literature. 6. Capitalism in literature. I. Kent, Eddy, 1978–, editor II. Tomsky, Terri, 1975–, editor

JZ1308.N44 2017

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C2017-904047-2 C2017-904048-0

Set in 10.5/13.5 Warnock Pro with Newslab Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ∙ vii Introduction: Negative Cosmopolitanism ∙ EDDy KENt aND tErrI tomSKy ∙ 3

Part One · Cosmopolitan Histories 1 American Good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and a Human Rights Record ∙ CryStal ParIKh ∙ 29 2 Sui Generous: Examining the Object of Organized Philanthropy through the MacArthur Foundation ∙ GEorDIE mIllEr ∙ 43 3 Underwriting Cosmopolitanism: Insurance, Slavery, and Confidence Games in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man ∙ DENNIS mISChKE ∙ 58 4 Fractured Mediations: Eur/Asian Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms ∙ SNEJa GUNEw ∙ 74 5 Disaster Cosmopolitanism: Imaginations of Comparison in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows ∙ lIam o’loUGhlIN ∙ 91

Part Two · Cosmopolitan Labour 6 Cosmopolitanism from Below: Oil Capitalism, Informality, and Citizenship in Nigeria ∙ PaUl UGor ∙ 107 7 Representing Migrant Labour in Contemporary Britain: Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Chinese Whispers and Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields/Two Caravans ∙ PamEla mcCallUm ∙ 130 8 Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility in Annalee Davis’s On the Map ∙ mElISSa StEPhENS ∙ 149 9 Reproductive Politics, the Negative Present, and Cosmopolitan Futurity ∙ hEathEr latImEr ∙ 172

Part Three · Cosmopolitan Communities 10 Standing Outside the Law: Prostitution-Free Zones and the Power of Property ∙ JUlIaNE CollarD ∙ 187 11 “Internal Racisms” of the Yakuza-eiga ∙ mIKE DIlloN ∙ 200 12 Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Tolstoyan and Goethean Ideas of World Literature during the Two World Wars ∙ DINa GUSEJNova ∙ 217 13 At Home in the World of the Wound: Feral Cosmopolitics in the Red Riding Quartet ∙ marK SImPSoN ∙ 243 14 Homiletic Realism ∙ tImothy BrENNaN ∙ 263 Afterword: Incipient Cosmopolitanisms ∙ PEtEr NyErS ∙ 283 Notes ∙ 291 Bibliography ∙ 345 Contributors ∙ 385 Index ∙ 389

AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

The essays in this collection emerge from papers presented at a conference on the topic of negative cosmopolitanism, held in October 2012. That conference was made possible through the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Trudeau Foundation, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the University of Alberta. The stimulating – and often contentious – conversations held during those two days, among over fifty presenters and hundreds of registered attendees, convinced us of the need for this volume. We thank the contributors for their patience in seeing this book through to its publication. It has been a long journey! On behalf of all the contributors, we would like to thank all of the people whose eyes have passed over various parts of this manuscript during its composition. In particular, we owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Abley, our editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, who scrupulously stuck by the project and supported us all the way. We would also like to thank the press’s three anonymous readers for the seriousness and care that they took in reviewing the manuscript. We particularly appreciate the constructive feedback and detailed specificity of each report, which helped shape this final volume. Assembling an edited collection, we have learned, is a complicated process and we would like to acknowledge our research assistants, Liam Young and Kristina Vyskocil. Liam was our proverbial cat-herder, overseeing the formatting of each essay into the mQUP style; Kristina joined the project at a later stage, reviewing the manuscript and scouring the footnotes to ensure the integrity of our works cited. We are very grateful for their work and any errors that might remain are wholly

our responsibility. We are also grateful to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta who, through the Roger Smith Undergraduate Research Award, enabled John Yoon to join our project and help develop a preliminary bibliography as we began writing our introduction to the collection. During the project, we have relied on our community of colleagues, students, and support staff at the University of Alberta. We gratefully acknowledge the Kule Institute of Advanced Study, whose generous Research Cluster Grant helped fund our two research assistants. Thanks, too, are extended to Susan Howard, the research administrator in the Department of English and Film Studies. Sue’s experience helped us navigate the sometimes byzantine internal and external financial reporting systems as well as various logistical challenges that came with the development of this collection. Our colleagues here in Edmonton have been relentless in their encouragement for this project but a special mention must go to Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, who has served as our mentor, right from the moment we began thinking about organizing the conference. Imre has been a constant source of knowledge and friendship to us: this book would not exist without his support. A version of Sneja Gunew’s chapter, “Fractured Mediations: Eur/ Asian Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms,” first appeared in her monograph, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators, published by Anthem Press in 2017. It is reprinted here by kind permission of Anthem Press. A version of Mike Dillon’s chapter, “‘Internal Racisms’ of the Yakuza-eiga,” appeared in Studies in the Humanities 39, no. 1–2 (2012): 193–232, as “The Immigrant and the Yakuza: Gangscapes in Miike Takashi’s DOA .” It is published here by kind permission of the journal. A version of Crystal Parikh’s chapter, “American Good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and a Human Rights Record,” also appears in her 2017 monograph, Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color, published by the University of Minnesota Press at the same time as this volume. Finally, as co-editors, each of us has a network of friends and distant family who have supported us through this and all our other academic endeavours. However, we are especially thankful for the child-care professionals at Edmonton’s University Infant Toddler Centre, who took care of our children, Felix and Zara, and whose labour was indispensable to freeing up the time needed to work on a book of this scope.

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Negative Cosmopolitanism

Introduction: Negative Cosmopolitanism Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky

Cosmopolitanism, like most -isms, is open to a variety of interpretations. For many, cosmopolitanism is an ancient Greek concept that has been rediscovered by modern thinkers trying to develop conceptual tools capable of managing our shrinking globe. A byword for “world citizenship,” it is frequently associated with progressive and emancipatory politics. For others, cosmopolitanism is an epithet, as in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the “rootless Jew” or the anti-capitalist campaigns against the “Davos set” and the global one percent. Negative Cosmopolitanism is not designed to reconcile the debate, in the sense of deciding whether indeed cosmopolitanism is “good” or “bad.” Instead, this book sets out to understand cosmopolitanism within the context of globalization. Even cosmopolitanism’s great champions, such as political scientist Anthony Pagden, agree that cosmopolitanism is hopelessly entangled with globalization, with cosmopolitan ideals frequently used both to promote and excuse the exploitation and violence of imperialist and capitalist expansion.1 Sociologist Ulrich Beck develops this entanglement thesis to argue for a “cosmopolitanization” that is correlative to globalization. Beck cites examples as varied as long-distance love and offshore manufacturing as evidence for a world increasingly structured by and conscious of globalized markets, global norms (such as human rights), decentralized digital communication, and large-scale transnational migration.2 For Pagden and Beck, the consequences of economic globalization – a phenomenon which has many historical origins, but which began to take its modern shape during the expansion of European maritime trading and military operations in the eighteenth century – have led to a world that has become

cosmopolitanized, whether we like it or not. In other words, we need to understand cosmopolitanism not just as a philosophical ideal, but also as a material fact. Balancing the tension between cosmopolitan ideals and cosmopolitan practice – what some scholars distinguish as “cosmopolitics” – this collection sets out to consider the legacy of cosmopolitanism through negative critique. The title Negative Cosmopolitanism deliberately evokes the school of Cynical philosophy, whose founder, Diogenes of Sinope, coined the term kosmopolitēs in response to Athenians who asked him which community he belonged to. Against the majority of books on the topic, whose genealogy of cosmopolitanism credits the Cynic simply for inventing a term into which later philosophers (primarily the Stoics and Kant) could pour a positive content, we take the negative impulse of Diogenes’s cynicism seriously. That is, rather than cynically dismiss cosmopolitanism as the fig leaf for neoliberal capitalism or imperialism, this collection cynically engages its enduring entanglement with globalization and empire. Before elaborating our sense of “negative cosmopolitanism,” it is instructive to recreate the rhetoric of imminent crisis that usually attends the call for more or better cosmopolitans. Such a narrative usually opens by observing how the intensification of transportation and communication networks has led to commodities, ideas, and people moving with increasing rapidity across the globe. This traffic has unsettled established patterns of life, creating fears and insecurities about war, disease, economic inequality, financial meltdowns, cultural flattening, environmental degradation, and climate change. Simultaneous to this negative affect is the growing realization of the earth’s finitude. We share a limited space, and decisions made half a world away now have direct and sometimes immediate impacts on our daily lives. No longer able to ignore our common problems, we have seen increasing demands to create institutions or frameworks for political interaction on a global scale. So wrote German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” which promoted cosmopolitanism as both a practical and principled tool. During the age of European imperialism, as England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal were expanding their spheres of influence across the earth, Kant wrote two essays that have since become foundational to our modern understanding of cosmopolitanism. For Kant, the fundamental definition of a cosmopolitan as

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a citizen of the world implies that we have moral obligations to each other arising out of our shared humanity, irrespective of our attachments to smaller political units such as nation, city, region, language group, religion, or family. As such, it offers a normative principle for regulating actions in a global age. In his essays, Kant optimistically endorsed the spread of empire and commerce, believing them to be agents of radical disruption that would help humans shake off centuries of superstition and provincial thinking. In his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), he proposed that such revolutions encourage “the hope that … the highest purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last be realized as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop.”3 A decade later he went further, calling the “cosmopolitan constitution” of the global civil society a natural and inevitable conclusion of world history. In “Perpetual Peace,” he explained how nature has historically driven humans “in all directions by means of war so that they inhabit even the most inhospitable regions.”4 Yet, “since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company.”5 Recognition of finitude – of geographical space and natural resources – thus compels human beings into some kind of global relationship. Whereas previously the terms of that relationship had been violent, Kant predicted that global commerce would promote bonds of mutual self-interest between the nations; feudalism would gradually yield to true republicanism, leading, for the first time in world history, to “perpetual peace.” The role of commerce in securing perpetual peace is central to Kant’s model, and also requires clarification. It does not presuppose rational agents capable of pursuing reasonable conversations, or an equivalent degree of rationality between parties. Rather, it is based on what Kant calls hospitality. While most analyses of this essay have focused on the way in which hospitality is used to explain the duty of each state to extend temporary refuge to any who request it, “hospitality” also structures Kant’s ideal of international commerce. Here the reciprocity of hospitality becomes clear; viewed through commerce, we see how the culture of hospitality should shape the visitor’s behaviour. Kant defines the ideal of commercial hospitality by negation, invoking the recent example of the “inhospitable conduct of the civilized nations of our continent, especially the commercial states.”6 Kant refers here not only to the state-sanctioned imperialism of Spain and Portugal, but also the

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corporate imperialism of the various English, French, and Dutch East India Companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and so on. For Kant, “the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great,” with “oppression of the natives” leading to “widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery, and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race.”7 As Mike Dillon observes in his contribution to this collection, Kant praised China and Japan for wisely restricting the access of these rapacious Europeans. However, Kant was clear that as soon as commerce was conducted properly – that is, hospitably – the whole world, including China and Japan, would enter into a universal community, “developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.”8 Kant’s view that economic globalization will secure the conditions for a cosmopolitan civil society has remained persuasive. However, despite its appeal, the next two centuries failed to secure anything near Kant’s prediction of the perpetual peace. Still, like the case of the Christian proselytizer St Paul, who incorrectly believed Christ would return within his lifetime, facts have not prevented people from admiring the beauty of Kant’s idea. We see, for example, Kant’s argument surface in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto, when they describe how world trade had accelerated to the point where capitalism had “batter[ed] down all Chinese walls.” 9 The need for a constantly changing market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere … the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … The individual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.10 Likewise, and more recently, Thomas Friedman rehearses the prediction of a (capitalist) perpetual peace in The World Is Flat (2005), which concludes its analysis with what he calls the “Dell Theory” of conflict prevention: “No two countries that are part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are part of the same global supply chain.”11 Whether the

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future is communist or capitalist, for such thinkers it seems certain to be cosmopolitan; to them, cosmopolitanism is a consequence of economic development. To give another example, consider how the revival of cosmopolitan studies in academic and policy circles coincided with the spread of the economic policies known as neoliberalism. Observing the geopolitical conditions in the late 1980s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expansion of international free trade agreements, many thinkers and policymakers believed that they were finally on the eve of perpetual peace. In 1991, for instance, US president George H.W. Bush offered a “big idea” to the American public in his State of the Union address. Bush presented a hopeful vision of “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind – peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”12 Though it is easy to understand why the American head of state could not use the word “cosmopolitan,” his imagery and intellectual architecture both evoke Kant’s vision. In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant outlines the importance of moral leadership to his project: For if by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which is by its nature inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states. These will join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea of international right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further with a series of alliances of this kind.13 For Bush, the United States stood as Kant’s virtuous republic, the catalyst that would inspire other states to realize how their mutual self-interests are better secured through reason and commerce than through sectarianism or conflict. Obviously one cannot uncritically accept Bush’s hegemonic inflection of cosmopolitanism – indeed, the chapters by Geordie Miller and Crystal Parikh in this collection explore the complicated relationship between American power and cosmopolitan values. Still, it is easy to see how, in such an environment, Kantian cosmopolitanism soon became a political and academic keyword. Taking cosmopolitanism out from its traditional home in philosophy and political science journals, scholars like Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, and Martha Nussbaum started

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writing about it for wider audiences of non-specialists in non-scholarly venues such as Die Zeit and The Boston Review.14 Meanwhile, within the academy, the proliferation of interest in cosmopolitanism has been such that, in 2012, Gerard Delanty announced that it was now possible to speak of “cosmopolitan studies” as an established interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences.15 One of the more significant contributors to this area has been Timothy Brennan (whose work is included in this volume). Brennan was among the first to anticipate the cosmopolitan turn, and he laid out the theoretical and practical importance of cosmopolitanism in several essays published in the late 1980s.16 Following the post-Cold War enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism as a geopolitical and ethical project, Brennan launched one of its strongest critiques. His 1997 monograph, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now challenged the normative, optimistic, liberal, and neo-Kantian views of cosmopolitanism, to remind scholars of its corporatist and capitalist iterations. Cosmopolitanism, he argues, serves many purposes, operating sometimes as a cultural commodity, and other times as the thin veneer on an expanding American hegemony.17 Taking a different approach than Brennan but sharing his skepticism of cosmopolitanism’s many guises, Amanda Anderson notes how it is curious to see a term so deeply associated with Enlightenment thought circulating enthusiastically in the wake of poststructuralism and postmodernism.18 As Karen O’Brien observes in her study of eighteenth-century historiography, Enlightenment cosmopolitanism projected its putative universalism off a primary subject who was European, white, male, and middle class.19 Furthermore, over time cosmopolitanism acquired a problematic set of historical associations which would seemingly render it unhelpful in any project seriously committed to principles of global justice or equality. Historians such as Zvi Gitelman, Michael Miller, and Scott Ury have described how, almost immediately following Kant’s aspirational theorization, cosmopolitanism was deployed in the rhetoric of European anti-Semitism.20 Literary scholars Lauren Goodlad and Julia Wright show how, more generally, cosmopolitans were viewed with intense suspicion when and where national identity was contested.21 Likewise, we see the word used today as an epithet in descriptions of both globalization’s elite (recall the Davos set and the one percent) and its managerial class: the

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bureaucrats, corporate executives, and academics who participate in what Ulf Hannerz describes as “transnational culture.”22 With this history in mind, Anderson defends the intellectual and moral relevance of cosmopolitan studies today. She explains that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of cosmopolitanism in circulation. The first is an unreconstructed version that ignores the poststructuralist critique of universals. Anderson rejects those who have taken up cosmopolitanism without attending to its complicated history, a wilful amnesia that she derides for its “cultivated naiveté.”23 Citing instead the examples of Edward W. Said and Bruce Robbins, she describes an alternative intellectual model, which “acknowledges its own privileges and interests, but without imagining that such an acknowledgment taints its practices or fundamentally disarms its attempts to forward progressive principles and strive against prejudice and partiality.”24 In this, Anderson’s vision of a critically self-conscious cosmopolitan intellectual resembles what Kwame Anthony Appiah described as the “rooted” cosmopolitan: someone who is “attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people.”25 Following the neo-Kantian wave of cosmopolitan theory, scholars began offering more qualified, nuanced, and modified versions. Along with Appiah’s “rooted” cosmopolitanism, scholars now distinguish between “vernacular” (Bhabha; Gunew), “armored” (Gilroy), “subaltern” (de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito), and “discrepant” (Clifford) cosmopolitanisms. Robert Fine and Vivienne Boon align such versions of cosmopolitanism with “a new humanism,” one that is aware of the “post-modern skepticism concerning commonalities across the sexes, classes, cultures and nations without simply retreating to the violence of old abstractions.”26 The humanism is “new” in the sense that, unlike the bad old humanism, this time scholars are sensitive to colonial legacies and multicultural complexities. Other scholars have used Kant’s observations about the earth’s finitude to articulate ecologically conscious versions of world citizenship. One of the more prominent interventions in this regard has been by Peter Sloterdijk, whose “Spheres” trilogy (1998–2004) identifies the global present as a crisis point in our geopolitical imaginary. Approaching globalization spatio-politically, Sloterdijk argues that advances in signals technology have left the world transparent and

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without a periphery. The consequence is that, for the first time, we are made explicitly aware of Earth’s ecological precarity; that our biospheric life-support system is constantly being affected by our actions (and, worse, the actions of others).27 Sloterdijk’s “spherology” can be considered among various strains of “eco-cosmopolitanism,” described by Ursula K. Heise as disrupting anthropocentrism and moving toward a cosmopolitan ethic which foregrounds human attachments to the biosphere, the latter being understood to comprise both animate and inanimate non-human ecological systems.28 However, where scholars like Anderson, Heise, Fine, and Boon celebrate fruitful diversity, others fear oversaturation. In 2013, the philosopher Michael Blake warned that the ubiquity of cosmopolitanism in academic circles actually “obscures more than it enlightens.”29 Blake explains that the fundamental premise of cosmopolitanism – “that individuals ought to be regarded as morally equal” – was perhaps once controversial, but has few serious opponents today.30 Provocatively, he recommends that we retire cosmopolitanism from our critical vocabulary, and instead seek new terms that more specifically differentiate the range of concepts available to those who are interested in understanding, confronting, and repairing the remaining obstacles to global justice and perpetual peace. Though we agree with Blake’s assessment that cosmopolitanism has by overuse lost some of its intellectual and moral force, we have not, as this book’s title confirms, followed his recommended solution. In adding Negative Cosmopolitanism to the existing critical vocabulary, we wish to critique the optimism often attached to cosmopolitanism. We use the word “negative” to emphasize the contemporary association of cosmopolitanism with ideals of world citizenship and universal human rights. As the chapters by Pamela McCallum, Melissa Stephens, and Paul Ugor indicate, there are many for whom being or becoming cosmopolitan is not only an imposition, but also an unhappy and painful experience. In fact, precisely what animates our collection is the evident disjuncture between intellectual fatigue with cosmopolitanism, and the manifest desire by individuals across the world to organize and claim a greater degree of world citizenship. In order to reconcile that difference, our approach has been to begin with material conditions and the human activity that emerges out of them. In the next section, we offer an alternative genealogy of the term cosmopolitanism, one that balances philosophical ideals with material practice.

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As we rehearse cosmopolitanism’s origins in ancient Greece, we aim to show that cosmopolitanism was never just an ideal, something to be hoped for, but always also a product of immanent political reality.

“Coining” Cosmopolitanism The word cosmopolitan derives from the ancient Greek word kosmopolitēs, itself a union of kosmos (the world/universe) and politēs (a citizen). It is an unusual word, because the bedrock of mainstream Greek political philosophy is the association of citizenship with the city-state. For many classical philosophers, including both Plato and Aristotle, it is the city – not the nation, not the race, not the language, and certainly not the world – that provides the distinctive social institutions to which an individual owes allegiance, and out of which he (and it was always a very gendered “he”) might conduct politics. In his Politics, Aristotle sees the city-state as the natural consequence of primitive social unions: the sexual union of male and female leads to the family, which is “the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants”; families in turn associate in villages which aim “at something more than the supply of daily needs”; eventually this leads to the union of several villages into the state, which Aristotle defines as “a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing … originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.”31 This organic narrative is the background for Aristotle’s two most famous political declarations: that “the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” Simultaneously the guarantor of material and ethical needs, the city-state is viewed as the ideal political form. Aristotle immediately adds the corollary that “he who by nature and not mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one’ whom Homer denounces.”32 Cosmopolitanism, or world citizenship, is not easily understood in the context of Aristotelian political economy. It is at best unorthodox and at worst unnatural. Most histories of cosmopolitanism trace its origins to Diogenes of Sinope, the founder of Cynical philosophy. None of Diogenes’s writings survive today, but according to the biography assembled by Diogenes Laertius, he spent most of his adult life in Athens where he was “great at pouring scorn on his contemporaries,” and

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where he notoriously flaunted social conventions in an often-obscene fashion.33 Such disregard was fundamental to his philosophy, which became known as Cynicism, a derivation of the ancient Greek kynikos, or “dog-like.” In his Rhetoric, Aristotle refers to Diogenes personally as “the Dog.”34 Diogenes is said to have coined the term “cosmopolitan” in response to a crowd of annoyed Athenians who challenged him to say where he came from. His response, “I am a citizen of the world,”35 has since been read by scholars of cosmopolitanism as a protest against the petty provincialism and prudishness of the Athenians, and an expansive claim of attachment to a wider world. In positioning Diogenes’s assertions as an expression of “negative cosmopolitanism,” we run against the grain of how that term is used by philosophers in the area, for whom “negative” connotes emptiness.36 To them, Diogenes’s pure antagonism merely cleared the way for the more positive cosmopolitanism of the Stoics, including Chryssipus and Hierocles among the Greeks, and Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius among the Romans. It is the Stoics who, according to Martha Nussbaum, first envisioned cosmopolitanism as a political program, “a challenge that is at once noble and practical” directed at the “containment of global aggression and the promotion of a universal respect for human dignity.”37 Nussbaum explains that Stoic cosmopolitanism grew out of the belief that each of us dwells “in two communities – the local community of our birth and the community of human argument and aspiration.”38 Stoic cosmopolitanism, she continues, is what Kant had in mind when attempting in the late eighteenth century to imagine a path toward perpetual peace. Thus understood as an ethical and moral project, stoic cosmopolitanism seeks to understand how the differences that are evident between humans from separate cultures, geographical regions, and linguistic groups might be understood through a process in which “we all should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.”39 We have focused our attention here on Nussbaum in particular because she was one of the leading voices in the revival of cosmopolitan studies that excited political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural theorists, and historians following the end of the Cold War. Her reconstruction of a cosmopolitan impulse from the Roman Stoics through to Kant’s Enlightenment optimism was immensely attractive to intellectuals confronting the new realities shaped by economic

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globalization and managed by a unipolar geopolitics. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the gradual liberalization of communist China caused some to celebrate, prematurely, the end of history. Others sought viable alternatives to the triumph of neoliberal democracy, and for them cosmopolitanism – understood in terms of international governmental institutions and treaties, or in terms of moral prerogatives – inspired projects such as the International Criminal Court.40 Yet, as Timothy Brennan cautions, the fundamental idealism behind cosmopolitanism can be used to “construct political utopias in aesthetic or ethical guise, so that they may more effectively play what often proves, on inspection, to be ultimately an economic role.”41 In preparing this collection of essays, we would argue that the life of Diogenes deserves further scrutiny, because it illuminates a series of material forces – exile, precarity, the intersection of political and economic capital – that continue to inspire cosmopolitical declarations today. Diogenes grew up in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea, where his father was a banker entrusted with minting the local currency. At some point in his young adulthood, a controversy arose over debased currency, the details of which are murky. Some sources blame his father, while others blame Diogenes. Diogenes Laeritius’s biography reports that “Diogenes himself actually confesses in his Pordalus that he adulterated the coinage.”42 The biography continues with a version of this backstory, probably promoted by Diogenes himself, in which his father appointed him to oversee the production of coins at the mint, and the workers persuaded him to “alter the political currency.”43 The debasement of the coins, in this case, can be read as an assault on the established political order in Sinope, including the material conditions of the workers, who were likely slaves. Here Diogenes appears as a precursor to a young Friedrich Engels, whose personal experience managing his family’s mill in nineteenth-century Manchester inspired what would become a lifelong protest against the conditions of the working class in England. Sources disagree over whether he was officially banished or simply fled to avoid prosecution, but in any event, Diogenes left Sinope. Eventually he landed in Athens, where Diogenes Laertius describes his early days: Through watching a mouse running about … not looking for a place to lie down in, not afraid of the dark, not seeking any of

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the things which are considered to be dainties, he discovered the means of adapting himself to circumstances. He was the first, say some, to fold his cloak because he was obliged to sleep in it as well, and he carried a wallet to hold his victuals, and he used any place for any purpose, for breakfasting, sleeping, or conversing.44 Both Diogenes Laertius and subsequent scholars have read these activities as a deliberate choice by Diogenes to cultivate an ascetic lifestyle. At the same time, we find it hard to ignore the resemblance between this so-called asceticism and the survival tactics adopted regularly by millions of displaced people around the world, exiled, hearthless, and without property or capital. In this light, Diogenes’s declaration of his cosmopolitanism is not simply an ethical preference to reject the provincial customs of Athens, nor a protest against his political disenfranchisement in Sinope, but rather the articulation of a desire for a politics that addresses the material deprivation and structural inequalities produced by the current world order. In its inaugural statement, cosmopolitanism comes into the world not from the mouth of Sophists or Stoics, wise men seeking a more perfect ideal, but rather from a Cynic, the dog-like man whose life on the streets inspires a claim for a radically alternative political framework.

Structure of the Book: Cosmopolitan Histories, Cosmopolitan Labour, Cosmopolitan Communities Featuring fourteen essays by scholars with diverse backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, including literature, political science, history, film, sociology, women’s studies, and geography, the following chapters investigate how the unequal effects of a globalized political economy not only contradict cosmopolitan ideals, but also result in enforced cosmopolitans: individuals whom we might consider unwilling citizens of the world. Indeed, we sought an interdisciplinary view of the field of cosmopolitan studies, with essays that share an understanding of cosmopolitanism as the source of, rather than the solution to, today’s inequities. Many of the chapters in this volume turn to the cultural realm and take up literary, artistic, or cinematic representations to critically analyze negative cosmopolitanism. This turn is deliberate, as scholars have long viewed cultural objects as both connected to and inextricable

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from the cosmopolitan project. Marx and Engels were among the first to observe the co-emergence of a world market and a world literature that has a “cosmopolitan character in production and consumption.”45 More recent theorists have identified literature as a catalyst for the spread of cosmopolitanism through the globe, within progressive pedagogies. For example, both Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah argue that literature, and the arts more generally, plays a privileged role in expanding political horizons, by affirming one’s solidarity with others.46 Appiah argues that novels play a special role in the extension of cosmopolitan sympathy.47 Similarly, Nussbaum’s conviction that “story-telling” is socially significant for its humanist, empathy-building potential has led to her call for a “cosmopolitan education,” a wholesale curricular reform in US schools.48 Our contributors depart from this line of thought. Instead of identifying works that best exemplify and thereby spread the advance of a positive cosmopolitanism, their chapters focus on the way creative works illuminate cosmopolitanism’s paradoxes and inconsistencies. In this manner, they dramatize and give shape to the negative valences of cosmopolitanism. What we call negative cosmopolitanism can be found in literature that represents cosmopolitan projects imposed by the forces of capitalism and imperialism; it can be found in artworks that historicize networks of intercontinental exchange and circulation; or it can be found in film that dramatizes challenges to national citizenship emerging from the oppressed or the subaltern classes. Such examples urge us to rethink the optimism associated with current theories of cosmopolitanism. They challenge the affirmations of the literary as a privileged space of sympathy, which will give rise to increasingly peaceful human relations. Instead, they identify literary and cinematic works that belong to an archive of Diogenes-like cynicism toward the notion of the cosmopolitan. The book is organized into three parts: “Cosmopolitan Histories,” “Cosmopolitan Labour,” and “Cosmopolitan Communities.” Together, they unify academic researchers working on the problems of the present moment, such as human trafficking, migrant labour, and corporate social responsibility, with those studying related issues of the past, including prisoner of war camps, human rights history, financial philanthropy, and colonial civilizing missions. The essays that follow illuminate cosmopolitanism as a Janus-faced concept, at once projecting a political ideal while also facilitating an exploitative world

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system. Moreover, despite the universalist ideals bound up in notions of world citizenship, actual cosmopolitan projects are always inflected by the particulars of geography, culture, and class difference. And so, each focusing on specific contexts, our contributors track the negative cosmopolitanisms that emerge under advanced capitalism across a range of contexts, from the experiences of rightlessness by migrant labourers, to the effects of multinational oil extraction on local communities. Part 1, “Cosmopolitan Histories,” collects essays that take a longer view of negative cosmopolitanism and its historical associations with militarism, capitalism, and colonialism. The first two chapters study attempts to mobilize cosmopolitanism in the service of human progress through the universalist regimes of, respectively, human rights and philanthropy. Crystal Parikh and Geordie Miller each consider how these putatively cosmopolitan projects unfold within the hegemony of the United States. Parikh examines the development of the international human rights regime in the twentieth century, through the set of instruments designed to secure the delivery of the “good life” for all humanity. Her analysis of formal statements issued by global institutions, such as the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, points to the existence of an archive that she calls the “Human Rights Record.” Though these documents were produced in institutional frameworks dominated by a United States government working to further its national self-interest, Parikh claims that an understanding of the archive depends not only on the conditions of production but also of interpretation. By examining their uptake within the decolonization movements of the mid-century, Parikh shows how the idealized “American good life” becomes cosmopolitanized in ways that exceed the governance of and their control by the American state. Her focus is on the 1955 Asian-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, whose participants used those human rights documents as the grounds upon which to imagine and negotiate the terms of future communities that not only exceeded the postcolonial nation-state, but also the Cold War’s bipolar view of geopolitics. Parikh shows how the cosmopolitan feeling of solidarity generated at this conference – the common experience of colonialism, racism, and economic oppression – coalesced in what she calls the “Bandung spirit.” Recognizing that a shared desire for colonial liberation cannot be reconciled with the (neo)liberalism that informs the American iteration of the good

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life, Parikh’s work shows how the Bandung spirit carried forward to subsequent assemblies of Third World solidarity such as the NonAligned Movement, and also continues to play a crucial role in any interpretation of the Human Rights Record. Geordie Miller’s chapter examines another approach to securing the so-called good life, through the philanthropic non-governmental organizations that propose to liberate individuals to fulfill their human potential. His case study is the MacArthur Fellowship Program – commonly known as the “genius” grants – which describes its intention to provide highly motivated, self-directed, and talented individuals with “the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements.”49 Like the idea of human rights, this seems a noble impulse, but Miller prefers to follow Slavoj Žižek’s injunction to historicize such impulses, leading him to produce what he calls a “counter-history” of the program. Miller’s reconstruction of the fellowship’s history brings him to the biography of John D. MacArthur, whose private fortune endowed the foundation. There he finds that not only was MacArthur’s fortune assembled by unscrupulous and arguably fraudulent business practices, but also that MacArthur’s intention in establishing the foundation was not entirely philanthropic. Indeed, Miller cites letters showing how the idea of the foundation was initially proposed by an attorney looking for a way to reduce the tax liability on MacArthur’s estate. Following this, Miller’s paper exemplifies the cynical reasoning we deem necessary to understanding negative cosmopolitanism, in that it does not conclude that we ought to reject the fellowship as immoral. Instead, Miller uses these findings as an opportunity to reconsider the limits of philanthropy in a world under capital’s rule. To its recipients, MacArthur’s philanthropy offers real freedom, but as Miller shows, it is a freedom whose horizon is coterminous with a world governed by capitalism. In his reading of the MacArthur biography, Miller reminds us of the continued relevance of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” that not only anticipates the general problems of philanthropy, but which also explores the conditions necessary for the flourishing of real human freedom. Turning away from the optimism usually associated with cosmopolitan projects, the next three chapters express a mutual suspicion of the promise of cosmopolitanism, as a project which derives from conquest, colonialism, and finance capital. Dennis Mischke’s chapter picks

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up where Miller’s leaves off, in the insurance industry of nineteenthcentury America. In his analysis, Mischke reveals how Herman Melville’s fiction represents the insurance system as a series of confidence games, perpetrated by the trickster figure of the cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism here is understood as a set of relations, rather than as a philosophical ideal – a distinction that enables Mischke to look back to earlier instances of transatlantic fraud. Citing the Zong atrocity of the late eighteenth century, when 133 slaves were drowned to secure an insurance payout, Mischke explains how a relational cosmopolitanism operates when global capitalism and imperialism begin to coalesce into a world market that can transform human slaves into abstract investments. In both the Zong case and Melville’s fiction, this theory of the insurance industry foregrounds a view of a cosmopolitan economic community underpinned by financial relations and speculation between objects and others, imagined only in terms of profit, loss, and compensation. Sneja Gunew continues Mischke’s interest in the maritime and examines the complicated cultural legacies of international trade. Explaining how that trade provided the impetus for the imaginative geographies behind our received notions of “Europe” and “Asia,” Gunew explores the work of three diasporic Eur/Asian artists: Kyo Maclear, Fiona Tan, and Anne Marie Fleming. Rather than celebrate these figures for their cosmopolitan hybridity, Gunew explores the significance of their attempts to reassemble the papers, archives, objects, and traditions deposited as a consequence of global commerce. Arguing, along with Pheng Cheah and Gayatri Spivak, that the globe is not a world, Gunew is interested in the plurality of communities that assemble after globalization in what, borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt, we could call occidental contact zones – sites such Venice and the orientalist pavilions of Brighton Pier, where the products of colonial contact are returned for consumption, sale, distribution, or storage. In addition, Gunew’s analysis of Fleming’s graphic novel The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam corrects our view of globalization’s frictionless advance. The novel represents Fleming’s attempt to reconstruct the history of her grandfather, an internationally famous magician and vaudeville performer; her repeated failure to cross borders that never troubled her grandfather reminds us that the speed of globalization does not increase in a linear fashion. Tracing global traffic’s ebbs and flows, Gunew positions the autoethnographic work of Maclear, Tan, and Fleming as instantiations

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of a “vernacular” cosmopolitanism: that is, a cosmopolitan identity based dually on one’s appreciation for the minutiae of the local, and, simultaneously, on a fundamental estrangement from a home in that local. Liam O’Loughlin takes up a different peripatetic character in order to theorize “disaster cosmopolitanism” in his analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s historical novel, Burnt Shadows (2009). He reads the novel as a genealogy of national disasters, including the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Partition of India, and 9/11. O’Loughlin considers how these seemingly oppositional terms – “disaster” and “cosmopolitanism” – work together, sometimes productively and sometimes dissonantly, enabling a comparative view of the conditions that produce military violence across disparate regions. Yet, as O’Loughlin’s reading demonstrates, the advent of disaster “from above” can sometimes enable an alternative cosmopolitanism, of transnational solidarities “from below.” O’Loughlin is interested in how literature places disasters within a larger, global pattern of ongoing violence, starting with the atomic bomb and ending with today’s War on Terror. O’Loughlin’s analysis also emphasizes the significance of Shamsie’s protagonist, a hibakusha – the name for the Japanese atomic bomb survivors – whose perspective of “belated comparison between disasters” both anticipates and warns readers of the militaristic logic that reproduces earlier forms of conflict and human destruction. The next four chapters consider the theme of “Cosmopolitan Labour” and the economic forms – or forms of economy – that are often hidden behind the ideals of world citizenship. The contributors to this part are careful not to presume an isomorphic relation between cosmopolitan and global labour, and instead restrict their focus to labour practices that transcend national paradigms. While cosmopolitan labour is frequently conflated with the group of intellectuals, business executives, and international NGo and UN workers that journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge collectively term “cosmocrats,” our contributors suggest how different forms of labour and production sustain the global economy while simultaneously undermining aspirational notions of universal belonging.50 When seeking examples of cosmopolitan labour, it is common to begin in the global city, where transnational elites exist alongside workers from the ranks of the precariat, the underemployed, the exploited, and the illegal sector. Yet it is important to remember that the process of cosmopolitanization has

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imposed different and sometimes radically destructive labour practices onto different parts of the world. The first essay of this part, by Paul Ugor, examines the effects of cosmopolitanization on the Niger Delta, a local space transformed by its absorption within the global petroleum industry. The Delta is well known for its abundant supply of crude, yet the local population has seen little economic or societal benefit from either the national government or the multinational corporations operating in, and degrading, their territory. Ugor develops the insights of his sociological fieldwork in the region to examine how local youth resist their disenfranchisement by setting up small-scale artisanal oil refineries. Using the technique of “bunkering,” the youth expropriate (some might say steal) the oil from government or company pipelines, in order to set up some of the 50,000 illegal oil refineries currently in the region. Through his interviews with these underground entrepreneurs, Ugor reveals an informal oil economy, made up of structures that have evolved in response to a half-century of exploitation, social neglect, and environmental destruction. He argues that such youths have not only become global subjects against their will, but that their illegal refinement of crude can be considered a patriotic act on behalf of their communities. While the evisceration of the local community brought about by oil extraction might be considered an example of negative cosmopolitanism, Ugor also reveals new modes of cosmopolitics in what he calls the “insurgent citizenship.” This form of citizenship is represented by the political action of the Niger youth and their strategies to reclaim their social and economic rights. Pamela McCallum also takes up the subject of the informal economy, or what she calls “the shadowy spaces of negative cosmopolitanism, the dark underside of the global movement of populations.” Her essay brings together two texts about contemporary Britain – the first an investigative account of the trafficking of undocumented Chinese workers, the second a novel about a group of diverse migrant workers, precariously employed in unpleasant, dehumanizing jobs. McCallum examines how both texts position their writing as bearing witness to the existence of excluded and largely invisible subjects, whose labour is nevertheless essential to the smooth operation of everyday life in the developed West. McCallum demonstrates how these texts provide a record of the inequitable material conditions often experienced by undocumented workers, including language barriers and many forms of intimidation. Yet, as she suggests, these texts do more than represent

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otherness to the reader. They also remind the reader of the way that illegal, criminal economies intersect with and enable mainstream global markets, while suggesting that oppression must be understood within broader international and historical circumstances (including the collapse of the USSr and economic reforms in contemporary China). Such contexts suggest the need for an internationalist response to the breakdown of civil societies and their human fallout. Melissa Stephens echoes McCallum’s concerns in her analysis of exploited migrants working in the Caribbean. She examines the interlinked conceptions of mobility, creolism, and cosmopolitanism in a film documentary by Barbadian artist Annalee Davis, and how regional neoliberal economic policies within the Caribbean have marginalized disparate groups as well as individuals in search of work. Stephens initially praises Davis’s film for calling attention to the uneven conditions of the migration experience in a Caribbean context, highlighting both those who are excluded, and the beneficiaries of the neoliberal market of free movement and exchange cultivated under the auspices of the CarICom (Caribbean Community and Common Market) and CSmE (the Caribbean Single Market and Economy) schemes. Yet, as Stephens goes on to note, Davis finds a solution to the dilemmas of neoliberalism through a poetic but problematic celebration of a diverse, “complex-Creole” identity: the culmination of the Caribbean’s history, seen particularly in the intimate interconnections between different ethnicities. Stephens calls attention to the different forms of cosmopolitanism identified in Davis’s documentary – from that neoliberal version imposed “from above,” to Davis’s own more expansive view of a complex Creole community – to suggest that there is often a homology between these different ideological positions. In highlighting the different appropriations of creolizations, Stephens reminds us of the political challenges of carving out a space for resisting freedom, in its neoliberal connotation. The last chapter in this part explores the undocumented migrant’s body in relation to labour, but, in contrast to the earlier pieces, considers how the body’s gendered, sexual, and biopolitical dimensions appear in theories of cosmopolitanism. In her essay, Heather Latimer calls to attention – and into question – the notion of heteronormative reproduction implicit in projections of cosmopolitanism’s futurity. As a utopic project, cosmopolitanism is propelled by visions of a better future. Yet, as Latimer suggests, this futurity often relies uncritically on

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the reproductive female body as a resource for new forms of cosmopolitan kinship. Latimer asks: what is at stake when cosmopolitan fantasies of belonging are premised on notions of reproduction, and, more specifically, on the “solution” offered by the impending birth of a child? Latimer engages with this issue through an analysis of two contemporary films, one directed by Joshua Marston, the other by Jim Sheridan, about illegal migration in the US. She argues that the films’ focus on the pregnancy of the female protagonists suggests a “way out” of a negative present, where the “future human” is cast as a panacea to the overtly political issues of undocumented migration, citizenship, and human rights. Latimer reveals how the films relay a deeply conservative view of sexual politics, where female bodies are conscripted as the biological reproducers of future communities, to the exclusion of other bodies and subjects, even as each film narrative anticipates an inclusive cosmopolitan future. Latimer closes by drawing on the potential of queer theory to reconfigure the charting of cosmopolitanism’s temporality, jettisoning the conventional constraints of social and sexual identity scripts. The final part of this collection, “Cosmopolitan Communities,” takes up the ways in which cosmopolitanism has often marked out, or is sometimes predicated upon, communities of otherness. Typically, cosmopolitanism has been understood as transcending the nation, reaching out towards universal formations – whether communities of feeling, or communities of governance (that is, political or legal institutions, such as a world government or an international court). More recent iterations of cosmopolitanism place emphasis on its relation to local communities, where loyalty and responsibility to particular localities exists in conjunction with (rather in contradiction to) a wider universal perspective or openness. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is often explicitly about communities. Juliane Collard’s essay opens with a vision of an American community reconstituted by law to produce the “good citizen.” Examining the case of Portland, Oregon, and the city’s use of trespass law to designate so-called “prostitution-free zones” in the late 1990s and mid-2000s, Collard maps what she terms “the colonial cosmopolitanism” of the law. She shows how the law – supposedly universal and impartial – is nevertheless inflected by a colonial history, which privileges only those citizens linked to private property and to a particular moral code. Under the law, the good citizen is constituted as the privileged cosmopolitan in terms of a logic of sameness: the

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citizen internalizes the aims of the law and so represents the rational, rights-bearing, law-abiding, free human subject. In contradistinction, the figure of the sex worker reveals all that is Other to the law itself. Yet, as Collard points out, the law physically and socially excludes the prostitute, subjecting her to further violence as she is forced to inhabit even more dangerous spaces. In this process, Collard remarks, “the bodies themselves become spaces of violence,” because they are understood in law as having consented to the violence that may be perpetrated upon them. Mike Dillon is similarly interested in abject and excluded communities, and he explores the representation of illegal immigrants in contemporary Japanese yakuza films. Reminiscent of the way that, historically, Jews were cast negatively as dangerous cosmopolitans in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Dillon sheds light on recent hostile views of foreigners, particularly illegal immigrants, in a contemporary Japanese context. As Dillon shows, the yakuza (or “gangster”) genre has been a staple of Japanese entertainment for decades, often featuring narratives and characters that glorify notions of “Japaneseness” steeped in notions of racial purity and cultural homogeneity. Recently, such films have begun to complicate these nationalistic paradigms by featuring non-Japanese characters, typically illegal immigrants, whose social realities have overlapped with those of the yakuza. The resulting shifts in the thematic conventions of the genre, on the one hand, suggest increasingly inclusive attitudes about Japan’s multicultural makeup as the nation contends with immigrant populations. On the other hand, the films undermine that inclusiveness by tying foreigners to illegality in a manner that reinforces Japanese racial and social normativity. Dillon suggests that this constitutes a paradox, as contemporary yakuza films exhibit a simultaneously progressive and reactionary set of values, where conservative ideological assumptions about nationhood collide with the sociopolitical dimensions of multiculturalism. His essay further incorporates a discussion of the broader context of policy-making about organized crime and illegal immigration, identifying how the yakuza genre figures in popular discourses that justify the marginalization of organized criminals, which in turn provide a ready template for relegating immigrants, particularly illegals, to social obscurity. How might we understand the cosmopolitan ideal of world literature when it is drafted in the service of war? Dina Gusejnova’s essay explores the institutional uses of cosmopolitanism in the context of

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prisoner of war camps between and during the First and Second World Wars. Gusejnova identifies Goethe’s universal notion of Weltliteratur as the founding principle for the production and dissemination of literature in disparate postwar and wartime contexts for the purposes of re-education. Gusejnova shows how authoritarian states such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany instrumentalized the concept of world literature as a tool of cultural management in relation to different populations (for example, the reading masses, or camp prisoners). While the goal of re-education, as Gusejnova suggests, varies drastically across contexts – from the advocacy of Communist internationalism to propaganda about the cultural superiority of the German nation – her essay nevertheless makes clear the protean form of a cosmopolitan ideal that can be easily adapted towards the different political goals of governance. In her analysis, Gusejnova allows us to see what she calls “compromised cosmopolitanisms,” or how the ideals of world culture were shaped in a way that in fact functioned to be anti-cosmopolitan, but nevertheless had unintentionally cosmopolitan effects on their readers. Indeed, the multiethnic, multinational, and multireligious composition of prisoner camps as a microcosm of enforced cosmopolitanism is fascinating in its own right. Gusejnova’s particular contribution here is to show how the propaganda effort of literature in such camps evokes the “enlarged cosmopolitanism” critiqued by Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said, a form of cosmopolitanism they saw favoured by the ruling personnel of Europe’s Roman Catholic Empire and by the British imperialists like Arthur James Balfour.51 In her rich historical overview, Gusejnova reveals the role of intellectuals in crafting canons of world literature employed to divisive rather than universal ends; rather than seeing world literature as servicing and promoting a positive ideal for human society, we see education in tension with the propaganda aims of a literary cosmopolitanism. Mark Simpson’s chapter identifies the shocking features of a cosmopolitan future that emerges out of neoliberal orthodoxy – including widespread deregulation, privatization, and monetization unfolding around the world. Simpson turns to David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, a series of crime novels about late-1970s/early-1980s Britain published between 1999 and 2002, to identify how the novels elaborate an “emerging cosmopolitical condition” in Western Yorkshire. There, states of suffering, abjection, and fracture make up what he terms “distressed publicity,” the texture of everyday reality for communities and

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public life. The chapter is particularly interested in the intersections between the structural violence that occurs in the novels at the level of corrupt institutions (including the police and the British government), and the brutality of the murders and the “violating power” of the mass media. In presenting this violence as ubiquitous and horrific, Simpson suggests that the reader is immersed into a world where murder, corporate corruption, and governmental policy are not only inextricably connected, but are also made manifest as the monstrous symptoms of a Thatcherite Britain. In Simpson’s reading, the social and cultural damage produced by these different violences animate and enable one another, yet the carnage they produce is unexceptional and chronic. Rather than producing an apocalyptic narrative, Peace’s representation of violence instead anticipates the neoliberal “future anterior” of feral cosmopolitics. Simpson closes with a consideration of the capacity of Peace’s novels to interrupt the normative consumption and commodification of the crime fiction genre in a neoliberal age. If Simpson’s chapter reminds us of a bleak past and anticipates a terrible future, calling attention to the world gone horribly wrong, Timothy Brennan’s contribution offers to teach readers how to read the negative present. Brennan understands cosmopolitanism relationally, as a negotiated tension between the part and the whole. At issue in his chapter is the way in which we represent and interpret that relationship, with the central difficulty being totality. Searching for an aesthetic mode capable of communicating the complexity of globalization, Brennan offers “homiletic realism.” When society appears as a complex, apparently indecipherable interpenetration of material forces outside the scope of an individual’s comprehension, homiletic realism exhorts its reader first to have faith in, and second to engage with, a totality that lies behind appearance. The real in homiletic realism functions as the kosmos in cosmopolitanism, a thing that cannot superficially be represented yet by necessity must be felt to exist. Our path to the real, Brennan warns, cannot be artfully deciphered by a careful attention to chosen fragments; nor will it come from a cosmic vision, a perspective granted by an Asmodeus removing the roofs from houses and showing all humans their true relation to one another. Invoking a philological practice he finds in the works of Giambatista Vico and Walter Benjamin, Brennan describes the ways in which we might connect parts to the whole. He finds an exemplar of homiletic realism in Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg’s Life of the Automobile (1920), a

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text which represents the international complexity of the nascent automobile industry in fragmentary form. For Brennan, Ehrenburg’s homiletic realism does not attempt to depict reality (à la the documentary photograph), nor does it yield to our conventional desires for fiction to present narrative closure. Rather, homiletic realism captures images and stages conversations between systemically implicated but mutually anonymous characters in a process unfolding over time. In this it exhorts its readers – and this is its homiletic function – to find connections, to make judgments, and to draw conclusions about their own implication in global processes happening somewhere out of view. Collectively, these chapters explore the tension between idealist articulations of cosmopolitan theory and material demonstrations of cosmopolitan practice. Cosmopolitanism has been cast in celebratory terms, as a positive consequence of mobility, hybridity, and multiculturalism. As our contributors argue, cosmopolitanism also has a darker dimension. Its emergence in the context of European nationalism and imperialism needs to be seriously reconsidered in light of contemporary globalization. The English novelist E.M. Forster recognized that connection in his critique of Empire near the conclusion of Howards End (1910). There, the narrator explains how the “Imperialist … is a destroyer [who] prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth he inherits will be grey.”52 A century later, in a postcolonial if not yet post-national or post-imperial age, we inhabit Forster’s grey world, where people must confront their entanglement in the multiple crises of globalization. Rather than providing a new grammar for world politics, negative cosmopolitanism instead reveals the apparent flatness of the world, characterized by cultural homogenization and economic disenfranchisement. From labour precarity, market instability, and the credit crunches of capital finance, to the regimes of surveillance and biopolitical management, whole populations are unwillingly caught up in a cosmopolitan reality that has little in common with the Enlightenment ideal. The following chapters show how, whether the philosophers of the world like it or not, the normative basis and the historical legacy of cosmopolitanism secure its utility for describing the range of practical or tactical decisions made by individuals and groups seeking to represent, resist, and reimagine their political lives under the aegis of economic globalization.

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PA R T O N E

Cosmopolitan Histories

1 American Good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and a Human Rights Record Crystal Parikh

Perhaps no contemporary discourse more fully expresses the character and ideals of cosmopolitanism than that of modern human rights. This essay describes a duality in our conception of the subject of human rights, and the critical opportunity inherent in that duality for recognizing and elaborating a negative cosmopolitanism that is, in Walter Mignolo’s terms, “critical and dialogic, emerging from the various spatial and historical locations of the colonial difference.”1 In order to do so, it traces the historical development of human rights discourses and instruments, especially in relation to the institution of the United Nations and the decolonizing movements after 1945. In this genealogy, the subject of human rights has largely been imagined to be latently American: always, that is, American in character and desires. And yet human rights are also imagined to be that which others – other people in other places – need, while Americans already enjoy an exceptional “good life.” Pairing the subjects of critical American studies with postcolonial studies, a negative cosmopolitanism renders visible the limits of such an American formulation of political and civil rights, social justice, and good life as it has been represented on a global terrain since the Cold War.2

We might think of such an interpretive move as returning to or reanimating a “Bandung Spirit.” The Asian-African Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 with representatives from twentynine countries in attendance, was hailed by its host, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, as “the first intercontinental Conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind,” and served as the forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement (Nam ) of 1961, which sought autonomy, neutrality, and solidarity in the face of an increasingly bipolar international order during the Cold War.3 Scholars have debated the diplomatic, strategic, and historical implications of the Bandung Conference and Nam for their constituent nations and international relations.4 My purpose in retaining the conference’s moniker, however, is to keep alive “the feeling of political possibility presented through this first occasion of ‘Third World’ solidarity” and to consider the normative principles the conference delegates arrived at by consensus: economic cooperation and development, cultural cooperation, human rights, self-determination, and world peace.5 Furthermore, I aim to retain Bandung and Nam ’s ambitions for a postcolonial order characterized by forms of political community beyond the state, to which nationalist aspirations have otherwise been yoked, even if those alternative forms remain deferred to a future yet to come.6 A postcolonial perspective hence makes evident how institutions and structures of power always mediate the history of ideas. At the same time, this “negative” critique also lays claim to the cosmopolitan ideals that Immanuel Kant famously elaborated in “Perpetual Peace,” where the idea of a law of world citizenship was designated as “a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity. Only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing toward a perpetual peace.”7

The American global Nation The predominant discourse of international human rights, with which we tend to be most familiar, was essentially shaped by the United Nations, itself the nearest approximation to the “league of nations” Kant called for in “Perpetual Peace.” The UN Charter established the Commission on Human Rights in 1946, which in turn drafted the tripartite international bill of rights, comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDhr ), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPr ), and the International Covenant on Economic, 30

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Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCr ). These developments reflect and are embedded within a larger postwar history, where the moral hegemony of political and economic liberalism eventually displaced both fascism and communism. At the same time, liberalism is itself plagued by the contradiction between, on one hand, its theory of universal, natural rights grounded in the individual person, and, on the other hand, its avowal of statist practices and positive law, which derive their legitimacy from the sanction that sovereign power claims for itself. Indeed, Kant’s preliminary principles in “Perpetual Peace” expressly forbid interference with the constitution or government of another state. But as political philosophers since at least Hannah Arendt have argued, in a world where only the sovereign state guarantees individual rights, the stateless – those very subjects to whom human rights attach themselves – have “no law” to protect them.8 The problem of rightlessness is thus a structural problem endemic to the Westphalian state system, despite its remaining practically masked by the expansion of constitutional governments during the twentieth century.9 States extend rhetorical acknowledgment to human rights without providing substantial means of practical enforcement.10 As Hope Lewis surmises, the “fundamental irony of the international human rights movement” is that states, although they are “often the most egregious violators of human rights … were also to be relied on as the primary and most powerful protectors” of those same rights, especially given that the United Nations prizes the nation-state as its basic unit of membership.11 Beyond the ideological and pragmatic contradictions that plague the conception and implementation of human rights after the Second World War, it is nearly impossible to overstate the extent to which the interests of the United States shaped and directed the postwar iterations of human rights. The exigencies of the Cold War in particular overdetermined the scope and meaning of human rights from the 1950s onwards. Initially pitched in counterpoint to the fascist regimes of the Axis enemies, by the time the Commission on Human Rights began crafting an international bill of rights, US officials were as interested (if not more so) in the “soft power” that they could wield through the United Nations as they were in any practical implementation of human rights principles on the ground. The US State Department crafted its own policy on human rights, largely ignoring social and economic rights, and this became, in turn, a critical precedent for how concepts of human rights have taken hold in the United Nations and other international bodies.12 American (neo)liberalism has enjoyed global American good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and Human Rights

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hegemony since 1989, and its particular interface with the international human rights regime during and after the Cold War has therefore rendered an alternative genealogy of human rights fragmented and scattered in terms of any political movement. Power politics, as well as a vision of free trade across borders (e.g., as institutionalized in the Bretton Woods charters) directed almost every aspect of US foreign policy and engagement during the Cold War. As a result, international human rights have since been tethered to the US Bill of Rights, rather than international consensus, as a model of individual freedoms. The United States remarkably orchestrated a postwar order that at once recognized and granted legitimacy to decolonization movements, while also buttressing its own (and Western European) geopolitical and economic domination. In order to appreciate the significance and effect of this achievement, we must go well beyond facile notions of American “imperialism” and even “neo-imperialism” and look to a longer history of democratic self-determination and nation-building, which in turn profoundly shaped an integrationist vision of a new international order. As Charles Bright and Michael Geyer argue, the American nation has been anomalous with respect to nation-making paradigms. Neither a case of an ancient society transforming into a modern state (as in France or Britain), nor an example of the “insurgent” nationality consolidated in struggles against these imperial powers, the American nation stands as a “novel political formation”: Who were its citizens, if people, white and male, from almost everywhere and anywhere constituted the nation? What was its sovereign territory, if the borders were in motion and the state barely in control of a people pushing beyond them? What was the imagined community of the nation if its first principles were the rights of (all) mankind? How could a global nation be also, and at the same time, a sovereign nation?13 To be clear, this is not an endorsement of American exceptionalism, but rather a reflection of how, historically and politically, the imaginary of American exceptionalism configures US global power, which does not simply reproduce older versions of European imperialism. Bright and Geyer conclude that the problem of defining a particularist, limited sovereign nation against such a universalizing imaginary meant that American history has always been concerned with the problem of sovereignty – with, that is, “efforts to define a people and territory fit 32

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for self-government.”14 Hence, the boundaries of the nation-state have been unstable, and “America was always larger, more boundless than the United States, and in this respect always already a global nation.”15 A conventional, historical perspective on the “Americanization” of the globe after 1945 posits the United States as seeking increasing geopolitical and economic power in order to secure “the American way of life.” This history, however, tends to obscure the extent to which that very imaginary of “American life” – characterized by a corporateindustrial order, free movement across integrated territories of social exchange, and affluent, consumerist lifestyles – was consolidated through a Cold War agenda, constructed against the threat of Soviet political and economic programs.16 Scholars such as Christina Klein have accordingly explicated how crucial a “global imaginary of integration” was to both the formulation of American national identity and to American foreign policy during the Cold War.17 Equating American economic health with access to other regions of the world (i.e., free trade), but steeped in unwavering conceptions of the nation as the leader of the free world and the victor over imperialist forces in the Second World War, US foreign policy ideologically remapped the nation and its place in the world. Liberals like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (following the lead of Woodrow Wilson before him) saw the political and economic future of the United States as inextricably tied to territorial and cultural expansion, and crafted an image of the nation as a global power which countered its longer tradition of isolationism.18 At the same time, this power could not reproduce the imperial character and modes of European or Soviet expansionism. The integrationist worldview, forged through both official political speech and more informal social representations and cultural practices, achieved these dual ends by giving rise to sentimental discourses of equality and tolerance.19 American expansion and exchange with other peoples around the world were imagined to be reciprocal and symmetrical. As such, winning the decades-long Cold War essentially entailed the campaign to “win hearts and minds” in the decolonized world, by disseminating American ideals of freedom and images of the “American way of life.” The imaginary of integration tied the rights and freedoms of American citizens to the fates of decolonizing others, and, in particular, to the integration of those others into an American global imaginary.20 As Americans understood it, the rights and freedoms being promised to other peoples in other places remained nonetheless the special provenance and manifest destiny of the American citizen.21 Thus, during and American good Life, the Bandung Spirit, and Human Rights

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after the Cold War, a cultural pluralist ethos comes to articulate, rather paradoxically, a nationalist superiority that is simultaneously supposed to be universal and unique to the United States.22 The functional solution to this contradiction rested on the consolidation of an international order, organized completely and necessarily around formally equal, sovereign nation-states, that operated as readily to limit political will as to express it.23 This entire new world order of “united nations,” as John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan argue, emerged after the Second World War as an alternative to a world order defined by competing European empires. Throughout the nineteenth century, empires subsumed “nations,” which, in turn, were predominantly equated with “races.”24 But, in its postwar planning, the United States came to understand that a system of formally equal, self-determined nation-states was crucial to global stability.25 At this moment, then, liberalism began to obscure the vestiges of nations-as-races with nationsas-states, where states would serve as politically neutral containers of lower-level ethnic, racial, and class politics. The international peace undertaken in this “united nations world” required nation-states to serve as the horizon for all politics, such that relations between states remained peaceful and, in turn, ensured “open economic doors.”26 Of course, if those “doors” had to be more coercively held open, the United States assigned to itself the policeman’s role of doing so.27 Thus, the “predicament of post-coloniality” consists of “the fact that decolonization as actually experienced was entry into a new world order already tooled for purposes at best differing from the aims of the anticolonial movements, and at times clearly obstructive of them.”28 In this united nations world, American economic and political interests mandated that “all that a political agent in any ‘new nation’ could rightly aspire to was his or her national interest, and that interest could only, responsibly, be [the] dream of ‘being free.’”29 First for Woodrow Wilson and then for Roosevelt, the stability of a new international order hinged on what they deemed to be the precarious line between nationalist self-determination and revolutionary “anarchy.”30 Both administrations saw radical or socialist politics as vehicles of dangerous unrest, and they limited support for nationalist movements to those which championed stable states, free of the taint of communism.31 As American aid and leadership proved essential to the rebuilding of Western Europe, the United States eventually prevailed upon its European allies to abandon ongoing imperial designs in favour of American Cold War

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interests.32 But the United States also cast itself as the “senior, wiser adviser, ready to help a junior nation in need of modernization and development.”33 Beyond Europe, the US mission was accomplished by building political and cultural alliances with local elites in order to gain access to local markets, and by providing military aid and training, especially in those nations where leftist campaigns had made inroads, in order to secure both the development of emergent states, and to secure those states’ commitment to US Cold War policies aimed at containing Soviet influence. Certainly organized around US interests, this new world order nevertheless articulated the imaginary of global integration and the American way of life through the consecration of politically free and formally equal sovereign states.34 The American self-image as the world’s premier and exemplary postcolony determined the destinies not only of a host of subjects in the United States, but of subjects across the globe, placing the construction, protection, and idealization of American citizenship (rather than those of European liberal traditions or other postcolonial societies) at the centre of the new world order. As Odd Arne Westad succinctly puts it: “Victory in World War II was therefore a victory not just for an alliance, but also for the American way of life itself.”35 In retracing this history, a remarkable continuity emerges – from the Second World War to the current “War on Terror” – which conjoins international wars, international trade agreements, and social and cultural exchange all in the interest of an American “way of life” that, on a global terrain, becomes identified with “life” itself.36 At the same time, since the late 1960s, the control that the United States has had over a global “American civil society” has been tenuous at best. US presidential administrations and congressional leaders have alternately embraced or denounced US involvement in “nation-building” and securing state sovereignty in other regions of the world, especially where its own economic interests are ambiguous. Instead, transnational institutions – for example, corporations and NGo s – have more regularly taken up the charge of disseminating American ideals, both as economic practices and as conceptions of rights and property.37

The Bandung Spirit and the Human Rights Record We might here shift from the American global nation to consider its discontents in the “united nations world.” By 1960, during the Bandung

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era, the United Nations became no longer a straightforward extension of US power, as the inclusion of Third World nation-states transformed it into a “more diverse forum, less susceptible to American influence than before”; by 1970 the global political map had been entirely redrawn with a total of 142 nations, compared to only fifty-six independent nations in 1910.38 Moreover, in the early 1950s, Third World diplomats such as Charles Malik and Jawdat Mufti promoted an essential link between human rights and national self-determination that necessitated both democratic domestic governance and non-intervention by foreign powers. Due in good part to this advocacy, Article 1 of both the ICCPr and the ICESCr declare first and foremost that “all peoples have the right of self-determination,” reflecting the absolutely vital anti-colonial aspiration that the great powers guarded for Western nations in the United Nations’ early days.39 Yet, the meaning of self-determination at this moment was itself highly contested, and anti-colonial leaders did not necessarily equate or limit self-determination to unassailable state sovereignty. For instance, the Afro-Asian bloc of nations undertook the next major human rights initiative, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICErD ) adopted in 1965, which, while focused primarily on apartheid and ongoing colonial abuses in Africa, also included an optional right to universal petition which was meant to apply throughout the world.40 However, between 1950 and 1966 (when the ICCPr and ICESCr were adopted by the UN General Assembly), the interpretation of the right to self-determination did indeed shift from a concern with individual, democratic rights to a strictly anti-colonial state prerogative that was indifferent, if not explicitly hostile, to democratic practice and political freedom, as I discuss further below.41 Hence, rather than being a means to individual, democratic rights, the right to self-determination became an end unto itself, such that the attainment of sovereignty “exhausted” the “idea of self-determination” and became aligned with the Westphalian order described earlier.42 Ironically, this international order was quite in keeping with the moral geography postulated in “Perpetual Peace,” where Kant drove home the need for a “league of nations” by invoking the spectre of “savages” whose attachment to their “lawless freedom” led them to favour “incessant strife” rather than “submit to a legal constraint which they might impose upon themselves.”43 In any case, most leaders of nationalist and Marxist resistance movements in colonized nations preferred the state form when it came to

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organizing the postcolonial societies for which they struggled.44 While such elites fought against foreign rule, they did not typically disavow the conceptions of modernity extended by colonial powers, and they usually believed that states were best able to mobilize resources and labour to counteract the colonial “underdevelopment” from which their people suffered.45 Because self-determination found limited, legitimized expression in the sovereign state form, domestic repression and abuse executed by authoritarian or one-party regimes led to the well-publicized scandal and “decisive failure” of postcolonial governance beginning in the 1960s.46 The supreme guiding principle of state sovereignty in the United Nations rendered the recognition and protection of all other rights subject to the dominion of individual nation-states.47 Military leaders, dictators, and other authoritarian governments, fashioning themselves as modernizers who could meet their nations’ economic needs through development while holding communists at bay, eagerly sought support from the United States. The United States in turn provided them with aid, training, and advisors, with little concern for how such regimes flouted even the liberal political rights that were supposedly part and parcel of modernization.48 Ultimately, then, for most of the twentieth century, the United Nations failed to serve as the “central forum for and singular imaginative custodian of the norms” of human rights, whether political, social, economic, or cultural.49 Nevertheless, a negative cosmopolitan perspective on human rights can enable us to recover a moment of significant engagement between the leaders of a newly emergent Third World, and the concept of human rights that is otherwise obscured by the official memories of the united nations world. If we take seriously the right to self-determination as part of what I am calling here “the human rights record,” we recover the real force of possibility that the Bandung Spirit and Nam posed to the prevailing postwar assumptions of American good life. During the early Bandung era, nationalist aspirations were hardly limited to the state, but were driven by a fervent desire to be free of colonialism, and Bandung participants shared an understanding of the structural causes of their nations’ underdevelopment by colonialism.50 Moreover, this desire for liberation was rarely based on conceptions of a homogeneous racial or cultural nation. While certainly cognizant of the many factors that differentiated their peoples, anti-colonial intellectuals and activists founded their political solidarity on a shared experience

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of colonialism, racism, and economic oppression.51 A shared struggle against empire made possible the broad continental and intercontinental imagining of Third World cooperation.52 In this way, the Bandung Spirit directs us “to consider the locations, practices, and politics that created senses of community across the Afro-Asian divide.”53 This sort of “internationalist nationalism” reveals the way in which popular social movements expressed desires for freedom, justice, and belonging that were distinct from, if not always in contradiction with, the state form.54 Third World liberation movements further offered a transnational vision of alternative modernities, divergent from the geopolitical stranglehold perpetuated in the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Final Communiqué from the Bandung Conference fully endorsed the UN Charter’s principles of human rights and the UDhr . Diplomats such as the Philippines’ Carlos Romulo, who had served as his country’s ambassador to the UN and signed the UDhr , urged delegates at the Bandung Conference to pursue both national self-determination and individual human rights, as he rebuked Western imperialism and communist repression in equal measure.55 Bandung, Nam , and the intergovernmental organizations and cooperation that followed thus illustrated the possibility of political communities that were alternatives to both nation-states and “outsized political entities,” such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.56 Moreover, Third Worldist formulations of procedural justice, including equitable representation in international institutions and decision-making, along with principles of international diplomacy that included peaceful dialogue and problem-solving, marked a notable departure from the coercive and domineering modes of both earlier imperialism and the great powers during the Cold War.57 Central to the history of solidarity and human rights at this time, then, were worldly visions of decolonization that diverged substantially from the paramount liberal objective of establishing individual political rights and state sovereignty in accordance with the market freedoms of capitalist trade. Instead, these global imaginaries referred to socialist ideals of equality and good life to endorse, for example, the right to work at fair wages, the right to education, and the right to health care. But they have also since included other, often transnational social movements, such as feminism and environmentalism, as well as religious movements such as liberation theology or global Islam, all organized

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around divergent modes of social being.58 Rather than romanticizing or idealizing any of these various social and political projects, which have often enough been in conflict with one another, I suggest that they have all contributed to a critically cosmopolitan “human rights record” that archives varying conceptions of good life from the 1940s onward.59 These movements drive a critical wedge into the naturalized hegemony of liberalism (and later neoliberalism) that secures the American way of life as good life.60 Human rights instruments drafted between 1948 and 2007 thus constitute what Micheline Ishay calls a “record”: a dialectical, progressive history, although not a linear or emancipatory one, in which human rights stand, not as “natural” properties, but as the minor transnational effects of social practices and political contest.61 Against the perspective of an American global nation that naturalizes and universalizes human rights, as a historical record human rights constitutes one of many possible ethical regimes by which “the good” can be imagined and lived across time and space. As Jack Donnelly explains, human rights provide only one of an array of conceptions of justice, political legitimacy, and the flourishing of human dignity that have been available since the mid-twentieth century.62 Whether taken together or as individual documents, the tripartite UDhr , ICCPr , and ICESCr , and later the ICErD , forward much fuller notions of human existence, good life, and well-being than does a more constrained set of negative freedoms that Americans often conceive of as natural rights.63 Thus, the human rights record reveals the substantial contestation undertaken by the “darker races” against the ideological limits of the united nations world, and its visions of good life go beyond what (neo)liberal citizenship is willing to aver.

Human Rights Futures As any, even cursory, review of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries makes evident, human rights principles and instruments have been severely limited in terms of legal implementation and enforceability. But as a record, human rights instruments remember the historical struggles and debates that informed the construction of an international human rights regime. And, as they recall the unlikeliest of subjects emerging to lay claim to rights they do not formally have, this record continues to signal what the performative force of human

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rights, underwritten by popular desires for justice, might yet be. Article 6 of the UDhr grants universal standing to human subjects: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” In conjunction with Article 3, which grants “everyone” the right to “life, liberty and the security of person,” Article 6 extends the crucial “right to rights” by which other rights are founded. Of course, such universal recognition is never simply emancipatory. When “everyone everywhere” is guaranteed recognition and equal protection by the law (as is stipulated in Article 7), “the law becomes the dominant force of social regulation across the entire globe to which all bodies are subjects by virtue of their existence … one is not a body at all without this regulation.”64 Moreover, the standing afforded by the UDhr is rather ambiguous. Not only does it not specify “whose law” provides the necessary recognition, it evades the entire historical and structural problem of disenfranchisement that characterizes statelessness, and which made the articulation of human rights necessary in the first place.65 However, rather than taking such contradictions as indices of the political uselessness of human rights, I suggest that we read them dialectically as signifiers of the promises and aspirations deferred from the postwar era. Scholars who have documented the political and intellectual history of human rights repeatedly use the phrase “life of their own” to describe the unexpected appeal of human rights well beyond the United Nations and other international forums.66 Although the process of drafting the UDhr and the international bill of rights, for example, was shot through with realpolitik interests on the part of Cold War superpowers, the very expression of these principles had a force that exceeded the sometimes more cynical – and always ideologically partial – intentions of state officials.67 According to Samuel Moyn, the true advent of a “human rights revolution” dates from the 1970s, arising from international jurists’ frustration with decolonized nations who had claimed the right to self-determination. By excoriating Third World regimes for their human rights abuses, former imperialist powers continued to hoard the prerogative to determine who might control their own political destinies and on what terms. As such, human rights politics readily appeared to be a flexible and strategic neocolonial rhetoric, selectively assessing the moral fitness of postcolonial governments from a Western perspective.68 By the 1968 Conference on Human Rights in Tehran, representatives from most Third World nations were already criticiz-

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ing the UDhr as “an irrelevant artifact from a past age,” unable to address a postcolonial Third World for whom economic development and maintaining national liberation were the most pressing priorities.69 For example, Article 1 of the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development (and its precursor, the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights) gave pride of place to economic development and self-determination, before Article 2 declares that “the human person is the central subject of development and should be the active participant and beneficiary of the right to development.” Moreover, Article 2 accords to states “the right and the duty to formulate appropriate national development policies that aim at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals, on the basis of their active, free and meaningful participation in development and in the fair distribution of the benefits resulting therefrom.”70 While the 1986 declaration did not wholly repudiate individual rights, its primary aim in both its preamble and main body was to advance guarantees of national and economic security from which the Third World had historically been excluded.71 Western states principally objected to such solidarity rights, which they argued shifted the locus of rights-holding from the individual to the collective or state (who, according to their perspective, did not have rights, only obligations). In their view, this allowed states to justify political repression in the name of social and economic development, or culturally specific moral norms and values. However, a negative cosmopolitanism animated by the Bandung Spirit actually recalls us to an earlier moment, when representatives of the imperial powers insisted that human rights were inappropriate and meaningless for peoples “at the lowest stage of development.”72 In contrast, at this time anti-colonial leaders denounced such “colonial cultural relativism” and were successful in defeating the insertion of a colonial clause in the draft covenant that succeeded the UDhr , and ensured that basic human rights were codified as universal in the human rights instruments that followed.73 In conclusion, it is considerably useful to bear in mind that, as Westad points out, in the 1960s, “the idea of the Third World” pertained to a conception of the future, which “in political and moral, if not economic terms – linked the European and American ‘New Left’ to the politics of Africa, Asia, and – increasingly – Latin America.”74 As a critically negative cosmopolitanism, the Bandung Spirit radically remakes our

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notions of politics and political community beyond national states, cultural relativism, or liberal rights and freedoms.75 The American vision of “good life,” forged in the context of the Cold War and decolonization movements, made any unitary bill of rights impossible within the United Nations. Nevertheless, the UDhr , ICCPr , ICESCr , and ICErD together offer a record of how racialized peoples have wanted otherwise, and form a critical paradigm by which to consider assertions of self-determination and “deferred” dreams of social and economic justice that remain yet to come. The negative cosmopolitanism embedded within the human rights record retains a dynamic and flexible character, one not bound to a single polity. Human rights impinge upon and deform the civil order of (neo)liberalism and its privileged subjects – the US citizen and American (way of ) life – as they grant viability to forms of good life that the American global nation cannot be made to represent, despite the latter’s claims to universality.

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2 Sui Generous: Examining the Object of Organized Philanthropy through the MacArthur Foundation Geordie Miller

“A good deal to be a good deal has to be a good deal on both sides.” – John D. MacArthur, quoted in Barbara Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 80

Modern forms of philanthropy have close ties to cosmopolitanism. Both putatively reject the hierarchies of race, class, gender, language, religion, and nation in favour of a more fundamental understanding of human equality. Yet, as with cosmopolitanism, critics have linked philanthropy to the expansion of capital and the spread of exploitation. The correlation between capitalist and philanthropic expansion is clearest in the age of Empire. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word “humanitarian,” in the sense of a person committed to human welfare as the supreme good, first came into usage in 1843. The boom in philanthropic associations and societies was soon reflected in Victorian culture, perhaps nowhere so famously as in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House (1853). In chapter 4, titled “Telescopic Philanthropy,” Dickens introduces the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby, a woman who “devote[s] herself to an extensive variety of public subjects … and is at

present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa.”1 The devotion comes at the expense of the domestic space, though. Neglecting her many children, Mrs Jellyby is even “too much occupied with her African duties to brush” her hair and her eyes have “a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if … they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”2 As Bruce Robbins explains in his astute reading of the novel, Dickens’s moral is clear here: Jellyby’s philanthropic commitment to Africa, which Dickens represents as “an ineligible elsewhere,” inappropriately distracts her from more immediate ethical duties.3 Nevertheless, through Jellyby, Robbins manages to recover the political potential for a cosmopolitan vision of the Victorian globe. However briefly, the satire of Jellyby forces the Victorian reader not only to recognize their attachments to fellow humans whose lives are being affected by capitalist expansion on another continent, but also to ask – if only momentarily – whether it is possible to imagine another kind of non-familial radical kinship with them. The satire of Jellyby also illuminates the troubling interrelation of cosmopolitan vision and philanthropic practice. For Jellyby’s devotion to Africa, while theoretically advancing the cosmopolitan ideal of world citizenship, is only made possible by the vast colonial expansion of the capitalist world market during the Victorian era. When this cosmopolitan ideal takes the concrete form of philanthropy, world citizenship becomes defined in terms of belonging to the capitalist world market. Necessarily so, since philanthropy relies on the economic inequalities produced by this market. Jellyby’s incomplete vision might therefore serve as a metaphor for the ways in which philanthropy deprives world citizenship of its radical potential. In its attempt to improve the lives of those subsumed under capital, that is, citizens of the world market, philanthropy legitimizes economic inequality and naturalizes existing power relations. This critical view of philanthropy was common in the nineteenth century, as exemplified in Oscar Wilde’s response to late-Victorian capitalism in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891). Echoing Marx and Engels’s formulation in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that “a part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society,”4 Wilde characterizes philanthropic acts as “remedies [which] are part of the disease.”5 In other words, philanthropy may alleviate poverty (the symptom), but it is an obstacle to thinking through how to restructure the social system (the cause) so as to

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eliminate poverty. Those encountering poor people on the streets of Wilde’s London respond “very sentimentally” to the immediate problem, whether it is a lack of food, clothing, or shelter.6 Their relative good deeds endlessly defer an absolute change into a world that does not produce poverty – a change that would require the benevolent to recognize what they share with the poor, namely systematic exploitation. I begin with this outline of Victorian philanthropy and how its cosmpolitan vision of world citizenship depends upon the stark inequalities produced by the world market because it underscores the extent to which today’s philanthrocapitalism7 has been largely insulated from critique. As Linsey McGoey concludes in the introductory chapter of No Such Thing as a Free Gift (2015), “the philanthrocapitalists have silenced their critics.”8 Returning to Wilde’s critique is thus vital, particularly as philanthropic encounters have assumed broader and more complex forms in our neoliberal moment.9 The private foundation is the most abundant of these forms. Foundations frequently control assets that are bequests and/or direct donations from the world’s wealthiest individuals, and they are often governed by boards of directors, which oversee an additional staff that can number in the hundreds. Foundations specialize in a variety of social “problems” such as abject poverty, human trafficking, and environmental degradation, for which their organized philanthropy provides “solutions.”10 As in the nineteenth century, they base their actions on fundamentally cosmopolitan principles, over and against the distinctions of race, class, gender, language, religion, nation, and so on. Organized philanthropy’s problems-and-solutions paradigm never views poverty and other effects of domination as demands of the capitalist world market. Along these lines, Slavoj Žižek has popularized the Wildean idea that philanthropy represents a lack of political imagination. First in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008) and then in several of his public lectures, Žižek channels Wilde to castigate the “fake sense of urgency” that attends humanitarian interventions.11 The urgency is “fake” insofar as “charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.”12 In Žižek’s terms, organized philanthropy performs the “objective violence” of perpetuating capitalism.13 The free market that enables individuals to accumulate dynastic wealth presumes and preserves gross inequalities, no matter how much money these individuals give back.14 Žižek refers to them as “liberal communists.”15 Like Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates and George Soros “give away with one

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hand what they first took with the other” (21). Characteristically, Žižek relies on extreme examples, in this case two of the richest men in the world, to radicalize his thesis.16 He follows Wilde in arguing that philanthropy allows capitalism to flourish, but his examples imply that the “liberal communists” have mixed motives: to do good and to protect the system that empowered them to do so well. Their “intentions” are less innocent than Wilde’s humanitarian bourgeoisie, who act with “admirable, though misdirected intention.”17 Where Wilde surpasses Žižek is in his emphasis on how capitalism (“the institution of private property”) engenders an illusion of freedom.18 Philanthropic subjects and their objects are implicated in this illusion. Wilde considers figures like Lord Byron to be of a piece with les misérables because capitalism deprives both of the opportunity for real freedom.19 The difference in the degree of their unfreedom ultimately matters less than their unfreedom’s identity in kind. This chapter focuses on a topic that highlights how Žižek’s particular critique of organized philanthropy and Wilde’s universal critique of individual unfreedom intersect. Organized philanthropy requires the economic inequality – rich benefactors and poor beneficiaries – that negates real freedom. As a systemic alibi for capital accumulation, organized philanthropy is especially indefensible in instances where even the pretense to tackling some social manifestation of economic inequality is absent.20 Private arts funding is a conspicuous example, which is why I have chosen to examine the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, famous for its “genius grant” program. In my first section, I construct a counter-institutional history of the foundation based on two biographical narratives of John MacArthur: Nancy Kriplen’s The Eccentric Billionaire (2008) and Barbara Graymont’s The MacArthur Heritage: The Story of an American Family (1993). I construct this counter-institutional history in order to demonstrate that while Wilde stresses the perpetual present of the philanthropic encounter – his humanitarian bourgeoisie “find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation”21 – critics of organized philanthropy should follow Žižek in shifting the accent to the past. The false consciousness that Wilde ascribes to his philanthropists has given way to disavowal, as the two books on MacArthur illustrate. Kriplen and Graymont participate in the symbolic management of MacArthur’s reputation. They offer unflattering portraits of him, lodged in the commonsense notion that regardless

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of the ethical violations accompanying the accumulation of wealth, capitalists-cum-philanthropists benefit society. After showing how this notion no longer makes good sense, I turn in my second section to the beneficiaries of the MacArthur Foundation’s most well-known initiative, the “genius grants.” I argue that the hype surrounding the legitimacy of the “genius” in the moniker frees the foundation from the charge that the creative freedom they purport to provide is an illusion.

Accounting for the Subject of Organized Philanthropy It did not take a genius to recognize that John D. MacArthur needed to revise his will before it was too late. Otherwise he was in danger of transferring the bulk of his assets to an entity he loathed: the government. In his lifetime, MacArthur went to great lengths to lower his taxes. Fond of referring to the IrS as “the infernal Internal Revenue Service,” for example, the billionaire designated himself an annual salary of $20,000 in order to limit the amount he owed.22 The value of MacArthur’s estate was substantial, as the 1976 Guinness Book of World Records would attest. It listed MacArthur as one of the United States’ four living billionaires, along with John Paul Getty, Howard Hughes, and Daniel K. Ludwig.23 For years MacArthur had stubbornly resisted the pleas of his personal attorney, William Kirby, that he amend his simple will, which divided his fortune in half between his wife (Catherine) and his children (Roderick and Virginia). “Simple” meant eminently taxable. Kirby prevailed in 1970 with a seemingly righteous solution: a philanthropic foundation that would help significantly reduce the amount the billionaire potentially owed to the IrS .24 The case for establishing a foundation was made when Kirby asked MacArthur, “Most of your money is going to the public, and who do you want to decide how it’s spent, the bureaucrats or people you trust?”25 MacArthur sided with choosing his own “bureaucrats.” Once the papers were signed and some years had passed, he would be frank about the pragmatic origins of his foundation, telling a New York Daily News reporter in 1976 that its formation was inspired more by “a desire to keep his business together than any charitable purpose.”26 This “desire” is reflected in the uninspired wording of the foundation’s charter, which barely deviates from an IrS template.27 MacArthur finally learned a lesson that he had hitherto avoided: “property has duties,” as Wilde had put it.28 Of course, Wilde was parodying this church principle as a call for property ownership to

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be abolished, that is, as a political argument for socialism. MacArthur experienced the “property has duties” lesson as an economic imperative. To protect his empire of capital, he was legally obliged to endow a foundation. The MacArthur Foundation is a striking institutional expression of negative cosmopolitanism. While MacArthur’s desire to transcend the state may appear cosmopolitan, if only accidentally, it deliberately denies treasuries the tax revenues that could be used to enact wealth redistribution policies. The MacArthur Foundation is synonymous with its fellowship program, nicknamed the “genius grants.” These five-year, $625,000 grants are annually awarded to individuals whom the foundation’s selection committee singles out for their creative promise.29 Since launching its program in 1981, the foundation has awarded more than $350 million to individuals from an array of fields, predominantly the arts, social sciences, and physical sciences. I will have more to say about the “genius grants” in my next section; MacArthur himself is less notorious than his philanthropic enterprise, unlike, for example, Henry Ford and the Ford Foundation. A 1972 Los Angeles Times headline would caption him as “America’s Least Known Billionaire.”30 Like Ford, MacArthur did not inherit his fortune. However, he neither developed nor manufactured tangible products. For these two reasons, he is an ideal subject for making intelligible the narratives of wealth-accumulation and the processes of finance capital that often underwrite it. The brief, biographical outline of MacArthur from the FaQ section on the foundation’s website keeps it simple, describing him as “one of the three wealthiest men in America at the time of his death, and [the] sole owner of the nation’s largest privately held insurance company, Bankers Life and Casualty Company of Chicago.”31 Background information on the impetus for the foundation is similarly euphemistic and, for the foundation, self-serving, choosing to describe under the banner “Our History” how “longtime friend and attorney William T. Kirby convinced MacArthur that a foundation would allow his money to go to good use long after he was gone.”32 By elevating their friendship over their professional relationship, the truth of Kirby’s motives – motives publicly acknowledged by MacArthur himself in the 1976 Daily News interview – are obscured and the tax-dodge is whitewashed. To their credit, the biographies of MacArthur by Graymont and Kriplen acknowledge these motives. At the outset, each biographer anticipates MacArthur’s flaws. Kriplen calls him a “complicated, con-

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troversial biographical subject”;33 Graymont promises to take an “uncompromised approach” to the MacArthur family.34 The danger of compromise is especially acute for Graymont, given that her book is a foundation-authorized private publication, based on a series of interviews conducted by a colleague at Nyack College in upstate New York, John Taylor. Although she states that her “study is not intended to be an account of [the family’s] business interests,” she supplies several details about these “interests.”35 Graymont thus provides Kriplen with much of the source material for her biography, published by the American Management Association. It is no stretch to surmise that the audiences for such personal histories and management biographies expect that any censuring of the biographical subject will be moderate. What I want to suggest in using them as my key source material in this section is that their inevitable biases are a critical asset.36 These books are resources for diagnosing the tendency to treat the evils of capitalist accumulation as a prerequisite for effective wealth redistribution. In other words, they characterize these evils as eccentricities, obfuscating systemic coercions such as the sovereignty of shareholder value.37 Kriplen expresses these eccentricities through various anecdotes related by MacArthur and his former employees. One of these anecdotes, from the early days of MacArthur’s Marquette Life Insurance Company, is startling for its display of arrogance. The passage is worth quoting at length because it forms the empirical basis for the broader dynamic of disavowal that I am describing: In later years, John would talk rather proudly about the chicanery of his early days in insurance. For instance, after opening the mail each day he would put it into piles. Checks would be taken from the pile of premium payments. The other pile, the one with the claims, would be tossed into the wastebasket. Heck, if someone really had a claim, he figured he would hear from him again … A similar story John liked to tell concerned an insurance investigator who walked in the door one day with a list of thirty or so complaints about claims that had not yet been paid, since there was no money in the till. O.K., I will get these checks in the mail right away, John promised. Oh no, you don’t, said the inspector. I’ll wait right here while you write the checks then mail the envelopes myself. John walked over to Catherine’s desk with the list and told her to write the first check and address the

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envelope – but he carefully moved his finger down to the next address on the list so that Catherine, but not the inspector, could see that the checks would not be going to the proper address. And so on, down the list. The time it took for claimants to return the incorrect checks and get replacements gave John enough breathing room to accumulate money from premiums to pay off. Only one person went ahead and cashed the wrongly made-out first check – and John sued him.38 The flagrant self-interest behind MacArthur’s tricks to stay afloat should not shock us, but they might. They follow the logic of an economic system that, when forced to choose in crises like the Great Depression, services the bottom line before the bottomed-out populace. The survival of the business is put, quite literally, before the health of its clients, and – if such practices are extended to other insurance providers – the public at large. “I broke all the rules,” MacArthur brags.39 Kriplen is careful to parenthetically counterbalance MacArthur’s post festum boasts with the response of one of MacArthur’s future employees: “‘I lived in terror that one of the claims on my desk would fall off into the trash basket,’ she said. ‘That would mean instant dismissal.’”40 By closely juxtaposing MacArthur’s boast and the employee’s fear, Graymont highlights an ethical contradiction; however, the moral of the story seems to be that unlike an employee’s theft, the boss’s theft is welcome because it has created jobs. Graymont documents fewer of MacArthur’s deplorable moments, although she does allude to his habit, when he was still going door to door, of embellishing the potential benefits of an insurance claim in order to sell a policy.41 This detail emerges in the course of her noting how his older brother Alfred, an insurance executive, “objected to [John’s] sales method of promising customers far more than the policies actually offered.”42 Alfred had ushered MacArthur into the insurance business. He was the general agent for the Chicago branch of National Life Insurance Company, where MacArthur’s first industry job was as an office boy.43 This job was interrupted by wartime stints in the US Navy and the British-Canadian air force.44 After the war ended, MacArthur returned to the insurance industry, working as a salesman for National Life.45 His enviable sales record earned him his first management gig, in the San Francisco office of National Life.46 Soon eager to escape his older brother’s shadow, MacArthur transferred to

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the State Life Insurance Company, where he became vice president of sales.47 In a manner not unlike that of an 1980s insider trader with a prime seat at the liar’s poker table, MacArthur learned from his friend Leo Lehane about a Jerseyville, Illinois company that State Life was desperately trying to get off its books: Marquette Life.48 He offered to buy it, provided State Life give him the money as a severance package. MacArthur apparently leveraged his unpopularity with management to seal the deal.49 His major acquisition, Bankers Life, was more of an accident.50 A state insurance manager mentioned that the firm had just gone bankrupt despite its solid portfolio, and so MacArthur borrowed money from the aforementioned Lehane in order to purchase it.51 What emerges, despite Graymont and Kriplen’s attempts to the contrary, is not a portrait of the maverick capitalist, with equal parts daring and ingenuity, but something more ordinary: the white, financially secure man in early twentieth-century America coasting on a network of well-placed family and business connections. This story is less romantic than the Horatio Alger-inflected robber baron stories and less immediately recognizable than the deadening bureaucracy depicted in William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). It is the story of the privilege granted to men like him, who are then able to exploit it further for their own substantial gain. Graymont does not admit the obvious explanation, tracing MacArthur’s success to his work ethic and business acumen. Before articulating MacArthur’s selfish reasons for establishing the foundation, she observes that he grew up “in a home where discipline, hard work, and dedication to a goal were valued.”52 She then paraphrases the analysis of one of the foundation’s primary incorporators, Paul Doolen, on how Bankers Life grew: First there was the innovative use of mail order, a sales technique that brought in clients with a smaller sales force than would have been necessary with traditional marketing. Then there was the favorable real estate market that greatly inflated the value of the company’s holdings.53 MacArthur hardly needed to enlist the virtues that Graymont attributes to him. The artificial inflations of financial value did the heavy lifting. While the rhetorical concision of the blurb on the foundation’s website is faithful to the essential ordinariness of MacArthur’s success

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(imagine the number of stories resembling MacArthur’s), this outline also illustrates that what is more typical, but hardly trivial, downplays the improprieties entangled with these accomplishments (just imagine the number of stories exactly like MacArthur’s!). I have made the evidence from books by Graymont and Kriplen central to my analysis because they testify to the fact that even generalist renderings of this man abound with sinister elements. Kriplen continually returns to MacArthur’s specific transgressions. For example, in a single twentypage segment, she makes three references to MacArthur’s misdealings: Bankers Life’s illegal practice of selling policies by mail,54 MacArthur’s embezzling of money from the Employees’ Welfare Account,55 and his foiled attempt to bribe an employee from an insurance rival which was threatening to file suit against Bankers Life.56 Yet Kriplen neutralizes the critical potential of her narrative in two representative ways, which are in their effect not unlike the economic website blurb about MacArthur. First, as her title indicates, she frames MacArthur as a kind of gentle anti-hero. He is “the eccentric billionaire.” His ethical violations may be unorthodox, but for Kriplen they define him as innocuously as do his strained relationship with his sister-in-law Helen Hayes or his insistence on flying coach.57 My argument is just the opposite. These evils are hardly eccentricities; rather, what is normal is treating them as such, or ignoring them altogether. What is normal is something akin to Catherine’s sister’s assessment of John and Catherine’s partnership: “Together they amassed a great fortune, for the benefit of mankind.”58 Why should “the benefits” be measured retroactively? Because they imply that while one has broken the rules along the way, one has obeyed the most important rule of capital: endless expansion. To Wilde’s declaration that capitalism inspires us to “confus[e] a man with what he possesses,”59 we need only add, “and then gives away.” Second, Kriplen relies on the legacy of MacArthur’s capital in order to justify its origins. The epigraph from her book describes the cultural dominant: “What counts in a penny is not its pedigree but its destiny.”60 Kriplen attributes these words to Professor Graham Taylor, and contextualizes them as being delivered “to critics who said [that the] Chicago Theological Seminary should not accept money from controversial John D. Rockefeller, Sr.”61 Kriplen implies that it does not especially matter if the gains enabling the giving are ill-gotten or if the philanthropist is “reluctant,” as her subtitle characterizes MacArthur. As long as the endpoint is assured – as it is in the foundation blurb 52

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highlighting MacArthur’s gains on a website devoted to the philanthropic enterprise that bears his name – then the journey can be as unseemly as is necessary to reach the destination.

“No Strings Attached” Popular discourse on the “genius grants” reinforces disavowal. Scare quotes envelop the phrase “genius grant” in press coverage of the fellowships, respecting the MacArthur Foundation’s publicized opposition to the moniker.62 In this section, I argue that the foundation’s stated refusal of the “genius” label channels critical energy toward the term’s superficial deployment, and away from the foundation’s ideological commitment to free market capitalism. Where did the idea for the fellowship program originate, not to mention its association with genius? MacArthur’s son Roderick and his lawyer William Kirby devised the idea for the program in 1978, eight years after John and Catherine signed the foundation’s charter. They were inspired by a letter they had received from Dr George Burch, Kirby’s doctor and then a dean at Tulane University. Burch’s letter posited that “impressing review committees and dealing with pressure to publish [are] a waste of time.”63 Kirby was impressed, and brought to the attention of the foundation’s board of directors a 1976 editorial in the American Heart Journal by Burch. The editorial, “Of Venture Research,” discusses the strong correlation between unfettered thought and knowledge production. Burch questions the integrity of the existing funding structure undergirding (especially) scientific research. Observing that grant applications do not necessarily lead to “high quality research,” he champions “venture research,” which he defines as “research in the search of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”64 So as not to be accused of advocating non-instrumental knowledge, Burch makes it clear that the “gamble[s]” of venture research will yield some significant returns.65 He lists the Curies and Alexander Fleming as exemplars of the kind of work that venture research can inspire. The fellowship program would follow Burch, not only in unifying its diverse array of recipients according to the capacious concept of “creative thinking,” but also in its nationalism.66 For both Burch and the program, “the strength of America resides in the minds of Americans.”67 To be eligible for a “genius grant,” one must be a United States citizen or resident. The national parochialism of the foundation’s policy coalesced with Ronald Reagan’s consecration of the entrepreneur in Organized Philanthropy and the MacArthur Foundation

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his first inaugural address. In it, Reagan laid out his vision for an independent and initiative-driven economy (meaning less government and more entrepreneurs). As he spoke from the west portico of Capitol Hill, shaded by the memorials of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Reagan constructed his own pillars for rediscovering and sustaining America’s reputed exceptionalism: military hegemony abroad and economic recovery at home. The 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act (Erta ) is anticipated several times during the inaugural. Reagan’s first signature piece of legislation reduced income tax rates by 25 per cent over three years, and lowered corporate rates by 12 per cent.68 This reduction was intended to foster a favourable environment for the sort of risky investments that are the lifeblood of venture capitalism. “The business of our nation goes forward,”69 he claims early on in his inaugural. “These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.”70 The cure for this “affliction,” soon emerges in Reagan’s speech: “Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.”71 Taxes, those neoliberal vampires, drain American ingenuity, as they act as a disincentive for private enterprise. The Erta was intended to suture the wound and diminish vampirical activity. So the cost of this alleged bloodsucking is not lost on anyone, Reagan stakes national progress on an unfettered market that had historically allowed America to “unleash the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before.”72 Productivity supposedly increases as tax rates decrease. In his “inventory” of those “who dream heroic dreams” that are implicitly impossible in planned economies like that of the United States’ Cold War rival, entrepreneurs are the only ones identified via their vocation: “There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity.”73 These are the “heroes” whose initiative the MacArthur Foundation, not to mention America, invests its hope in for a better future. Reagan’s supply-side dogma was rationalized as a means for keeping these entrepreneurs competitive in a global marketplace where the policies of competing nations were believed to put Americans at a disadvantage. Roderick MacArthur was not quite this ambitious in explaining the program to Newsweek in 1979, but his thinking is invested in the promise of entrepreneurial freedom: “Albert Einstein could not have written a grant application saying he was going to discover the theory of

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relativity. He needed to be free.”74 The fellowship program’s association with genius was cemented when Roderick went on to say that “our aim is to support individual genius and to free those people from the bureaucratic pettiness of academia.”75 As consistently as it has denied the association with genius since Roderick made these remarks, the MacArthur Foundation has invoked a venture capitalist model in order to justify the larger goal he articulates.76 The foundation purports to “provide seed money for intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors.”77 It is no coincidence that for years the amount of the fellowships ($500,000) corresponded to the textbook amount of “Seed Round funding” in venture capitalist arrangements.78 There are “no strings attached” because the foundation avows that “highly motivated, selfdirected, and talented people are in the best position to decide how to allocate their time and resources.”79 Money buys these investees the opportunity to do so, while adding value to them in a venture capitalist manner via the “genius grant” imprimatur. Given that the dominant genre of self-assessment for foundations is the success narrative, on some level it comes as no surprise that the foundation officially disowns the “genius grant” moniker. For this moniker implies that the recipient’s success was more organic than co-constructed, and thus denies the role of the foundation as catalyst: they are “MacArthur Fellows” first and foremost. However, the foundation’s repeated denial of the nickname is decidedly more complicated. This denial is not only a marketing technique, duplicated in media representations of the program, but also a way to maintain a convenient gap between more narrow critiques80 of the program itself and broader ones concerning philanthropic practice. How so? Frederic Jameson’s theory, first articulated in The Political Unconscious, that any interpretation of a text is “always-already” governed by “strategies of containment,” can help us envision the contours of this gap.81 According to Jameson, American literary and cultural analysis involves “the ‘local’ ways in which [critics] construct their objects of study and the ‘strategies of containment’ whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.”82 Jameson’s exposition of the political stakes of every hermeneutic act can be applied to the relationship between genius and the MacArthur fellowships in several ways. The invocation of genius deterministically “constructs” all public discourse on the fellowships. Perhaps somewhere behind closed doors a foundation employee would nod to acknowledge

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such an implied sympathetic recognition of the heavy burden under which s/he operates – would that it were so simple. For the second aspect of Jameson’s model, the “strategies of containment,” is more relevant to the interaction of genius with the fellowship. Genius grabs the majority of the attention popularly devoted to the fellowship program. This hype insulates the foundation from larger structural charges. Chief among these charges is that the autonomy that the foundation promises is a mirage. Although recipients are free from oversight, they are nevertheless interpellated as market subjects. Strictly speaking, the money is not the problem. Even Wilde would concede that “private means” enable authors like “Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others … [to] realise their personality, more or less completely.”83 For Wilde, such an achievement was marked in works whose “beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”84 “Genius grants,” by contrast, imply that artists are akin to entrepreneurs. To follow Wilde’s lead with the example of literary artists, the MacArthur Foundation obeys the speculative logic of a literary marketplace in which readers’ encounters with texts are increasingly shaped by authorial celebrity, prizes, book sale figures, and motion picture rights, which serve as securities for the initial investment that publishers and/ or granting institutions make in an author. In the process, the market effectively disregards the desires of the individual author, who must satisfy its demands in order to succeed. For these structural reasons, the MacArthur Foundation can never grant the autonomy it touts. For the foundation, genius functions as both a “framing mechanism” and a “basic masking device,”85 in Jameson’s terms, determining (“framing”) popular mappings of the foundation and barring (“masking”) critical exploration beyond these narrow coordinates.

Conclusion: Organized Philanthropy as Negative Cosmopolitanism The disavowal that I have attributed to organized philanthropy manages to recall an uncomfortable scene in the early pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). A wealthy white benefactor, Norton, pays his annual visit to the college to which he has donated. Too distracted by his awe at the apparent progress his money has helped underwrite to notice the persistence of racist hierarchies, Norton twice tells the

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African-American narrator chauffeuring him around campus that he “felt even as a young man that your people were closely connected with my destiny.”86 During these recollections, Norton simultaneously undermines his own liberal rhetoric through his use of subjective pronouns, carefully dividing “your” from “my.”87 Their “destinies,” like those of philanthropists and the causes in which they invest, are indeed linked, but not in the benign manner that Norton suggests. The fundamental antagonism endures: philanthropy’s cause is an effect. Norton’s endowments ensure relative gains and insure against absolute change. Without a change to a new social system, Norton and the narrator are destined to remain without access to real freedom. If “a good deal to be a good deal has to be a good deal on both sides” – as John MacArthur enjoyed saying88 – then organized philanthropy is a bad deal for all citizens of the world (market). It is obviously a bad deal for the global poor who continue to experience the daily indignities and insecurities that accompany life under capitalism. It is also ultimately a bad deal for the capitalists who organize their wealth in private foundations and for their more affluent recipients. For in making the world safer for capital, organized philanthropy helps to only permit “a certain very limited amount of Individualism,” as Wilde asserts.89 Real human freedom – Wilde’s “Individualism” – is “limited” because everyone must confront the unsettled social needs that capitalism, whose class structure produces and requires economic inequality, cannot adequately redress. Whether socialism can better attend to these needs is an open question. At the very least, I hope to have shown why Wilde’s essay belongs in the canon of negative cosmopolitan scholarship: it reveals how the ideal of cooperation under capitalism is a soulless one.

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3 Underwriting Cosmopolitanism: Insurance, Slavery, and Confidence Games in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man Dennis Mischke “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” – Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” 256 “But why, in this case, care what it says? Trust and Insurance! What more would you have?” – Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, 247

In the middle of the Atlantic, on a day in September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ran out of water supplies for the 440 slaves that were penned and crowded below deck. Calculating that the sick or weak among them would very likely not generate the expected profit on the market, the captain decided to jettison 133 men, women, and children in order to file an insurance claim for a contract that had been underwritten in Liverpool, some thousand miles away. In a ruthless economic risk assessment predicated on pure probabilistic expectation, the £30 assigned to each unit of human cargo in case of loss

was deemed to outweigh the potentially greater reward of bringing the slaves to market. In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the History of Philosophy (2007), Ian Baucom reads this calculated act of murder, which came to be known as the Zong massacre, as the birth of a malign epistemological configuration still at work today. The apocalyptic and perverted horror of the transatlantic slave trade, he argues, not only sparked the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth century, but also revealed a spectre that still haunts the cosmopolitical world of the twenty-first century: the global injustices brought about by deregulated finance capital and the ubiquitous net of speculative credit relations. In my essay, I want to set out from the historical case of the Zong atrocity in order to derive a critical perspective on cosmopolitanism and its surreptitious market logic, built on a reality of fraud, confidence games, and what I will call abstract cannibalism. The explanatory “gain” that I want to achieve with this approach is to understand which “global design”1 causally connects the displacement, the torment, and ultimately the death of 133 individuals on board the Zong with the business of merchants on the other side of the Atlantic, who had never seen the ship, let alone the people whose lives they agreed to “underwrite.” Furthermore, I want to inquire what kind of transhistorical cultural architecture and strand of imperial politics runs through this specific historical event. My suggestion will be that it is in fact a transversal system of credit, loans, and insurance underwriting – emerging in the imperial world of the eighteenth century – that has shaped and still continues to shape negative cosmopolitan relations based on confidence and fraud. In this context, I will differentiate the nature of these cosmopolitan relations from the philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism and its humanist lineage. By looking at two prominent texts by Herman Melville – “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man, both of which expose negative consequences of cosmopolitanism – I want to highlight a critique of the concept and suggest a transhistorical understanding of it that only the metonymical imagination of literary creativity can bring to the fore. Literature, like insurance underwriting, is a conceptual practice that reflects the world to the same degree that it inscribes itself into it. In a manner of speaking, literature underwrites the world shaped by narrative. The “global design” of imperial finance capitalism is just as much a work of speculation and the imagination as is the literary. What

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finance capitalism and the literary share is that both are writing practices embedded within larger macronarratives of culture, history, and ideology, albeit with vastly different outcomes and manifestations. In the context of his initial usage of the concept of “global designs,” Walter Mignolo distinguishes three “overlapping macronarratives” that have created dominant images of western modernity and cosmopolitanism. Among those is the narrative that the West is primarily defined by the Renaissance and the expansion of capitalism via the Atlantic.2 In the following, I want to sketch out how the Zong atrocity can in fact be read as a historical case that reflects (and is simultaneously shaped by) the macronarrative of finance capitalism and its epistemology of underwriting. Herman Melville’s literary writing is especially fruitful in this endeavour. For one thing, it “focuses attention on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter and the question of intercultural mediation … [and] on cosmopolitanism and the international theme,” as Peter Gibian notes.3 In addition, Melville’s prescience debunks a cultural logic of speculation and underwriting that has markedly altered the production of subjectivities through technological and economic development in a multicultural world.4 Hence, I argue that in Melville’s take on this complex set of questions, transatlantic financial relations turn the world into a Theatrum Mundi, in which cosmopolitanism and confidence games are difficult to tell apart.

Slavery, Insurance, and Financialization In Specters of the Atlantic, Baucom develops the idea (as many others have done before him5) that the triangular trade and the Black Atlantic continue to have a huge cultural significance, especially in our present era of transnational corporations. In his discussion of the Zong atrocity, Baucom reads the contract which “insured” and eventually killed the men and women aboard the ship as an allegory for an entire epistemological configuration that turned human beings into abstract figures, easily to be subtracted or added to the lists and books of merchants and traders. On the transatlantic stock exchange of human suffering that the Middle Passage had come to be in the minds of merchants and traders, the value of slaves or indentured labourers was not simply embodied by their labour power or physical existence, but had instead mutated into a matter of speculation and credit. Baucom’s venture – that is, to recast our thinking about the repercussions of the transatlantic slave

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trade under the auspices of a historical trajectory of global capitalism in conjunction with cosmopolitanism – is an endeavour that I want to expand and reframe in the light of trust, confidence, and its negative cosmopolitical impact on the world at large.6 With the term “historical trajectory” I want to invoke two things. First, I am alluding to conceptualizations of world history according to which the primary mechanism of modernity and Western-style capitalism has been unlimited flexibility, fluid change, and adaptation, from at least the late eighteenth century until today.7 Second, I also use the term to designate the vast spatial expansion of global capitalism under the banner of “cosmopolitanism.” Among the many notions associated with cosmopolitanism today, one particular meaning has covertly infused all other renditions: the notion that cosmopolitanism finds its deepest expression in the transversality of the market economy. In my essay, I subscribe to Timothy Brennan’s thesis that cosmopolitanism has become a relay of market ideology and has profoundly changed the ways in which cultures and civil societies interact on a global scale.8 As a matter of fact, the long, risky, and difficult voyages across oceans, including the Atlantic, had been driven by markets and credits – and their compulsory return on investment – ever since the European conquistadores had set their sails to the New World. Yet, with the widespread introduction of paper money during the eighteenth century, the world witnessed a financial revolution that turned the Atlantic into a hothouse of abstraction and innovation, in which ever more complicated financial instruments and modes of accumulation were produced and developed. Until the widespread introduction of banknotes printed by state authorities in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the forms of paper money on which the slave trade rested were primarily private loans and more or less promises of payment issued and circulated within a limited system of mutual trust between slave traders.9 In order to assure their transactions, many merchants insisted on exclusive and pre-established relations of exchange, which were necessary because the abstraction of value transmitted with their very signatures on a piece of paper was not backed by enforceable laws, nor by an institutionalized practice of confidence. However, as the contact zone of trade across the Atlantic grew in distance and complexity, a transnational mode of exchange, “a new system of trust”10 between slave traders, had to be established. In his analysis of the Zong case, Baucom excavates the epitome of such a social practice in the

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speculative institution of insurance. The “genius of insurance,” he explains, in a tone that paradoxically almost glorifies what he criticizes, the secret of its contribution to finance capitalism, is its insistence that the real test of something’s value comes not at the moment it is made or exchanged but at the moment it is lost … in a money culture or insurance culture value survives its objects, and in doing so does not just reward the individual self-interest of the insured object’s owner, but retrospectively confirms the system-wide conviction that value was always autonomous from its object, always only a matter of agreement.11 The financial instrument of insurance, in other words, created and simultaneously demanded the collaborative creation of value, despite – or even because of – the absence of its bearer. So when the captain of the Zong decided to toss his slaves overboard in order to financially “save” their agreed value, he committed a brutal act of murder and racism facilitated by a logic of abstraction, speculation, and underwriting that had been established across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. “There is every reason to believe that slavery, with its unique ability to rip human beings from their context, to turn them into abstractions,” notes David Graeber in his book on debt, “played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.”12 In his book on insurance and American literature, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America 1722–1872 (2006), Eric Wertheimer pursues a similar concern. He claims that the development of insurance through the practice of underwriting, coeval with the rise of paper money and credit, facilitated the creation of abstract value out of nothing. Insurance, however, ultimately reduces the material world to the purest form of capitalist abstraction: property. “Insurance underwriting,” he notes, “seeks to efface zero from the realm of property. Thus it places an artificial stabilizer on property’s seemingly natural relationship to an unfetishized exchange value (zero).”13 The insured object or person, in other words, is turned into a form of pure abstraction through nothing but the signature of the underwriter. Let me note at this point that the concept of insurance is probably as old as human societies themselves. In early communities insurance was simply the mutual agreement to help in dire situations. Other early

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forms of insurance were also simply the spreading of risks, as when merchants travelling along dangerous routes distributed their goods to more than one vessel or introduced the rule of the general average, an agreement by which a voluntary loss undertaken to save the entire ship (jettison, ransom, etc.) had to be shared among all parties involved in the voyage.14 In fact, with regard to financialization, Tim Armstrong explains that “the history of insurance begins with the sea.”15 Especially the concept of life insurance that we are so familiar with today was made possible chiefly through financial insurance policies underwritten on slaves. In most of Europe in the early modern era, as Armstrong argues in his article “Slavery, Insurance, and Sacrifice in the Black Atlantic” (2004), insurance on human lives was considered either blasphemy (only God was to decide about life and death), or it was associated with conspiracy or gambling, and hence was illegal.16 The ambiguous legal status of slaves, however, offered a loophole to the ban on life insurance. “Slavery thus occupies a middle position in the progress from insurance on goods to insurance on persons, providing a way of thinking about the value of a life.”17 Slaves, according to this brutal logic of abstraction, could be insured against a potential “loss” because they were treated as objects rather than as persons. Again, David Graeber explains with reference to Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982), slaves were already considered the living dead: being captured, imprisoned, degraded, humiliated, and stripped of any human right, “one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died.”18 In the logic of slavery, the existence of the human body of a slave, who otherwise would have been killed, is simply turned into an abstract surplus and hence a form of money. “Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to have been used precisely as measures of honour and degradation: that is, the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.”19

Communities, Risk, and Cosmopolitanization But what, then, is the connection between slavery, negative cosmopolitanism, and insurance? The most complex aspect of the concept of insurance – as Walter Benjamin predicted in his much-quoted “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1974) – is its (dialectical) potential to be

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a document of civilization and barbarism at the same time. Theoretically speaking, up to the present day all forms of insurance constitute a community of solidarity that emerges in the case of individual loss and disaster. While collaboratively paying a small amount on a regular basis, as in health insurance for instance, a community of participants gathers resources in order to help the individual in a case of emergency. In principle, such a practice of generalized help for particular loss bears essential cosmopolitan and philanthropic characteristics. The practice of insurance, as Wertheimer writes, reconfigures the relation between public and private. Even more: insurance may be viewed as an indication of capital’s own distrust and fear of the very idea of the market … Insurance carries within it the seeds of the market’s alternative, a rationalization of social welfare through nonmarket redistributive means and a reliance on an idea of the public that suggests the public as a legitimate economic counterweight to private interests.20 In its emphasis on a shared exposure to the universal risks of life, the social practice of insurance could in fact envision a form of imagined togetherness beyond local communal ties and realize a form of what Walter Mignolo has described as “planetary conviviality”21 based on genuine public solidarity.22 Yet, with the financialization of insurance in the eighteenth century – emerging at sea – this community of public solidarity increasingly turned into an imagined community of private interest in which not only the people involved in the insurance contract were imagined, but also the value of the insured object or person. In the case of the Zong, neither the captain nor one of the slaves had ever seen the merchants who had invested in the vessel or insured its human cargo. However, unlike the imagined community that Benedict Anderson23 has diagnosed as constitutive of the rise of nationalism, the imagined communities created by insurance and financial relations had an enforced cosmopolitan dimension. I am explicitly using the term “enforced cosmopolitanism” as developed by Ulrich Beck24 because I want to distinguish, as Beck does, between the philosophical, philanthropist ideal of cosmopolitanism, and its quotidian realization as the “cosmopolitanization of the life world” or “banal cosmopolitanism,” as

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he calls it. In his analysis of the late twentieth century in World at Risk, he makes an observation that can also be applied to the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Enforced cosmopolitanization” means that global risks activate and connect actors across borders who otherwise don’t want to have anything to do with one another. Hence I want to make a clear distinction between the philosophical and normative notions of cosmopolitanism … The key point is that cosmopolitanism cannot become a reality deductively by applying philosophical principles but can only enter through the back door of global risks, unseen, unintended and under duress.25 Surely, the “duress” Beck is talking about does not directly address slavery, and yet his words reverberate with the market of the transatlantic slave trade in a remarkable way. The cosmopolitanized existence, into which so many innocent men and women from Africa were forced, constitutes a very early form of what Beck has called the “World Risk society.” In a later article published in 2011, Beck suggests the connection between risk and Anderson’s notion of imagined communities himself. The imagined communities of nationalism that Anderson describes in his seminal book, are, Beck shows, primarily predicated on a common and equally imagined past circulated and enabled through the mushrooming of the printing press and the conception of mass media, primarily newspapers. But the imagined communities of cosmopolitanism, which Beck locates exclusively in the twentieth and twentyfirst century, were predicated on an anticipated future distributed via the border-crossing impact of new mass media assemblages, such as globally operating media corporations, computer technologies, network technologies, and the like. Whereas the imagined national communities, as Anderson (1983/1991) shows, are based on the invention and mass production of the printed book, imagined cosmopolitan communities depend on the Internet and the worldwide communications and mobility processes, networks, forums of debate, and so on that the former makes possible.26

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In the context of my analysis, Beck’s differentiation of imagined national and cosmopolitan communities yields an intriguing potential that needs further development. For what Beck falls short of seeing is the fact that forces of cosmopolitanization and the creation of imagined cosmopolitical communities were not established by networked computers alone, or any other concurrent technology for that matter; rather, they were triggered by the rise of paper money, insurance policies, and other promissory forms of payment and transaction invented on the Black Atlantic.27 Most importantly, these early forces of cosmopolitanization were brought about by a practice of imagination devised not by technology and communication alone, but by people and their attitudes towards the world and the future. Ulrich Beck seems to acknowledge the transhistorical and cross-temporal dimension of this idea when he notes: Imagined national communities are rooted in the past (which must likewise be decoded as “imagined past,” since in the eyes of the nationalists such a past is – subjectively – ancient, whereas in the perspective of the historian [its origin] can be dated to the beginning of European modernity). Imagined cosmopolitan communities in contrast are rooted in the future anticipated in the present.28 The negative consequences of cosmopolitanization as epitomized in the case of the Zong represent the border-crossing activity of Liverpool merchants and their speculation on the future, anticipated from a very specific locality and with a very specific agenda. Since the eighteenth century, in other words, a speculative confidence game of abstraction, mathematization, credit, bonds, and insurances has established and shaped a negative cosmopolitical cultural and economic power of unprecedented scale and magnitude. Epistemologically, the condition of possibility for such a cosmopolitical confidence game was the proliferating logic of the marketplace, according to which values were always a matter of abstraction, consent, and persuasion. Yet the increasing complexity of the colonial world in general also created a condition that required a form of social cohesion increasingly reliant on confidence and trust. If one understands trust, following Niklas Luhmann, as a social mechanism for the reduction of complexity,29 it becomes logical that the amplified complexity of the

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colonial world had to be answered by social systems that institutionalized trust and confidence in the form of insurance. That the practice of insurance (which might have been a cosmopolitan practice in the philosophical sense of solidarity, charity, and philanthropy) would turn out to be such a malign and evil instrument of slavery, can, I think, be understood as an unintended consequence of Enlightenment subjectivity and the dialectics of Enlightenment. At any rate, an important component of any form of insurance – and this is what connects cosmopolitanization and confidence with cannibalism – is the notion of the “general average.” As a very early form of insurance, the rule of general average implied the collective surrender of randomly picked cargo as a form of a minimal calculated loss in order to save the entire ship in a dire situation. In principle, more abstract forms of financial insurance entail the notion of a calculated minimal loss in order to receive compensation in the case of a maximal one. In the judicial aftermath of the Zong case – which was first of all a trial on the grounds of insurance fraud, absurdly enough – the counsel for the insurers claimed that when presumably faced with the necessity of having to practise the rule of the “general average,” Captain Collingwood did not pick the people he jettisoned randomly, as the “custom of the sea” would have demanded when faced with immediate peril at sea, but instead selected the sick or weak among the slaves.30 Implicit in this reasoning is the idea that Collingwood used the notion of sacrifice in order to mask his brutal, calculated, and purely utilitarian act of murder and profit-maximization. As Tim Armstrong explains, “random selection … might be seen as a way of mimicking a state of emergency, disguising human agency.”31 Though ludicrous, the trial’s key point of discussion was the invocation by Collingwood’s legal defence of the notion of the general average, which in dire situations was used to justify even cannibalism if the person to be eaten was chosen by lot.32 The question of whether or not the captain picked the slaves randomly becomes a crucial one in this context, because although the slaves were not literally eaten, the captain jettisoned their bodies and surrendered their flesh, so to speak, in order to recuperate their assigned monetary value. The defence was clear that Collingwood’s acts were not the equivalent of cannibalism, however; rather, they claimed that his reasoning followed the same principle appropriate for times of serious peril. Through this, insurance fraud becomes an abstract and financialized form of cannibalism.

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Cosmopolitan Cannibalism Let me now turn to two literary examples taken from Herman Melville that connect the concepts of cosmopolitanism, confidence, cannibalism, and insurance in an insightful way. As a canonical author, Melville’s cosmopolitan fiction occupies a double position within the macronarratives of Anglo-European modernity. For one, as for instance Wai Chee Dimock has shown, Melville can be read as highly complicit in the logic of Western imperialism.33 However, Melville’s enigmatic and ambiguous stories also continually break through the imaginary walls of Anglo-European imperialism by exposing its “global design” of confidence games, fraud, and double standards. In the present context, Melville’s writing stands out as critically indicative of the transhistorical cultural architecture of Western imperialism. It lays bare a logic of underwriting, speculation, and credit that has infused and shaped the precarious claims to authenticity, identity, and ownership with which Western financial capitalism has colonized major parts of the “great counting house the globe.”34 With this project, Melville is of course not alone. His work can be aligned with a wider array of texts by writers who have embarked upon similar journeys. Olaudah Equiano comes to mind here35 just as much as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, or many more. What distinguishes Melville’s literary take on the issues at stake, though, is his unique ability to create an aesthetics of distrust that deliberately reflects upon Western imperial confidence games, while constantly revoking impulses to place trust in writing as such. Especially in his later novels, Melville’s critique of modernity turns into an unmasking of the macronarrative of Western cosmopolitanism as a confidence game of capitalist speculation, underwriting, and abstract cannibalism. In a pivotal scene of his 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, for instance, the protagonist, a con man of changing appearances, finds his ultimate avatar in the figure of the Cosmopolitan, Frank Goodman. He introduces himself as “a cosmopolitan” to whom “no man is a stranger” and whose “principle of a true citizen of the world is still to return good for ill.” Addressing a passenger on board a Mississippi steamboat, he asks: “My dear fellow, tell me how can I serve you.”36 According to John Bryant, the usage of the word “serve” can in the context of the following passage not only be read in the sense of an aid but also very literally as cannibalism. “The cosmopolitan,” he notes, “will not merely aid men,

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he will serve them as a ‘dish.’”37 And indeed, shortly after his arrival, the cosmopolitan evinces a very gruesome appreciation of mankind: Is the sight of humanity so very disagreeable to you then? Ah, I may be foolish, but for my part, in all its aspect, I love it. Served up à la Pole, or à la Moor, à la Landrone, or à la Yankee, that good dish, man, still delights me; or rather is man a wine I never weary of comparing and sipping, wherefore am I a pledged cosmopolitan, a sort of London-Dock-Vault connoisseur, going about from Teheran to Natchitoches, a taster of races; in all his vintages, smacking my lips over this racy creature, man, continually.38 It is important to note in this context that Melville’s pun, almost to the point, mocks a much-disputed conception of cosmopolitanism that was not to appear until more than 140 years after the publication of The Confidence-Man. Ulf Hannerz in 1996 sketches the “genuine cosmopolitan” (quite ironically) along very similar lines. Hannerz suggests that other cultures are “artworks” which can be appreciated by “connoisseurs” and from which “the individual picks … only those pieces which suit him/herself.”39 To be sure, Hannerz speaks of “artworks” and not human flesh, and yet the elusive concept of a cosmopolitanism “from above,” as it were, illustrates the problematic and ambiguous position that many elitist renditions of cosmopolitanism ultimately imply. In The Confidence-Man, the elusiveness of cosmopolitanism is intensified in a scene at the end of the novel: shortly before midnight, the Cosmopolitan enters the ship’s barbershop. The barber, who has “by the lectures of his trade simply stopped to believe that men are wholly what they look to be,”40 has put up a sign saying “No Trust.” The Cosmopolitan wants to be shaved and is troubled by the sign. After an extensive discussion about the nature of confidence and trust, the Cosmopolitan eventually succeeds in persuading the barber into a contract, which requires him to trust all strangers and to take down his “No Trust” sign for the remainder of the trip. As insurance for his trust, the Cosmopolitan promises to cover all losses the trustful behaviour of the barber might ensue. Take it down, barber; take it down to-night. Trust men. Just try the experiment of trusting men for this one little trip. Come now, I’m a philanthropist, and will insure you against losing a cent.41

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The contract being struck on the “1st day of April 18–, at a quarter to twelve o’clock, P.M.,”42 the cosmopolitan leaves the barber without paying. The barber, shocked by the situation he was talked into, immediately puts up his sign again and thereby breaks the contract, so that the Cosmopolitan does not legally have to pay for his shave.43 Let me note at this point that the contractual manoeuvre with which the Cosmopolitan tricks the barber is structurally not unlike the notorious financial instruments and insurance products that have played such a key role in the financial disaster of 2008 and its aftermath. In Melville’s novel, the Cosmopolitan offers the barber a kind of insurance to cover his potential losses only as a scam in order to secretly speculate against it. During the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, many hedge funds and financial actors on Wall Street did in fact employ a similar strategy. In what came to be called “the Magnetar trade,” for instance, revealed in Jessi Eisinger and Jacob Bernstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 story, investment bankers helped to assemble extremely weak and risky products, only to bet against them in a huge confidence game based on highly financialized insurance products, called CDS (Credit Default Swaps). I will return to the question of contemporary finance capitalism in the conclusion of my chapter. At present, I want to focus on how the subtexts of slavery and confidence games figure in Melville’s writing, because Melville’s most prominent text on the question of slavery, “Benito Cereno,” also involves confidence games and masquerade. In this short novella, Melville narrates a slave insurrection that has taken place on the vessel San Dominick – a reference to the slave uprising in Santo Domingo that would become famous as the Amistad case. In the story, the American sealer and trader Captain Delano encounters the ship in a bad condition (and I deem it important to emphasize that he is a trader). Upon entering the ship with the alleged intention to help, Delano is conned by a masquerade of the slaves, who pretend to uphold the social hierarchies of a slave ship. Now, the story has been a quilting point for all kinds of readings and approaches to literature. In the 1950s Sidney Kaplan called it an explicitly racist text as the reader is forced to identify with the figure of Captain Delano, who repeatedly utters racist stereotypes and depicts the black slave Babo as evil. Others have convincingly held against Kaplan that DeLano does not represent Melville’s opinion about slavery and the issue of racism, arguing that a story “which ends with the beheading of its black protagonist can nevertheless be read as a

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pro-abolitionist narrative.”44 In fact, in her insightful 2008 book Ethnic Ventriloquism – Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Mita Banerjee makes the case that “Benito Cereno” simply reverses the racist theatrical form of black minstrelsy. The mastermind behind the veiled slave uprising in the story, the black servant of Spanish captain Don Benito Cereno, concocts a counter confidence game that exposes the core of the intricate game of conceit and confidence upheld by the Western world. In doing so, the figure of Babo subverts the cosmopolitan cannibalism of the Middle Passage by showing that even ostentatiously innocent third parties like the overly trustful and confident Amaso Delano are ultimately complicit in the imperial global design of colonial hegemony and its abstract form of cannibalism. As one of the most significant literary symbols of the story illustrates, the entire foundation of the New World is surreptitiously based on an abstract form of cannibalism: the figurehead originally displaying Christopher Columbus at the bow of the ship San Dominic is replaced by the human remains of the owner of the slave ship. Another vital point about the novel, which has so far rarely received attention, is the fact that trader Captain Delano does not approach San Dominick out of philanthropy towards the Spanish crew, but because he is interested in doing business: Presently Captain Delano, intending to say something to this host [Don Benito, still being held captive by Babo] concerning the pecuniary part of the business he had undertaken for him, especially – since he was strictly accountable to his owners – with reference to the new suit of sails, and other things of that sort.45 Bearing in mind that Amasa Delano is at the beginning of the story introduced as “a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature,”46 which naturally evokes a line from The Confidence-Man according to which “confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions,”47 Delano’s initial distrust regarding the strange ship he encounters appears to be more like deliberate, calculated risk-taking and a confidence game on his part, than like naiveté. It is only after the American realizes that Babo and Cereno do not particularly acknowledge his business plan that doubts about the proceedings on board arise in the American:

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The price of the sails and other matters was fixed upon. But while this was being done the American observed that though his initial offer of assistance had been hailed with hectic animation, yet now when it was reduced to a business transaction, indifference and apathy were betrayed.48 The triangular encounter of Delano, Babo, and Cereno can consequently be read as a miniature model of the confidence game established by the logic of the financialized Atlantic. The story of their failed communication and the transatlantic confidence game of financial capital, to which the African slaves react with a kind of countermasquerade, epitomizes the reality of the transatlantic marketplace. In it, confidence has turned into confidence games, solidarity into financialized insurances, and philanthropy into a negative cosmopolitanism of exploitation, exclusion, and violence.

Conclusion What then can we learn from Melville’s literary thought experiments for the cosmopolitanized world of the twenty-first century? To avoid misunderstanding, I do not seek to imply that the financial crisis and the unimaginable horror of the Middle Passage are causally connected. Reducing the one to the other would run the risk of mitigating the abhorrent abyss of the slave trade. However, that the financial world of the twenty-first century produces instruments which – in a very abstract and cosmopolitanized way – cannibalize the work and lives of others by betting against them is just one uncanny reminder that confidence games and financial speculation are part and parcel of negative cosmopolitanisms today. Operating in the interstices between philosophical reflections and the representation of maritime life, Melville’s novels narrate the problem of intercultural encounter from the perspective of the multicultural seafaring world society at the dawn of American exceptionalism. From his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), to the last novel published in his lifetime, The Confidence-Man (1856), Melville repeatedly connects his experimental literary negotiations of cosmopolitics with the question of interpersonal and intercultural confidence and trust. While Typee and Omoo, for instance, debunk the hypocrisy of Western missionaries and their absolute confidence in belonging to

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a superior culture as a pure confidence game, in The Confidence-Man, the ultimate confidence trickster turns out to be a cosmopolitan. As of today, the utopian ideal of cosmopolitanism remains prone to be misused as a mere masquerade and confidence game for a hidden neocolonial agenda. “Cosmopolitanism,” as Timothy Brennan notes, can be used to “construct political utopias in aesthetic or ethical guise, so that they may more effectively play what often proves, on inspection, to be ultimately an economic role.”49 Especially in the present context of global neoliberal politics, Brennan argues, the notion of cosmopolitanism is often called upon and appropriated to celebrate a world of diversity and cultural difference, polyglotism, and free intercultural exchange, with the primary purpose of establishing free trade and frictionless transnational commerce. As the debates about cosmopolitanism and global belonging aspire to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state in a celebratory embrace of radical difference and alterity, the ways which “actually existing” forms of cosmopolitanism tend to operate repeatedly end up reintroducing what the concept ostensibly seeks to eradicate. This is, namely, a politics of disregard toward an “excluded other” and a precarious internal periphery of worldwide migrant workers and subaltern refugees. In other words, the “new” cultural trend into which the ancient notion of cosmopolitanism has recently been transformed has become a tool of ventriloquism50 for the old global economic centre that effectively works to maintain systemic inequality, while simultaneously criticizing it. “Cosmopolitanism of this kind,” Brennan writes, “is an identity that depends on others whose originality, even viability, it suppresses.”51 Melville’s equivocal and far-reaching literary negotiations of globalization and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century, therefore, yield an enormous potential to study the phase transitions of a complex utopian vision of “perpetual peace” that is simultaneously a gateway for new modes of hegemony and a paradoxical realization of “perpetual war.”52

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4 Fractured Mediations: Eur/Asian Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms Sneja Gunew “The globe is not the world.” – Pheng Cheah, “World Literature as World-Making Activity,” 30. “I have always tried to imagine what the world would look like without this dominating paradigm of East and West, which all too often implies East versus West … I also find it ironic that my work as an artist is still pigeonholed, filed away in the post-colonial box, whilst the idea of the whole debate was to do away with such categorization and the need to categorise at all.” – Fiona Tan, Disorient, 24.

Postcolonial theory has helped us understand the ways in which imperial cultures have claimed a version of cosmopolitanism as intrinsic to their civilizing missions. While consideration of the treatment of indigenous groups and the history of slavery have enabled a consistent critique of such claims, less attention has been paid to the ways in which other groups have been positioned in these dynamics, particularly in the settler colonies. The debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade have attempted to position such groups more centrally. The term “vernacular cosmopolitanism” is usefully invoked here

because it acknowledges the global interdependence that is a feature of the new debates in cosmopolitanism at the same time that it recognizes that these are always rooted in and permeated by local concerns, including the claims of minority groups within the nation – a complex politics. This chapter examines the ways in which the European archive is increasingly shown to constitute an “interested” universalism by artists who are positioned between Europe and Asia, in relation to “vernacular cosmopolitanism.” The oxymoronic nature of the phrase reflects the double movement of these debates: in Homi Bhabha’s (probable) coinage of the term,1 the vernacular “native” or “domestic” is always in a dialogic relation with the global-cosmopolitan “action at a distance.” I explore this dynamic by focusing on the discrepant meanings of “Asian” and associated terms such as “Eur/Asian.” My argument in the more extended study from which this chapter is drawn2 is that terms such as “Europe,” the “West,” and “Asia” need to be unpacked so that they can no longer be invoked as self-evidently heuristic categories in post-multicultural debates, including those associated with neo-cosmopolitanism. In the present chapter I draw on the work of several so-called Eur/Asian artists, Kyo Maclear, Fiona Tan, and Anne Marie Fleming – the last two encompassing both visual and written art.

Asias Cheah’s and Tan’s opening quotations serve to remind us of the metaphors that constrain our imaginings. Asia as a concept, metaphor, or taxonomic framework has always been both enabling and disabling. For example, Gayatri Spivak points out in her recent volume of essays Other Asias that “there is no original unity to the name ‘Asia’”: “But what is Asia? Should we train our imagination to allow ‘Asia’ to emerge as a continent? The word ‘Asia’ reflects Europe’s eastward trajectory. It is as impossible to fix the precise moment when ‘Europe’ became a proper name for a real and affective space as it is impossible to fix the moment when a ‘European’ first used the term ‘Asia.’”3 Spivak goes on to describe “Asia” as a “place of negotiation”4 and traces the first European usage of the term to Homer.5 In an anthology titled The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, editors Kuan-Hsing Chen and Chua Beng Huat (based in Taiwan and Singapore, respectively) describe their project as contributing to “the integration of an imagined Asia at the level of knowledge production,” in which this imagined field escapes from

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its historical definitions by the West. The volume contains an essay by Sun Ge, “How Does Asia Mean?,” which begins: “Asia is not only a political concept, but also a cultural concept; it is not only a geographical location, but also a matter of value judgment.”6 Confining himself to the framework of intellectual history in modern Japan, Sun Ge alerts us to the (somewhat controversial) work of the philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960).7 Tetsuro situated mankind in relation to natural environments, classifying “Asia” in terms of monsoon, desert, and pasture.8 In his view, the dryness of the desert, for example, produced the major religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Such a reordering of hermeneutic categories can certainly function to liberate one’s imagination. Examples of arbitrary but generative classification recur in Fiona Tan’s work. Critics have cited the influence (via Foucault) of a short narrative by Borges, who evoked the classificatory system of a mythical “Chinese encyclopaedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: belonging to the Emperor; embalmed; trained; piglets; sirens; fabulous; stray dogs; included in this classification; trembling like crazy; innumerables; drawn with a very fine camelhair brush; et cetera; just broke the vase; from a distance look like flies.”9 Using this example as a way into the discussion of neo-cosmopolitanism resonates with Paul Gilroy’s contention that cosmopolitanism should include the “cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”10 How do we render more reflexive our propensity to create familiar classificatory categories? Neo-cosmopolitan debates over the last decade have reminded us that there are many regimes of knowledge, not necessarily in terms of infinitely relativistic values, but certainly enmeshed in different belief systems (including those supposedly immune realms of science and reason). Thus cosmopolitanism, in the sense in which the term is extended to describe the many groups and classes who have travelled and been dispersed widely over the globe over the last century and more, offers exposure to these other ways of knowing – if, that is, there is a receptiveness to their attempts to suggest different regimes of legibility. Alluding to the terms in Pheng Cheah’s epigraph, it is therefore a case of creating a world out of the inherently alienating mobilities that currently define globalization. The concept of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” is particularly helpful precisely because it is an oxymoron that signals an internal contradiction. What orthodoxies does that split undermine at the same time

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that it gestures towards a potential solidarity? To give this solidarity a particular dynamic, drawing on Gilroy’s quotation above, imagining the stranger differs from imagining oneself as stranger and from being interpellated as stranger. These three points of view will serve to structure this chapter.

Europes In the longer study I look at the ways in which the new debates on cosmopolitanism function in relation to constructions of Europeanness and the West in postcolonial discussions.11 Within these debates, the term “West” often functions as shorthand for colonial and imperial histories and ideologies, but it is often unclear what or whom the term includes. I pose the questions of who counts as European, and in what periods and what sites, alongside the broader question of what constitutes the human, in conjunction with claims to modernity and interiority (in a logic where the primitive is all surfaces). I cite outlier figures such as Frankenstein’s Creature or Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula as establishing certain unexpected accounts of European subjectivity in the nineteenth century: Mary Shelley’s text created a version of European cosmopolitanism within which England, France, and Switzerland were to some degree interchangeable, as were Turk and Arab in a parallel register. The text also demonstrated a degree of tolerance toward Islam in ways that are at odds with our current era of a spreading Islamophobia. Count Dracula, on the other hand, was an example of the manner in which the outer reaches of Europe were often perceived as contaminated by “oriental” elements (the threatening Mongol hordes, as well as Judaism) that were placed in opposition to ethno-nationalist models of “purity.” We are still haunted by these allegories, which were subsequently reclaimed and reworked by the diasporic writers in the so-called New World who cast unexpected illuminations onto what it means to be European, and who would count as European in varied imagined geographies including the settler colonies. As a contemporary example, I analyze the manner in which Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s text Dead Europe is animated by the desire for Europe to be dead for the diasporic Greek community in Australia (as depicted by him) since it is associated with toxic legacies of antiSemitism, blood feuds, homophobia, etc. – the yoke of old histories and moribund (but undead) models of familial and social relations.12

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In this chapter I will be looking more specifically at the ways in which cosmopolitanism resonates with so-called Eur/Asian artists who are often interpellated as hovering somewhere between these binaries, but who use them reflexively in order to interrogate such certainties. But first a detour to further examine that curious term, vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism Timothy Brennan’s critique of cosmopolitanism states that “its covert appeal is most powerful when, in a double displacement, its political sense is expressed in cultural forms. Typically, cosmopolitanism constructs political utopias in aesthetic or ethical guise, so that they may more effectively play what often proves, on inspection, to be ultimately an economic role.”13 My concern is with invariably consigning cultural analyses to a somewhat bleakly reified culturalist domain. Unexamined elitist and commodified versions of cosmopolitanism will always be elements within this field, but scholars and artists are also trying to conceptualize new forms of thinking about co-existence without invariably falling into a “mindless celebration of global difference” (to cite the “Negative Cosmopolitanism” conference mandate).14 Such attempts include engaging with difference as incommensurability, something that is often unacknowledged in debates that pit secularism and religion against each other. In the present instance, the suggested counter-tactic consists of disaggregating cosmopolitanism by attaching it to an impossible qualifier: the vernacular. The concept of vernacular cosmopolitanisms reaches towards global contexts and responsibilities at the same time that it recognizes that these always arise in very local concerns.15 The oxymoronic nature of the phrase reflects the double movement within these debates. Sheldon Pollock points out that by including both the privileged world of the Greek polis and the Roman verna or house-born slave, the phrase purposefully signals its inherent contradiction.16 And this is precisely its appeal.17 In Bhabha’s employment of the phrase, the concept attempts to capture the “growing, global gulf between political citizenship, still largely negotiated in ‘national’ and statist terms, and cultural citizenship which is often community-centred, transnational, diasporic, hybrid.”18 Bhabha also associates this concept with minorities who do not necessarily wish to claim majoritarianism, and whose defining impetus is

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that of translating across cultures in an economy marked by iteration rather than teleology.19 The way Bhabha structures these arguments pertains to his familiar dyad of the performative and pedagogical nation, in which adding to does not mean adding up. A comparable argument occurs in Paul Gilroy’s desire for a cosmopolitanism that encompasses a new planetary consciousness, whose antecedents he locates, for example, in Montesquieu’s eighteenth-century satiric text Persian Letters.20 Thinking in “planetary” rather than “global” terms is also a distinction that Spivak makes: “The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed are it. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe.”21 Such an approach is also captured in Stuart Hall’s plea for what he terms an “agnostic democratic process”: “We witness the situation of communities that are not simply isolated, atomistic individuals, nor are they well-bounded, singular, separated communities. We are in that open space that requires a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism, that is to say a cosmopolitanism that is aware of the limitations of any one culture or any one identity and that is radically aware of its insufficiency in governing a wider society, but which nevertheless is not prepared to rescind its claims to the traces of difference, which makes its life important.”22Acknowledging these traces of difference without situating them as a master narrative is at stake here.23 Speaking from within literary criticism, Berthold Schoene refers to the new cosmopolitanism as “opening oneself up to a radical unlearning of all definitive modes of identification.”24 Elsewhere I have referred to the process of suggesting differences without producing comprehensive answers as constituting an ethically necessary stammering pedagogy.25 Certainly, within my own work, the question of being at the periphery or the margins of, at odds with, or at a slant to prevailing orthodoxies has always been paramount, not least for the reason that it allows one to be ambushed by estrangement, the unexpected perspective that reveals something new within one’s own familiar iterations and taxonomies. But how do these claims resonate with other theorists in this field? In current debates on cosmopolitanism, much revolves around the tendency to view universal human rights as being ineluctably at odds with the sovereignty of nation-states, and Immanuel Kant is, for example, invoked on both sides of this argument. Seyla Benhabib, in

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Another Cosmopolitanism, argues that Kant’s significance lies not so much in his doctrine of hospitality as in the ways in which his three articles on definitive peace are articulated together.26 In consequence, “The discourse of hospitality moves from the language of morals to that of juridical rights … [to]articulate principles of legal cosmopolitanism, according to which the individual is not only a moral being who is a member of a universal moral community but is also a person entitled to a certain status in a world civil society.”27 We recall Derrida’s recognition that hospitality is always permeated by hostility, hence his neologism: hostipitality.28 While Benhabib recognizes the claims of the state and the fact that we act politically from within bounded communities, these “state borders and frontiers, require moral justification.”29 Furthermore, when it comes to articulating the “democratic people” in relation to the nation, those who are most vulnerable in being excluded from the nation are precisely not able to participate in legislation concerning their supposedly universally constituted human rights. “Citizenship and naturalization are sites where the disjunctions between nationhood and democratic peoplehood become most apparent.”30 In her vision of a “cosmopolitanism to come,” Benhabib reinforces the need for solidarities beyond borders and the recognition of a more robust version of universal rights to hospitality.31 In kindred terms, Paul Gilroy argues for a type of conviviality that recognizes that we need to find ways of living in and with difference in a “divided but also convergent planet.”32 Gilroy notes Giorgio Agamben’s stark contention that the camp has replaced the city as “the primary political institution of our anxious age,”33 and I would add that the camp is also within the city, or, as others such as Ann McClintock have argued, that the city includes such abject zones. One example is the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Canada, where the homeless and ostracized (many of them Aboriginal) congregate, revealing the underpinnings of Vancouver’s much vaunted claims to be one of the world’s most hospitable and liveable cities. Adding to this logic, when Gilroy was the first to receive the Treaty of Utrecht Chair, he gave a talk drawing attention to the ways in which “racial discourse can be thought of as contributing to a system for making meaning that feeds the tendency to create exceptional spaces and populate them with vulnerable, infra-human beings.”34 Invoking race as the way to make visible some of the ruling agendas, Gilroy notes that “the foundational investment that the West has made

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in the idea of rights is not itself a neutral or universal gesture.”35 Gilroy critiques some versions of the new cosmopolitanism, preferring what he terms “demotic cosmopolitanism,” which involves (as noted earlier) “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”36 I would like to extend this idea to include considerations of “estrangement as pedagogy”37 since such estrangement is precisely something that is cultivated, something that one must learn (as distinct from race or even class – attributes that are often naturalized). It features in the artists and writers examined here: Kyo Maclear, Fiona Tan, Anne Marie Fleming. Gilroy suggests that “imagining oneself as a stranger … might instructively be linked to actually becoming estranged from the cultural habits one was born into,”38 and cites the example of George Orwell within colonial England.39 However, this imagining is different from being interpellated as stranger in what one had imagined to be one’s home.40 Gilroy’s book offers a revised account of European modernism in which black and brown Europeans are always already part of its fabric rather than being eternally regarded as aberrations. My addendum would be that black and brown are not natural categories but are historically given content, and those designated by these terms were not always necessarily perceived as aberrant. For example, that position is currently thrust upon Muslims, and it has also traditionally been (and to some degree still is) occupied by so-called Eastern Europeans who are perceived as visible carriers of “oriental” contaminations within “European” and European-derived contexts.41 In other words, the mechanisms of racialization tracked by Gilroy extend their arbitrary application to many groups.

Cosmopolitanism and world Literature Just as “cosmopolitanism” is receiving renewed attention, we note as well the growing interest in redefining the category of “world literature.” This is signalled by the opening quotation from Pheng Cheah, here in its wider context: The world is a form of relating or being-with. The globe, on the other hand, the totality produced by processes of globalization, is a bounded object or entity in Mercatorian space. When we say “map of the world,” we really mean “map of the globe.” It is assumed that the spatial diffusion and extensiveness achieved

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through global media and markets give rise to a sense of belonging to a shared world, when one might argue that such developments lead instead to greater polarization and division of nations and regions. The globe is not the world.42 Concerning the category of world literature, Cheah argues: “In this imaginative process that generates cosmopolitan feeling, we can discern three moments. First, one must sunder the identification of oneself with the world and breach and transcend the limits of this particularistic perspective. Second, one must imagine a universal community that includes all existing human beings. Third, one must place oneself within this imagined world as a mere member of it, subordinating one’s egoistic interests to that of the whole.”43 As Spivak argues in Death of a Discipline, what world literature should not become is an adjunct to area studies. Bearing these cautions in mind, this chapter examines some vernacular cosmopolitan cultural texts whose explorations in sociality and hostipitality juxtapose claims to humanity with the constraints of subaltern abjection, with the proviso I mentioned earlier: imagining the stranger differs from imagining oneself as stranger and from being interpellated as stranger in the place one considers home. The concept of abjection underpins some of the discussion. Abjection resides on that borderline that decays into the ambiguous slimy dimension between solid and liquid, between human and inhuman, and meaning and non-meaning; hence its potency within cultural theory, because it overcomes absolute binaries, thus neither nor, both and. The minute it becomes linked with supposedly solid concepts such as the human, language, nation, etc., it creates a penumbra which includes affective anxiety, but this ambiguity may also hold the potential for other futures. These dynamics are exacerbated by the ways mobility is conceived.44 But let us turn now to some examples.

“Eur/Asians” – Imagining the Stranger: Kyo Maclear As an explanatory category the term “Eur/Asian” makes as little sense as “European” or “Asian,” and is, like them, freighted with fantasy projections. Canadian writer Kyo Maclear can usefully be situated in these discussions via the Writing thru Race debates in Canada that were a landmark event in terms of launching the question of appropriation in cultural debates.45 Who had the right to tell certain stories when

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those stories concerned minoritarian groups who, arguably, did not as yet have a cultural franchise within the framework of the nation? An unexpected outcome of raising these issues was the generation of a kind of identitarianism whereby the work was automatically judged in relation to surmises about the artist’s origins and the extent to which they could claim a racialized genealogy. In Maclear’s critical study Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness, an analysis of trauma, public mourning, and traumatic historical events such as Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Holocaust, she explores visuality in relation to a planetary ethics. What are the responsibilities of those who engage with representations of these events when they tread the line between acknowledgment and appropriation? How do we mourn the losses of unknown others? Judith Butler, via Derrida, has made us aware of what constitutes a grievable life.46 Maclear reminds us that Freud’s tidily individualized mourning, which processes the loss and lets it go, cannot account for the massive losses in the wake of world wars and technologized contemporary warfare – those require a different model of mourning. “Freud’s central characterization of mourning as a solitary and interior activity is incomprehensible once we invite consideration of historical trauma.”47 Increasingly critics suggest that mourning needs to be replaced by melancholia – not as a psychotic or incomplete state (as in Freud’s account) but as a deliberatively ethical process that acknowledges the importance of encrypting or continuing to carry the burden of traumatic events. Like the ancestors, they need to be enshrined in perpetuity and regularly revisited. Maclear, citing Derrida, reminds us that these nameless ghosts need to be serially acknowledged since they “continue to stake claims on the present.”48 The practice of witnessing, including witnessing at a distance, requires ethical cultivation since it does not come “naturally.” Such pedagogical processes also include the need to not grasp at alibis based on one’s historic links to previous historical trauma as a way of rendering oneself forever immune from complicity. As an ethical alternative Maclear suggests the concept of “transmemory,” where one acknowledges the various kinds of haunting without in any way appropriating their specificities.49 In her novel The Letter Opener, written after the text on witnessing, Maclear turns to the question she asks in the earlier study: how do we cultivate an ethics that enables us to make the experiences and memories of others our own? Her protagonist, Naiko, is a hybrid figure, the

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daughter of a Japanese mother and an Anglo-Scottish father. We encounter her at a point where her mother, who resides in a home for Japanese Canadians, is entering dementia, a time of advancing memory loss and thus erosion of identity. The mother increasingly depends on objects as a way of constructing a theatre of memory where things are endowed with the histories that have leached from her mind. Objects circulate as commodities but also as magnets for affect or carriers of affective translation. What appear to be merely objects can become palimpsests of affect; linked to a letter, for example, they carry emotions from one person to another. When interrupted by a third person they enter the symbolic realm in other ways. The father is absent, as is the sister who has become a journalist wandering the globe as a way of evading familial responsibilities. We encounter Naiko in the Undeliverable Mail Office (formerly the Dead Letter Office), where she works to reunite senders and receivers by means of letters and unmoored objects that have become detached from their addresses. Naiko addresses us from the experience of losing not an object but a person: Andrei, a Romanian refugee and co-worker whom she had befriended and who had suddenly disappeared.50 Using the skills she had developed in her work, Naiko relates Andrei’s tale, including the surrounding apparatus of affect that inhabits him and animates his actions. As though possessed by Andrei, Naiko reconstructs the world of Romania under the rule of the dictator Ceausescu – a plausible account that includes what it meant for his Jewish mother to return to her looted house in the village after surviving the Holocaust, and what it meant for Andrei, who is gay, to survive in these circumstances. The tale is told via letters and photographs and Naiko slips into Andrei as first-person narrator, perhaps an ethically dubious sleight of hand. Arguably, the text’s symbolic economy suggests that this process also allows Naiko to come to terms with her own mother’s memories of the Japanese Canadian internment, and an understanding of how this experience divided her from herself and perhaps led her to be perceived as a “delinquent” mother. As a way of constructing character, Maclear focuses on objects: every character is given a list of their “things” as a means of identifying his or her singularity. The effect is that of roaming an immense archive or museum where the experience depends on the viewer being able to animate the objects with the lives of those for whom they function as

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prostheses – weathered by their attachment to a life but remaining separate as well, and retaining something that exceeds this derivative life.51

Imagining Oneself as Stranger: Fiona Tan52 In We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Etienne Balibar suggests the following: “The idea of the vanishing mediator is probably not so different from the idea of the translator, the intermediary, or the traveler that I have associated with the essential function of the intellectual.”53 It is an attractive thought and certainly Fiona Tan fits into the role of mediating translator and intellectual who uses the motif of travel as a way of exploring both the globe and the possibility of a different sense of the world in the sense Cheah suggests. Tan is a hybrid subject (father Chinese and mother Anglo-Scottish Australian) who was born in Indonesia, grew up in Melbourne, Australia, from the age of two, and has resided in Amsterdam since 1988. She reflexively resists the identitarianism these biographical facts might engender. Describing herself as a “professional foreigner,” Tan’s early video work, May You Live in Interesting Times, consists of an exploration of her putative Chineseness, which led her to her father’s family village and the recognition that there was no natural home for her there. On numerous occasions and as a way of unsettling traditions of anthropological ethnography, Tan has sifted the colonial archives and re-presented footage that makes strange the familiar narratives of colonialism – including the hierarchy of what constitutes the human. In her work Facing Forward (1999), she takes the paradigmatic traveller Marco Polo and the voice-over comprises a dialogue with Kubla Khan based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern text Invisible Cities. For example: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he had not known he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”54 More recently she uses representations of everyday lives, as in the Vox Populi project,55 where she assembled photographs people sent her in four international sites and plotted a pathway through them. The idea is to use the concept of taxonomy to break open assumptions concerning what we recognize as life, as meaningful existence.56 At the same time she has explored – and the categories of travellers and explorers punctuate her work – a range of archives. As she puts it, “I’ve

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started to love archives. Looking through an archive is like discovering an unknown continent, a small universe in which the explorer can keep on undertaking new expeditions.”57 Arguably her dominant archive comprises Europeanness itself, as exemplified in Provenance where the tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century portraiture (called tronie, from the Old Dutch word for “face”) undergirds the grammar of the piece.58 The animated portraits, both static and mobile (static when one considers their slow movements in cinematic terms, and mobile if one considers the immobility of the photograph or portrait), are not family photos, but they do deal with subjects known by the artist. So there is a familial connection but there is also a distance. As she puts it in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, “I prefer images that are free of the baggage of the media, public relations, the film industry and big business.”59 The repetitions construct a certain sense of time – both animation and meditation, since photos, unlike oil paintings, do not encourage the eye to linger over details.60 Thus her method is in a sense synesthetic, projecting onto photographs the viewing grammar of an oil painting by means of the mediation of twentieth-century technology – the moving camera. As Thomas Elsaesser states, “The Face, the face-to-face and the close-up in cinema were among the first ways of defining the new medium of mechanical reproduction as an art-form in its own right.”61 The notion of provenance also links with the ambiguity surrounding origins; in the antique marketplace it indicates a history that confers value, which Tan alludes to in her pursuit of the history of Dutch portraiture, where those who commissioned such works did so in part as testimony to their social ranking.62 Fiona Tan’s video A Lapse of Memory63 opens with an abject image – the burnt-out shell of the old West Pier (Brighton) that hovers into view as though rising from the sea as dawn breaks. It is a shell, but because we see it at a distance and shrouded by mist, we don’t quite realize that and so when we move to an interior space (actually the Royal Pavilion in Brighton) it is as though we had moved into the spectral and ambiguous space of the Pier – quintessentially heterotopic in the sense of being physically as well as conceptually present. The opening shot of Tan’s elderly protagonist Henry (also referred to in the voice-over as Eng Lie) brings us into the interior, but at the same time suggests abjection and liminality. From an overhead shot of his foetal body lying on a blanket on the floor, the camera moves to a close-up of his bare feet, whose slight twitch indicates a living being. The space

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surrounding him is also decayed and unkempt. As Henry wakes up, we focalise, through his eyes, views of the chinoiserie wallpaper and the dimly lit extravagance of the Royal Pavilion’s dragon chandelier menacingly brooding over the scene. The female voice-over begins but initially refers to the opening shot in a time lag because we are already observing Henry doing his warm-up exercises. The voice-over subsequently speeds up to describe a scene we have not witnessed as yet. Time and space have been destabilized by disconnecting the visual and the audio (a regular feature in Tan’s work). The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, an orientalist icon completed in 1822, comprises, as Thomas Elsaesser suggests, “an exploration of Orientalism from its European ‘inside.’”64 Henry is a man of dubious background who is described in the following ways: “He feels lost within his various selves, his possible biographies. They trap him in a scenario which he does not want to live. This place can only serve him as a halfway hotel. Henry is waiting for a story he can make his home.”65 He may indeed by an avatar of the global traveller Marco Polo, stranded in his own orientalist fantasy. The voice-over situates this figure as sliding into dementia, reminiscent in his repetitions and uncertainties of a Samuel Beckett character. While the orientalist baroque setting suggests constraints or being trapped within a particular ideological context, his own embodied rituals faintly echo “Asian” cultures, such as when he drinks his morning tea or projects some of the gestures of tai chi exercises. The phenomenological elements of his embodied habits possibly point to a corporeal freedom beyond the interior structures and ideologies that have always caged him. Critics suggest that the Royal Pavilion may be an externalized version of Henry’s interior world, a theatre of memory.66 Within this he repetitively performs his daily rituals, occasionally pausing as though he had forgotten his script. When not dozing off, he reads while wearing double spectacles. The voice-over gives him a romantic plot saturated with colonial desire, in which he fell in love with a woman who was as fragile as porcelain but “the next morning found her smashed to pieces, a disgrace to the village.”67 The materiality of Tan’s voice-over is interesting in its own right, carrying the hint of an Australian accent. Tan has described A Lapse of Memory as finishing a sentence begun in May You Live in Interesting Times. “I felt I had left all that – meaning my post-colonial roots/routes – behind me. But here, all of a sudden, was this building, which refused to go away. It felt like full circle, like a way of completing a sentence. Ten years later, I felt that a conclusive

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explanation was required of me. And I felt a need for closure.”68 At the end Henry is described enigmatically: “Patiently, Henry is waiting for a story which he can make his home. His forgetfulness is perhaps his greatest virtue. His journey is one yet to be taken.”69 Tan’s installation for the 2009 Venice Biennale, titled Disorient,70 revisits Marco Polo, this time using extracts from his own journal as voice-over.71 The installation involves two screens that use exactly the same audio script but differing visuals. Referring to the quotation at the opening of this paper, Tan infuses the work with the anomalies created by the “taxonomic eye” which is, as we know from postcolonial studies, also a prescriptive eye animated by the civilizing mission that imposes the assessing slide rule of “progress” or “development.” Marco Polo, the quintessential merchant who paved the way for the colonizer, is an emissary from Venice, a city that, like the Western Pier, is an ambiguous entity where it is difficult to distinguish between land and water. Watching the two screens simultaneously as one is meant to do, a powerful dynamic is set up between them – but not, as Tan tells us, “a simple dialectical juxtaposition of rich and poor, positive and negative.”72 In the first screen, the dim lighting makes it hard to distinguish individual objects. The camera pans across shelves of stuff including an old television set and clearly modern artefacts. We view a stuffed (dried out) elephant in Screen #1 just after we see a living one walking in Screen #2. As well, we observe a monitor showing silent early footage of possibly Chinese men boating along a canal. Somewhere, a screen or fabric with kangaroos is inserted. The collection is reminiscent of the Victorian cabinet of curiosities – indiscriminate collecting with no clear rationale (these days we might call it hoarding and the parallels are worth investigating). This contrasts with the self-confidence of the male voice-over from Marco Polo’s journals. Screen #2 depicts footage of the places mentioned in Marco Polo’s journal in their modern incarnation; for example, there is footage of Baghdad during the recent war with US occupational forces.73 Footage includes a man being hooded and led off, presumably to be executed, while his distressed wife and children are slumped against a wall. People look directly into the camera conveying no clear affect. The net effect is to render the Marco Polo voice-over ludicrous in its confident taxonomizing, as when Marco Polo speaks of great wealth and how all the inhabitants wear silk, but we see modern footage of people labouring

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in terrible conditions (e.g., shovelling at mountains of white powder with inadequate protection); or, when he describes the ideal scenery the traveller encounters, but we see evidence of a polluted landscape.

Being Interpellated as Stranger (the Stranger Imagining Home): Anne Marie Fleming74 Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, as both film and graphic novel, explores the legacy of her “cosmopolitan” (in the earlier sense of the word) grandfather, a world-famous magician born in China who married an Austrian and took his vaudeville troupe all over the world in the period between the two world wars. Playing with the conventions of the auto-ethnographic documentary, Fleming punctuates the stock repertoire of photographs and movie footage with devices from her life as an animation artist, thus undermining the veracity of, or assumptions concerning, the truths of visuality (for example, as explored in Maclear). Fleming’s graphic novel describes her great-grandfather in terms of the older meanings of cosmopolitanism: “Now, we are not a very Chinesey family, and the only pictures I had ever seen of Long Tack Sam were of him in Western clothes. I thought of him as my great-grandfather, not as a particularly ‘Chinese Guy.’ ‘Cosmopolitan,’ I guess you’d call it. A citizen of the world. He was very short and carried a big cigar.”75 In keeping with this image, Long Tack Sam appears to have no difficulties with border-crossing, in ways that are at odds with the experiences of Fleming herself when she attempts to follow in his footsteps.76 Her exertions culminate in her not being permitted to visit the “ancestral village” when she is only a taxi ride away.77 Fleming compensates for this inability to arrive at the originary place by finding fragments of Long Tack Sam all over the world – whether it be the stage backdrops deposited in Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology or handbills in New Zealand (53).78 The sheer logistics of these feats of travel are a continuing source of wonder. With characteristic humour, Fleming inserts a number of “origin” stories for her ancestor, derived from the various versions she encounters when interviewing family members scattered across the globe.79 At the same time, the account is permeated by her sense of pathos that this history, which is described as a ghostly network of connections, has been permitted to fall into decay.

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The rhizomatic nature of the family web does not mean, alas, that its inhabitants actually talk to each other. In the final pages of the graphic novel, Fleming muses, And now that I know what a big life he had, I’m left with the question, “Why was he forgotten?” I think he was forgotten in the West because of the death of vaudeville. Because he didn’t go into the movies. Because he was Chinese. But he was also forgotten in China, perhaps, ultimately, because he did not make it his home. But what puzzles me is why he was forgotten by his own family. (Okay, we did celebrate his birthday, his death day and his anniversary, in good Chinese style – while granny was still alive – but we knew nothing about his accomplishments).80 The war effectively curtailed Sam’s mobility and he had foreclosed on the possibilities of entering the movies because he objected to the ways in which Chinese characters were being portrayed.81 The fantasy of being entitled to claim universalism, to have access to this conceptual economy, is currency available to some and not others. Vernacular cosmopolitanism has the ability to conjure up global mobilities that entail the minutiae of the local – Maclear’s imagined Eastern Europeans who help accommodate more immediate histories of Canadian internments; Fleming’s “Asian,” “European,” and Eur/Asian ancestors confound historical prescriptions of “ethnic” identity and the “coercive mimeticism” these often entail (to use Rey Chow’s term82); and Tan’s work provincializes Europe by distancing us from European canonical aesthetic and taxonomizing legacies. All help construct the estrangement from one’s own culture identified as one of the necessary symptoms or attributes of the new planetarily conceived cosmopolitanism. Such perspectives are not majoritarian, not the god’s eye view of the old cosmopolitanism, but instead comprise the stammering pedagogies, the minoritarian interjections that disrupt the business as usual of globalization.

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5 Disaster Cosmopolitanism: Imaginations of Comparison in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows Liam O’Loughlin

Mohsin Hamid’s noir novel Moth Smoke (2000), set in Lahore amidst the South Asian nuclear tests of 1998, features a scene in which news of the successful Pakistani tests at the Chagai Hills reaches the novel’s protagonist, Daru. An otherwise disaffected character – recently fired from his banking job and spiralling into drug addiction and crime – Daru unexpectedly discovers in himself “a strange excitement, the posture-correcting force of pride.”1 In Daru’s upright stance, evoking a soldier standing at attention, Hamid isolates the intended impact of the Pakistani government’s nuclear tests: the establishment of a militarized ideological formation which scholars and activists have since dubbed nuclear nationalism. Against the triumphant national rhetoric around the tests heralding Pakistan’s achievement of international standing, Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows narrates the nuclear tests within a historical and comparative framework of spectacular military violence, proffering an imaginative construction of what I call “disaster cosmopolitanism.” My pairing of these two terms, disaster and cosmopolitanism, is intended to produce a certain dissonance. Disaster typically connotes a sudden and violent rupture of everyday life, which

both reveals and interrogates previously stable ideologies and belief systems,2 while cosmopolitanism evokes an aspirational ideal of global citizenship against provincial forms of belonging.3 However, Timothy Brennan calls cosmopolitanism a “fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon,” one that conjures up notions of harmonious coexistence but often lacks any real challenge to existing power structures.4 How, then, might the two terms be thought of together? What forms of cosmopolitanism do disasters generate? Conversely, what forms of cosmopolitanism generate disasters? Furthermore, how might the disaster help to identify the weaknesses and limitations of cosmopolitanism while also identifying cosmopolitanisms worthy of the name? In their production of disarray, disasters lend themselves to cosmopolitanisms from both above and below. In the first case, Naomi Klein argues that disasters have served as major avenues for the imposition of neoliberalism – a form of cosmopolitanism Walter Mignolo calls a “managerial global design.”5 For Klein, the simultaneous uncertainty and urgency of disaster has been exploited globally to institute a broad sweep of otherwise unpopular free-market reforms, leading also to the increased militarization and privatization of disaster relief.6 However, disaster is also a site of cosmopolitanism from below, as previously silenced voices may become audible in the aftermath. In trying to imagine the shape of a cosmopolitanism from below, literature proves a valuable resource, because it offers an opportunity to provide a perspective on a series of world events that might otherwise (by historians, by states) be seen as unconnected disasters. The historical novel in particular initiates a way of representing disasters cosmopolitically, that is, in ways that exceed the grasp of national or state apparatuses. This essay frames Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows as a powerful example of disaster cosmopolitanism from below. The novel narrates a history of violence, structured around disastrous sites of conflict and upheaval across the twentieth century, from the perspective of a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Written in the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests, the attacks of 11 September 2001, and the violence of the global “War on Terror,” the novel’s encompassing historical and geographical narrative stands in sharp juxtaposition to the narrow historical views of chauvinist states that frame its composition. The form of the historical novel, then, provides Shamsie the capacity to catalogue and connect seemingly discordant histories; its disaster cosmopolitanism is expressed through the polysemous symbol of atomic scars, one that

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memorializes Nagasaki in comparative relation with other contexts of disaster, exposing and critiquing the recurrence of top-down militarisms. Before attending to a close reading of the novel, I will historicize Shamsie’s aesthetics of disaster comparison by situating the novel within South Asian anti-nuclear cultures and theorizations of comparison.

South Asian Nuclear Imaginations As Itty Abraham argues, the 1998 tests are too often seen as inaugural uses of nuclear technology on the subcontinent; instead they should be viewed within the much longer history of state nuclear energy programs in both countries.7 While the particular arc of nuclearization differs in India and Pakistan, nuclear technology was endorsed in both countries soon after independence (1948 in India, 1954 in Pakistan), and it became linked to postcolonial projects of nationalist modernization, self-reliance, and the embrace of science. By the end of the twentieth century, then, both countries came to acquire what Zia Mian calls a “nuclear estate,” composed of “nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, and nuclear science and technology research and development.”8 Thus, while the 1998 tests are part of a much longer historical development, they do mark the historical emergence in South Asia of the militarized, legitimizing ideological formation of “nuclear nationalism.”9 The term refers to a state ideology, one that consecrates the successful testing and possession of nuclear weapons as emblems of modernizing progress and international prestige, achieved through the cultural practices of annual celebrations, public monuments, and icons of heroic commemoration.10 The formation of a strident nuclear nationalism provoked a variety of oppositional discourses from South Asian scholars and activists. Some scholars attempted to undermine the nuclear program as a distinctly national accomplishment by recovering and narrating the transnational research collaborations and the importations of nuclear technology into South Asia which led to each nuclear test.11 Peace activists offered statements of regional solidarity between the two countries,12 while others registered concerns over the costs to the nation-state evinced by nuclear radiation at the local test sites.13 Among these modes of opposition, scholars have singled out for critique a preoccupation with images of mass death and devastation, or what Srirupa Roy calls an

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“apocalyptic imaginary.”14 According to Roy, these shocking images mobilize a limited “politics of horror” that fails to articulate a “politics of anger” around the state’s secretive investment in the development of nuclear weapons, as well as the long-standing inequalities and injustices left unaddressed by the nuclear weapons program.15 Haider Nizamani echoes this critique in the Pakistani context, identifying a misplaced emphasis in Pakistan on “the dangers involved in the deliberate or accidental use of nuclear weapons” which “have not struck a chord with the ordinary populace.”16 Both critics fault apocalyptic imagery for its inability to activate widespread political opposition and call for a different politics of relation, in which nuclear weapons programs are vibrantly linked to concrete sites of struggle and mobilization, and thus more vigorously opposed. Notably, the anti-nuclear imagination of the post-1998 Pakistani Anglophone novel is decidedly non-apocalyptic; these works leave aside the images of mushroom clouds and mass devastation and instead interrogate nuclear nationalism through its icons of commemoration.17 Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden (2013), for instance, reveals the ideological bankruptcy of nuclear nationalism by juxtaposing a grandiose replica of the nuclear test site, the Chagai Hills, with the conditions of poverty it thinly obscures.18 Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke positions the nuclear tests within – and as an exacerbation of – an existing landscape of severe inequality and disorder. The bombs’ impact is portrayed through worried conversations about frozen foreign currency accounts, diminished employment, and the rising price of food and gasoline, as US economic sanctions are imposed on Pakistan as punishment for its nuclear detonations. Even Hamid’s titular cautionary smoke, the ethereal remainder of a “kamikaze moth” killed in a candle’s flame, figures the image of mass destruction writ small.19 Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows maintains this anti-apocalyptic focus, and like other post-9/11 Pakistani Anglophone novels, the threat of nuclear war recedes into a background presence within the larger context of a militarized globe under the American-led War on Terror.20 Partly due to the background presence of nuclear conflict, Burnt Shadows has largely been examined as de-centring the fall of the World Trade Center within existing literary and media narratives of 9/11.21 In re-centring Pakistani nuclear nationalism as an orienting context for the novel’s creation,22 I aim to pluralize the number of militarist situations under

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review here, and to better situate Shamsie’s aesthetics of comparison as a cosmopolitan response to disaster. To best illuminate Shamsie’s aesthetics of comparison, I turn to the way in which comparison has been theorized within two relevant bodies of scholarship: postcolonial studies and Holocaust studies.

The Politics of Postcolonial Comparison Colonial epistemology’s rigidly hierarchical binary of colonizer and colonized forms a central and antagonistic conception of comparison for the field of postcolonial studies. Natalie Melas identifies colonial comparison as a paradoxical act of reliance on and destruction of a subordinate partner, a “comparison in which of the two terms (colonizer/ colonized), the necessary one (colonized) is figured as superfluous.”23 In her study of comparison and postcoloniality, All the Difference in the World, Melas identifies a number of literary and theoretical “figures of comparison” that reconfigure the uneven ground of comparison through their markers of “incommensurability,” which in turn assert a non-hierarchical postcolonial difference. Importantly, in Melas’s conception, incommensurability names not an unbridgeable divide, but rather, a marker of difference that forestalls efforts to affirm exact equivalencies.24 In memory studies, the notion of incommensurability functions alternately as a claim to public recognition of a historical wrong, or as an assertion of radical exceptionalism and incomparability, especially in the case of the Nazi Holocaust or Shoah. In the Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit) of the late 1980s, conservative German revisionist historians compared (and nearly equated) the Holocaust to the Soviet Gulag as a means of diminishing the particular horror and guilt around German atrocities.25 Initial claims of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, then, functioned as a means of attaining recognition and subverting German quietude around the catastrophe, though later assertions of exceptionalism served to position and reinforce the Holocaust as a master trauma, prevailing over and above all other experiences of mass rupture and dislocation.26 The Historians’ Debate and the trajectory of the Holocaust’s memorialization demonstrate that just as comparability can be a strategy of obfuscation, incommensurability may function as a claim to power.

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More recent scholarship on the Holocaust displays a decided turn away from exceptionalism, and instead, carefully charts generative relations between the Holocaust and other mass catastrophes, such as the “lost generation” of Australian Aborigines and African writings about mass killings.27 In one prominent example, Multidirectional Memory (2009), a work that spans postcolonial, memory, and Holocaust studies, Michael Rothberg theorizes comparison between the historical experiences of violent mass rupture in the Holocaust and European colonization. Rothberg argues against what he calls “competitive memory” – those doctrines of exceptionalism that in effect declare an event incomparable, as well as those comparisons which rank experiences of collective disaster in measures of severity, as in, for instance, the numbers of the dead. Against competitive memory, Rothberg poses a notion of comparison that he calls “multidirectional memory,” which conceives of each collective experience as singular, yet unexceptional – a form of comparison that does not equate experiences, but identifies their “partial overlaps.”28 Rothberg’s set of terms helps to preserve difference between units, and also to emphasize a mutual influence between units being compared. This suggests a potential space of transformation that does not leave the component pieces unchanged, where “after the comparison, each actor goes back to her corner to pursue business as usual.”29 How then might Rothberg’s emphasis on a transformational, multidirectional notion of comparison function within the South Asian nuclear tests and the context of the global War on Terror? As I argue below, Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows stages a multidirectional comparison between historical disasters, illuminating an aspirational cosmopolitanism in their aftermath, while also exposing and critiquing various forms of militarism across national contexts.

Birds of Comparison and the Discourse of Necessity As a historical novel, Burnt Shadows encompasses a significant amount of material. Spanning five countries, the narrative follows the interwoven lives of two families, the Tanaka-Ashrafs and the Weiss-Burtons, over the course of the twentieth century. Shamsie frames the novel with a brief prologue in Guantanamo Bay, anchoring the narrative’s otherwise linear historical path in the contemporary moment of the

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War on Terror. Structurally, the novel is then segmented into four distinct sections, each set amidst critical moments of violence and upheaval: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945; the 1947 partition of India in Delhi; Karachi during the 1980s Afghan-Soviet war; and New York City and Afghanistan just after the 2001 terrorist attacks.30 In this trajectory, the novel is in part a narrative retelling of the twentieth century’s latter half, demonstrating a continuity running through the disturbing conclusion of the Second World War, decolonization, the Cold War’s hot zones, and the global War on Terror. This sequential retelling might be seen as a corrective to the prominent post-9/11 narrative of American amnesia, one propagated by the US State Department and prominent media outlets and reinforced by depictions of 9/11 in American fiction.31 While the narrative is not solely focused on American interventions (the Delhi section is devoid of American characters entirely), the retelling of the attack on Nagasaki, US spies in Karachi, and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan provides a sketch of catastrophic violence and covert manipulations that constitute the period of American global hegemony that some scholars have described as the “American Century.”32 Here, Burnt Shadows may be seen alongside other recent Pakistani novels – including Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013), or Mohammed Hanif ’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) – that reconstruct this obscured history. Yet, the novel diverges from these texts in its structuring feature of comparison. As I have argued elsewhere, Burnt Shadows draws implied comparisons between contexts: set distinctly apart from one another, the novel’s four sections might be seen as a set of uneven mirrors opposite one another, illuminating repetitions between different moments in time. The novel depicts each site of mass violence as accompanied (or enabled) by the top-down imposition of a militarized monoculturalism: Japan’s domestic wartime suspicions are reflected in Pakistan’s authoritarian distrust of religious difference; India’s intensifying communal tensions, set amidst Delhi’s Islamic ruins, parallel the US’s rising xenophobia following the destruction of the Twin Towers.33 Thus, rather than dealing in notions of national innocence, all nation-states here are “indicted as perpetrators of violence and injustice.”34 While the novel highlights the violence done in the name of the nation-state, I argue that the novel’s critical emphasis is not a “post-

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nationalist” one, but a critique of forms of militarism.35 Militarism, as Neloufer de Mel defines it, differs from militarization – the unconcealed process of the military’s increasing control over civilian institutions – and is instead a pervasive ideology that “mediates aggressive, hyper-masculinist, militant solutions to conflict.”36 Defined as an ideology, we may locate the presence of militarism not simply in the structure of the nation-state, but in the novel’s depictions of transnational organizations of various sizes and in various locations. For instance, the mujahedeen, the American Central Intelligence Agency, and the private military company are all bound together here in a web of militant contest. Thus, rather than depicting nationalism itself as the root cause of this violence, the novel instead identifies a rigid form of militarized monoculturalism at work in both nationalisms (General Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan) and transnationalisms (the mujahedeen). The novel’s primary point of comparison is the memorialization of the bomb at these different historical moments, carried out through the fluctuating form and meanings of atomic scars. The novel’s central figure is Hiroko Tanaka, a hibakusha or survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, who moves between the novel’s damaged terrains in a series of migrations initiated by the “momentum of a bomb blast.”37 In the explosion, Hiroko not only loses her fiancé (Konrad, an Anglo-German migrant to Japan), her immediate family, and her home, but also suffers the inscription of the bomb’s violence upon her body. As the bomb detonates over Nagasaki, the three black cranes stitched onto the back of Hiroko’s white kimono absorb the heat of the blast, and the birds are fused into her skin, becoming “neither flesh nor silk but both.”38 Numerous commentators on atomic violence have noted the atomic bomb’s perverse photographic self-documentation, its violent imprinting of “remnants of light” into bodies, architecture, and earth.39 Here, Shamsie shows this photographic function at work, but its result is Hiroko’s bodily fusion with a heavily laden symbol. These scars, an instance of what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls “the trope of atomic disfigurement,” become dead zones on Hiroko’s back, incapable of registering feeling; yet they register multiple levels of significance related to the bombing of Nagasaki.40 Within the symbolic resonances of the novel, the scars are a physical embodiment of the phantom presence of the dead, and the burdens of her survivor’s guilt: “some days she could feel the dead on her back, pressing down beneath her shoulder blades with demands she could make no sense of

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but knew she was failing to meet.”41 Intertextually, the significance of the scars multiplies, as the image of the crane references a prominent icon of Japanese memorialization around the bomb.42 These scars, then, affix themselves, and Hiroko, unalterably and unforgettably to the violence of Nagasaki’s destruction. And yet, they quickly become a marker of the event’s marginalization within global memory, as Hiroko faces two social discourses associated with the bomb and diminution. The first is what Hiroko describes as “the fear of reduction,” or the simplification of her identity to the stigmatized status of bomb-survivor (hibakusha) in postwar Japan.43 The second is the discourse of historical necessity around the bomb. In Tokyo, Hiroko first encounters an explanation of the atom bomb’s use as a compulsory component of the American war strategy: she recounts an unnamed American soldier’s admission that “the bomb was a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives.”44 Shamsie highlights the official American discourse of necessity, mobilized by both President Harry Truman and other government officials directly after the bombing. This justification, spoken by an American soldier to a Japanese survivor, highlights a casually phrased yet heavily militarized conception of national identity, one which justifies an instance of mass killing through an implicit cost-benefit analysis – the exchange of Japanese lives for American. The novel’s historical setting of Nagasaki, as opposed to the more widely represented site of Hiroshima, further emphasizes the bombings as marginalized and silenced disasters. Nagasaki carries a symbolic catastrophic excess, occurring three days after the horrors unleashed in Hiroshima, leaving Hiroko to mournfully question its necessity: “Why a second nuclear bomb?”45 Rather than emphasize the second bombing’s cruel excess, prominent discourses around the bombing have often subordinated Nagasaki to Hiroshima’s “primal scene of atomic warfare.”46 Thus, as a temporally secondary disaster, Nagasaki has been rendered subordinate to, and elided within, the historical memory of Hiroshima. As the novel moves past the immediate postwar history, Shamsie explores the comparative logic at work in the discourse of necessity and the marginalized memory of Nagasaki. In attempting to counter Nagasaki’s marginalization, Hiroko turns to the historical record and confronts her experience as a meagre statistic in comparison to the larger tragedy of the Second World War. “My stories seemed so small,”

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she remarks, “so tiny a fragment in the big picture. Even Nagasaki – seventy-five thousand dead; it’s just a fraction of the seventy-two million who died in the war. A tiny fraction. Just over .001 per cent. Why all this fuss about .001 per cent?”47 The bombing’s discourse of necessity depends upon, in Michael Rothberg’s terms, a competitive statistical comparison, in which the severity of one experience is devalued and undermined in favour of another, producing no restructuring of imagined social relations. Indeed, the statistical comparison also functions as a mechanism of what Natalie Melas refers to as “catastrophic miniaturization,” in which an experience of trauma is abruptly and devastatingly reduced by an act of comparison.48 What Hiroko encounters here is the notion that Nagasaki must be claimed through a different mechanism of relation. In the following moments of comparison, Shamsie offers the mobile figure of the bird scars, one that refuses to assert itself in numerical terms against such discourses of minimization, but instead reappears in moments of disaster as a cautionary symbol against forms of militarism, both overt and covert.

The Kamikaze and Mujahedeen: Self-Sacrificial Militarisms In the Pakistan section of the novel, we see signs of General Zia’s program of Islamization and markers of the Afghan war: the refugees and suspected CIa agents in the city of Karachi. Amidst these historical developments, the bird scars drift into Hiroko’s dreams. At this point in the novel, Hiroko’s seventeen-year-old son, Raza, has been rejected by his teenage love interest due to a rumour that he is a deformed “bombmarked mongrel.”49 Fleeing this reputation, Raza runs away from home to an Afghan refugee camp just outside of Karachi, an area in which he is recognized (due to his mixed-race features and multilingual talents) and welcomed as a fellow displaced ethnically Hazara Afghan, especially by Abdullah, a young man of similar age. Meanwhile, Hiroko’s fears about her missing son enter her dreams, and the dark birds become a figure of comparison between the militarized contexts of 1945 Japan and 1982 Afghanistan. In her dream, Raza was speaking to an Afghan boy but the boy, although an Afghan boy, was also her ex-student, Joseph, the kamikaze pilot. “Maybe I won’t join the Air Force,” Joseph, who

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was also the Afghan boy, said. Raza sneered. “Scared, little boy?” Joseph stood up taller, unfurling his black wings, and when he opened his mouth desiccated cherry blossom cascaded out, blanketing the dry soil of Afghanistan.50 The dream combines Joseph, a former student of Hiroko’s, with an Afghan boy, establishing clear parallels between them: both young, newly anointed, and reluctant, both transformed into a self-sacrificial warrior. Shamsie’s technique of combination here differs from the familiar postcolonial trope of the palimpsest – in which multiple layers of text or images are visible, while overlaid upon one another – and instead resembles the composite: a unity of elements in which the separate parts remain visible (“Joseph, who was also the Afghan boy”).51 Indeed, the composite is a more fitting concept for the creative act of comparison, in which two units are intentionally brought together, while the palimpsest describes an historical process of accretion. As the brief dream continues, it twists into a nightmare, positioning Hiroko’s son as provocateur, goading on the figure’s aggression; in response, the composite kamikaze-mujahedeen issues what we might read as a warning, taking on the black wings of the burnt cranes – the novel’s symbol of disaster – and becoming a kind of angel of death.52 The wings render both figures monstrous, undermining notions of glorious self-sacrifice, and the composite figure breathes out another layered set of images: desiccated cherry blossom onto the Afghan soil. Within the novel, the cherry blossoms recall not the trauma of Nagasaki, but the act of protest by Hiroko’s father against a culture of reverent military commemoration, in which he sets fire to a cherry blossom garland commemorating the death of a fifteen-year-old kamikaze pilot.53 This final merging retrieves not a scene of mass devastation but resistance to the stultifying culture of militarism that sanctifies self-sacrifice – a culture common to the kamikaze pilot and to what Eqbal Ahmad has called the “Kalashnikov culture” of 1980s Pakistan.54 Thus, the comparison provoked by the birds does not have to do with the particularity of nuclear disaster – its radius of annihilation or radiation – but the militaristic milieu in which that disaster takes place. We might understand this moment as a survivor’s disaster cosmopolitanism, one whose aspirational comparison breaches Hiroko’s own experience of disaster.

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New York and Nagasaki: Security and Disaster The birds reappear in the novel’s final section, set in a post-9/11 New York City, where they link the security-driven militarism of the US to the discourse of necessity surrounding the bombing of Nagasaki.55 In this section of the novel, old debts across family lines are repaid as Raza requests that his mother help Abdullah, an undocumented Afghan immigrant, across the US-Canadian border. Hiroko enlists Kim, Konrad’s grandniece, to complete the task. As a structural engineer preoccupied with fears of collapse and desires for stability – “she’d always wanted to know how to keep things from falling, from breaking apart”56 – Kim reflects an uneasy post-9/11 American consciousness, one that seeks the restoration of a perceived absolute security. This enduringly unfulfilled desire overshadows Kim’s agreement to the task; soon after ferrying Abdullah across the border, Kim succumbs to a xenophobic distrust of Abdullah and notifies the authorities. When Kim returns to New York, Hiroko confronts her on comparative grounds, identifying the action as a betrayal not only of her personal trust, but also of the memory of Nagasaki. You have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that’s what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? … because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.57 Hiroko’s denunciation establishes a parallel between the supplementary excess of Nagasaki’s destruction and Kim’s security-fuelled labelling of Abdullah as a potential terrorist threat. Here we see a reversal of the terms of the statistical ranking and its minimization of Nagasaki, as Hiroko’s act of comparison places Nagasaki not in competitive relation with another monumental trauma – like the Holocaust or the slave trade – but in relation to a numerically smaller violation. While differing tremendously in this numerical severity, Hiroko’s act of comparison identifies a similar logic at work in both heinous acts: a risk calculation that weighs the security of the self above all else. This

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relation demonstrates that, while not overtly militarized, Kim’s security calculation has behind it an equally corrosive and damaging logic of conflict resolution. The force of Hiroko’s comparison is emphasized by the final appearance of the novel’s poetic figure of relation: the birds. Shamsie writes, “The silence that followed was the silence of intimates who find themselves strangers. The dark birds were between them, their burnt feathers everywhere.”58 The memory of Nagasaki, revived by this comparison, lives vividly in this moment, as Hiroko’s scars, either hidden or appearing only in dreams up to this point, figuratively move from Hiroko’s back and fill the room, requiring silence, demanding recognition. Yet, in this final appearance, the birds do not solely represent the singular loss of life in Nagasaki, but reprise the discourse of necessity and its militaristic identitarian logic. After Hiroko has transformed the room into a comparative space, she turns away from the room – and the destructive insularity of post9/11 America – “and walked slowly over to the window. Outside, at least, the world went on.”59 The novel’s final gaze grounds the cosmopolitan viewpoint – the aspirational attempt to envision the world as an open space of motion and possibility – from the position of a belated comparison between disasters, an act of relation that arrives too late to forestall violence and abuse. The novel’s cosmopolitanism, grounded in the comparative scars of Nagasaki’s disaster, demands a practice of preemptive comparison that identifies the repetition of Nagasaki’s underlying structures and enabling conditions of emergence. In a passage on confronting complicity in historical atrocities, Dominick LaCapra suggests that “a reckoning with the past in keeping with democratic values requires the ability – or at least the attempt – to read scars and to affirm only what deserves affirmation as one turns the lamp of critical reflection on oneself and one’s own.”60 LaCapra’s suggestion that to “read scars,” one must combine both delicate care for the injury with a demanding inquiry into self-implication, is one that resonates remarkably with the comparative project in Burnt Shadows. Shamsie’s comparisons help think through different forms of militarism, from the level of the Pakistani nuclear state to the Kalashnikov-bearing mujahedeen, or from the amnesiac American hegemon to the suspicious individual perpetrator. Examining the interrelationships between these groups begins to untangle the ways these militarisms strengthen and

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reinforce one another. Through its poetic figure of comparison, Burnt Shadows implicates its transnational audience in both anticipated and ongoing disasters, forcing readers to confront ideologies of militarism as reflected in those historical scars.

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PA R T T WO

Cosmopolitan Labour

6 Cosmopolitanism from Below: Oil Capitalism, Informality, and Citizenship in Nigeria Paul Ugor

Both as a moral and political project, cosmopolitanism is invested in a universalism that promotes the impartial treatment of all human beings, irrespective of one’s place of birth, ethnicity, race, gender/sexuality, or religion. Cosmopolitanism, then, is committed to a process of internationalization in which human beings everywhere are world citizens with basic rights grounded in natural law, that is, with rights which cannot be denied by any person(s), group(s), institution(s), or constituted authority, including the nation-state. Stressing the rights of the individual rather than those of the sovereign state, cosmopolitanism thus favours what Brown and Held call a “non-national sense of citizenship,”1 in which the rights of the individual are guaranteed in spite of the specific nation-state where such individuals reside. Thus, built on an international system of rights, cosmopolitanism encourages the right of all human beings to life; the right to association, worship, free movement; the right to engage in economic activity and decent living; the right to a safe environment devoid of danger; and many other such inalienable human rights. In a sense, the concept of citizenship itself is grounded in cosmopolitan ethics.

It is therefore unsurprising that cosmopolitan politics have become important to the discourses of environmental justice and environmental citizenship that have emerged in the last two decades. Such movements not only promote the idea of sustainable development, in which natural resources are exploited wisely to provide for present and future generations, but they also encourage and defend the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination – the right to have control over the natural resources in their communities. But as Patrick Hayden argues, a careful attention to the core issues of sustainable development reveals that the concept barely gives serious “weight to matters of social injustice, economic exploitation, and the link between ecologically unsound practices and poverty.”2 According to Hayden, the agenda of national development, especially one “predicated on economic growth fuelled by industrialization [and neoliberalism] renders imperative the exploitation and consumption of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, and leads to increased pollution of water, air and land, consequences which harm rather than assist human development.”3 In the quest for development, the state, the entity that claims the responsibility of overseeing the exploitation of national resources for the development of its sovereign territory and its subjects, becomes a threat to its own citizens. In other words, uncontrolled economic exploitation of natural resources by the state and its capitalist agents can infringe on the natural rights of its citizens. The oil-rich Niger Delta in Nigeria, as I hope to show, represents a classic example of developmentalist pursuits that have become indifferent to the basic principles of environmental justice as a key component of cosmopolitanism. Rather than provide for and protect the people with resources from their God-given land, the activities of the Nigerian federal state and the multinational oil companies now pose enormous danger to the people of the Delta region and their livelihoods. It is this threat – political, economic, and environmental – that has led to the emergence of a thriving informal oil sector in the region. But informality here must be seen as a particular brand of cosmopolitanism. For as Will Kymlicka argues, “Far from depriving domestic citizenship of its meaningfulness, globalization [and cosmopolitanism] may be helping to renew it in important respects [because it] is opening up the political process to new groups.”4 Environmental globalization particularly allows marginalized groups to bargain for their environmental rights, especially as local residents of economic

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spaces endowed with rich natural resources. These new environmentalisms gain both legitimacy and universal moral purchase by forging links between environmental rights, human rights, and cosmopolitanism. The new indigenous movements seeking self-determination and self-control of their natural resources expand the normative repertoires of liberal rights associated with cosmopolitanist discourses in order to make strong claims linked to the universality of human rights and human dignity. This is what Matthias Luz-Bachmann and others mean when they argue that the new global challenges posed by an integrated cosmopolitan world order requires “the adoption of a cosmopolitan perspective which retrieves and reviews Immanuel Kant’s original proposal for world citizenship rights in terms of cosmopolitan law [weltburgerrecht].”5 My chapter thus examines, on the one hand, the particular case of the systematic impoverishment of the Niger Delta people of southeastern Nigeria who represent a minority position within a fragile postcolonial state; and, on the other hand, the people’s desperate attempts to secure their environmental rights as global citizens. The enormous crude oil deposits in the Niger Delta have made the region a priceless global economic territory that has been integrated into the global oil economy, but the people of the Delta have very little power in the revalued capitalist world into which they have been thrust. In a sense, the Niger Delta people have been made global subjects very much against their will, with the resources in their homelands appropriated without their consent, and their traditional ways of life now destroyed through petro-violence. My contribution therefore not only chronicles the varied injustices perpetrated against the Niger Delta peoples, but also demonstrates how a marginalized youth generation in the Niger Delta has stepped onto the international platform of global capitalist accumulation beset by social and economic inequities, to take charge of its own destiny and find answers to the problems that confront them amidst neglect by the Nigerian state and global corporate giants in the oil and gas sectors. Specifically, I focus on the unique ways in which young people in this oil-rich region have developed an alternate community organized around an underground oil economy, in the form of small-scale private artisanal oil refineries. These informal refineries provide not only a means of daily survival, but also a means of resistance against global oil capitalism, which has been indifferent to the daily predicaments of

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ordinary people in these oil-producing communities for more than fifty years. Although this chapter examines the politics of young people’s involvement in the informal oil sector in Nigeria, the ultimate aim of my critique is to demonstrate a particular instance of how the proliferation of the so-called informal economy in Africa is “not simply a silhouette of darkness and absence but a haunting figure of resemblance – a ‘shade’ that, through its uncanny combination of likeness and difference, claims a connection, a relationship, and sometimes an aspirational quality.”6 In a sense, what I aim to reveal is the ongoing ways in which marginalized youth in Nigeria are creating their own informal structures as a way to respond to the long years of neglect and exploitation by both cosmopolitan corporate forces and their local allies within the structures of the postcolonial African state. In doing so, I seek to contest the pervasive notion of a lost and cursed generation in Africa, an assertion often bandied about within the global sociology of youth.7 While African youth continue to face a flood of social and economic problems, they have remained resourceful, finding their own answers to the political-economic crisis generated by the failures of the postcolonial state.

The Context of Survivalist Politics: Youth and Post-Amnesty Life in the Niger Delta The armed insurgency led by the so-called militant youth8 in the Niger Delta region between 2006 and 2009 had huge international and national political-economic implications. At the global level, it fractured the steady production and flow of crude oil and oil profits to the international market. In 2005, for example, global oil prices shot up for the first time above $50 per barrel when Alhaji Mujahid Asari-Dukubo began his series of threats in the region, code-named “Operation Locust Feast.”9 And for the five-year period in which the region witnessed the rapid proliferation of militant groups, at least half a million barrels of crude oil were lost every day from the international oil market, “spiking world oil prices up further in markets already jittery about Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Venezuela and much else.”10 At the local/ national level, it fundamentally interrupted the accrual of significant economic rents that the Nigerian state earned from the transnational oil corporations. The insurgency reduced national output by about

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750,000 barrels per day, roughly half of the nation’s daily output.11 It is estimated that the Nigerian state lost approximately $23.7 billion in oil revenues in the first nine months of the armed struggle.12 At many levels, then, the insurgency destabilized an already vulnerable global oil market, and a fragile postcolonial Nigerian state whose democracy was still teetering on the brink, threatened by a powerful military class that had ruled the nation for over three decades. It was in a desperate bid to restore industrial peace, and the uninterrupted production of crude oil, profits, and economic rents to local political elites and multinational oil conglomerates, that the idea of a “presidential amnesty” for the estimated fifty thousand young men and women involved in the insurgency was initiated. When the late president Yar’Adua offered the “presidential pardon” to the militants in June 2009, he declared that it was a national “Independence anniversary gift” and vowed that his administration would “do everything to ensure that the conditions that make people take arms against the nation and subject themselves to inhuman conditions in the creeks are ameliorated.”13 As part of the comprehensive package, the federal government, in partnership with oil companies, promised to increase the amount of local participation in the industry. Included was a promise to retrain all amnestied Niger Delta militants for work in the oil industry. But, several years later, there is now serious doubt as to whether the deep-seated problems that catalyzed the violent conflict in the Delta have really been addressed, either by the Nigerian state or the multinational oil corporations. Recent scholarship points to the fact that, apart from the momentary cessation of hostilities in the region, nothing has really changed.14 The general culture of “accumulation by dispossession,”15 wherein a larger percentage of the wealth generated from the natural resources extracted from the Niger Delta is controlled, managed, and used by external actors inside and outside of Nigeria, is ongoing in the region. The oil economy in the Delta functions as an enclave industry, operating without the consent and involvement of the oil-bearing communities. To date, oil companies have entered and left communities where they have oil wells without their consent. Backed by Decree No. 51, the Petroleum Act of 1969, which grants sole ownership and control of “all petroleum in, under or upon any lands” in Nigeria – and later the Land Use Act of 1978, which grants exclusive ownership and authority over all lands and mineral resources found in Nigeria16 – concessions for oil exploration and extraction are often

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granted by the federal government to prospecting companies without the input of local communities. Not only are the exploration and refining facilities prefabricated, dismountable, and relocatable, the oil companies create the impression that the people of the region lack the relevant skills needed for employment in the highly technical oil and gas industry.17 Indeed, the former special adviser to the president on Niger Delta affairs and chairman of the Presidential Amnesty Committee, Mr Kingsley Kuku, complained about how oil companies in the region failed to honour their commitments to train 3,000 ex-militants to work as artisans in the oil and gas industry. Instead, they opted to train them as tailors, cobblers, and other professions irrelevant to the industry.18 Oil companies still operate with impunity in the region, destroying the ecosystem, the cultures, and the health of the Delta’s peoples through relentless gas flaring, oil pollution, and other industrial activities. With astounding annual revenue of about US $40 billion accruing from the sale of crude oil from the Delta, efforts by the federal government to address the crisis have remained superficial and sporadic at best. And although the national revenue allocation formula was revised in the 1999 constitution to allow 13 per cent of petroleum revenue to go directly to the oil-producing states, there is no evidence that the extra revenue has changed anything in the lives of the over 30 million people in Niger Delta.19 In fact, some scholars have argued, the 13 per cent formula has made “a difference only to the bank accounts of politicians and not to the lives of Niger Delta peoples.”20 Social services in the Niger Delta are barely functional. Roads, electricity, health care, schools, and other basic social amenities are either in absolute disrepair or are completely non-existent. Apart from the main cities of Port Harcourt, Warri, Yenegoa, and Benin, where there is some semblance of development, the entire Delta region is marked by squalor and poverty. This social decay is complicated by the increased levels of unemployment in the region. Despite the existence of many oil companies and subsidiary oil-servicing companies, it is estimated that at least one in seven young people are jobless, making the Delta’s unemployment rate nearly three times the national average, currently estimated at five per cent.21 It is in this sense that former militant Asari Dokubo described the Niger Delta as an “occupied and abused territory,” whose natural resources are forcefully extracted to benefit the lives of outside political and economic power brokers.22

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Under these conditions of dispossession and alienation – created by global oil capitalism and exacerbated by poverty, unemployment, infrastructural decay, chronic underdevelopment, and fiscal imbalance in the allocation of national resources – a different kind of economy has emerged amongst marginalized youth in the Delta region. Excluded by the Nigerian state, rebuffed and disparaged by transnational oil companies, exploited by their own local political elites, and now betrayed by their former commanders, a large segment of youth in the Delta have turned to the same industry responsible for their abjection – oil – to find answers to the everyday social and economic hardships confronting them and their families. As noted by twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Akpoyemi in the creeks, “there are no other options of survival here apart from the local refineries. Look at this our local river, if you set nets here, even for two to three weeks, you may not catch even a small quantity of fish to cook. So it is only through these refineries that we can survive in this place.”23 Although Gabriel lives in Warri, because there are no job opportunities in the city, he has to return to the village to help his father in the local refinery business. The illegal refineries now provide the only means for individuals like Gabriel to get by while they wait for gainful employment, or even for admission to university and other formal training institutes.

Background to gbekebor Most of the research for this article was carried out in Gbekebor, a small fishing community in Burutu Local Government in Delta State. With a population of about 3,000 people, Gbekebor and the adjoining villages that form the “Ogbolubiri Kingdom” lie on the northern fringes of Burutu, about five nautical miles from Warri, the state capital and main hub of economic activities in Delta State. Burutu itself is one of the twenty-five local governments in Delta State, located on the coast of the Niger Delta on both sides of the Forcados River, one of the many channels of the River Niger, about 32 kilometres upstream from the Bight of Benin. The dominant occupations amongst this predominantly Ijaw-speaking community are farming and fishing. There are also other minor subsistence economic activities such as sea-diving (for aquatic snails and periwinkles), logging, and the sale of products like palm oil, kernels and palm-wine. But these long-established economic activities, which have provided sustained local livelihoods, have

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come under immense pressure because of the environmental pollution wrought by oil production in the area. High concentrations of heavy metals have been found in the freshwater clams that inhabit the lower river-reaches around Gbekebor and Obotebe.24 The research indicated that “mean levels of lead (P b), manganese (m n), and Cadmium (C d) were found to be higher than world standards.”25 The immediate effects of these toxins in the land and waters in Gbekebor and its environs have been the destruction of plants and animals, making farming or fishing almost impossible. Local residents in the 1960s and 1970s boasted of harvesting enough fish to sell and feed their families. Since the 1980s, it has become almost impossible to catch fish even for domestic use because of the ceaseless oil spills contaminating the water. Apart from the pollution, for which oil companies are responsible, Gbekebor lacks basic amenities like pipe-borne water, schools, hospitals, and electricity, let alone decent housing or good roads. Interviewees complained that local people have to be transported by boat to Warri if they become ill, even from minor health problems like malaria; pregnant women often have to depend on traditional birth attendants to deliver their children. There is no source of drinking water in Gbekebor, not even a borehole, so local people drink, bathe, and cook with water from the tributary of the River Niger running through the village. This water is contaminated with mud, faeces, dead bodies, and crude oil. It is arguable, then, that the illegal refining of crude oil emerged as a major occupation amongst local communities because the chief sources of livelihood for people in the area have been destroyed by the activities of multinational oil corporations. Local respondents date the emergence of illegal refining to the late 2000s, soon after the armed insurgency in 2009. Many of the young men and women who were not integrated into the presidential amnesty program, and who found themselves jobless after the insurgency, embraced illegal refining as the only way to make a living. In Gbekebor none of the youth in the area were included in the amnesty program. Most of the boys from the village were killed during the insurgency; those who survived the violence were scared of reprisals from government authorities and stayed away from the amnesty program. The few who did register for the latter did not see their names in the official list of ex-militants invited to the Demobilization, Disarmament, Reconstruction, and Rehabilitation program at Obubra. The underground oil industry in Gbekebor and other such places in the Delta creeks surfaced as an uncoordinated and

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spontaneous response by local youth in the midst of very harsh social and economic circumstances. According to a former member of the local legislature, Hon. Dikesi Edonyah, “we’ve just learned how to use what we have to develop ourselves, instead of dying in silence. Our communities are tired of being treated like slaves or children.”26 The industry has phenomenal support and patronage from the local people because it is seen not only as an alternative industry for youth to productively channel locally acquired skills into eking out a living and supporting their families, but also as a meaningful pastime that has reduced widespread criminality in the area. Of the approximately 100 refining camps I counted in Gbekebor, each had ten to eighteen youth working there at a time. A maximum of three youth manning each local refinery earn as much as 1,000 naira (N 1,000) per drum of diesel produced; hence an average worker in the refining camps makes between N 4,000–6,000 daily (approximately US $25–40 per day). The boys are often not paid for the production of kerosene or petrol, though, as the money accruing from the sale of such products is ploughed back into their meals and general upkeep in the refining camps. This means that some of the youth in this underground industry earn as much as N 160,000 (at the time, approximately US $1,000) monthly – an amount most graduate employees with the federal or state governments do not earn in Nigeria.27

Local Oil Refining – Structure, Agency, and Functionality Generally, the local refining business runs on an ad hoc basis, managed by individual youth entrepreneurs, not the community. And although most of the youth involved in the local refining industry have social links with politicians in government and senior army officials, such connections are covert and do not amount to formal institutional recognition of the artisanal oil industry as a formal business sector. The local oil refineries are not licensed and are not supported by any state legislation; they do not pay taxes to government, and the industry is not a bankable economic activity supported by the formal financial sector in Nigeria. From the acquisition of crude oil products, the refining process itself, and the marketing of the refined products, nothing is formally structured. Almost every aspect of the industry is artisanal in nature and participants require only minimal advanced skills to work in the camps where the refineries operate. This is significant because it

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means that the new underground oil industry is amenable to the largely uneducated and unskilled youth in the Delta creeks who have long complained about being kept out of the formal oil and gas sector. Jobless youth from surrounding cities like Warri, Port-Harcourt, Benin, and Ughelli are often recruited to work in the refineries, where the only required skill is knowledge of the indigenous technique of brewing gin. Local gin is often distilled from palm-wine – a very popular alcoholic beverage tapped from palm trees. The local refineries are thus rooted in the age-old technology of gin distillation, which local communities have used for centuries. The only difference between the systems of local distillation of gin and crude is the product; the mechanism is the same. Here we see a unique example of how a new generation is reinventing old autochthonous technologies to address urgent contemporary needs in local communities which are overwhelmed by poverty, unemployment, and suffering from the neglect and extraversion of political regimes turned towards exogenous economic interests. While the indigenous technologies now adopted for refining crude by locals have not been developed beyond their current artisanal nature, they still point to the creativity of marginalized people who are finding their own answers to problems created by an indifferent local ruling elite and multinational oil conglomerates. The improvised mechanism used for local refining consists of an oven that generates fire for heating the crude, a cooling mechanism locally known as “Okpuroku” used to regulate the temperature under which the crude is refined, and a reservoir for collecting the refined products (diesel, petrol, or kerosene) from the oven. The ovens work in similar ways to those used in modern bakeries for making bread. They are usually powered using firewood and charcoal, and in some cases, bitumen (coal tar), which itself is a by-product of the refining process. So there is a recycling process here which makes the industry self-sustaining and economical in many ways. There is also a cooling system – usually a standby water pump, a large container with a mix of water and washing detergent (like Omo) which is used in case of large fires, especially where there are no fire blankets.28 Each oven is interconnected with a network of pipes allowing raw crude to flow through the refining system to the large tanks that hold the final products, usually in the form of petrol, kerosene, or diesel. Typically the product that comes out first from the tail end of the improvised refining system is the associated gas that is normally linked with crude

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Figure 1 · Typical artisanal refining system in the Niger Delta

products. This process is imperative, supposedly to purify the final product for “safe” public use. After the gas comes fuel (petrol) and later diesel. In some cases, the associated gas is followed by kerosene, and then diesel. The ovens are normally different sizes, ranging from the ones that contain two drums to larger ones that take as many as five to ten drums. Usually more established refining camps that have been in the business for longer periods have larger ovens, while new entrants or women involved in the business use smaller ones. But whatever the size of the oven, characteristically two drums of crude oil will produce one jerry can (25 litres) of petrol, one jerry can (25 litres) of kerosene, and one drum (200 litres) of diesel. And most camps, depending on

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their capabilities, will produce between thirty and fifty drums of diesel daily, and each drum of diesel, depending on the season, sells for between N 10,000 and N 17,000 (US $106). Respondents were generally quite reticent to reveal the sources of the crude used by the local refineries. This is perhaps because most of the refinery operators genuinely do not know the exact places where the crude oil is sourced from. Based on informal discussions with many of the young men working in the refining camps, it seems likely that crude oil is supplied by illegal bunkerers. Illegal bunkering is the practice of stealing oil from government or oil company pipelines using very sophisticated rackets. The process “involves tapping into a pipeline, filling plastic jerry cans with crude oil, and taking the oil away in speed boats to waiting barges, which in turn sell the oil to large oceangoing tankers, which then sell it to refineries in neighbouring countries such as Ivory Coast, at a considerable profit.”29 Approximately 120 drums of illegally bunkered crude are supplied to each of the refining camps in Gbekebor at least twice each month (perhaps more). It is customary for the bunkerers to pass the cost of bribing soldiers and other security personnel along the waterways in the Delta creeks on to the local refiners, who often pay N 5,000–7,000 per drum of crude. The price of the crude (per drum) thus varies, depending on how much the bunkerers have incurred from the point of extraction to the point of delivery. Production within the local refineries is itself often regulated by demand, so there is usually higher demand for products during annual Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter, or even local seasonal festivities like the New Yam festival. The former Nigerian minister of Petroleum, Dieziani AllisonMadueke, and the then-managing director of the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation of Nigeria, Mutui Sunmonu, declared that this “complex criminal enterprise” presently costs Nigeria about 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day, amounting to annual losses of US $5– 7 billion.30 Others have described it as a vast international oil racket in which locals only partake in a very small fraction of the loot.31 But with the rise of local refineries, an almost insatiable local demand has also emerged for the products from this complex underground oil business, sustained by both local and international entrepreneurs. The market for the locally refined crude is huge, extending from the far reaches of the Delta hinterlands to the Sahel region. At the local level, both private/domestic and public/international social and

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Figure 2 · Operators of local refineries transporting illegally bunkered crude to refining camps

economic activities are sustained by the products from the local refineries. Almost all the speedboats that criss-cross the creeks, commercial or private, more or less depend entirely on diesel or petrol purchased from the local refineries. Improvised filling stations line the seashore in Warri, where passengers board boats for various destinations in Delta State and beyond, selling bootlegged petrol or diesel to boat operators. Given the fact that access to the creeks is only by sea transportation, the local refining industry has become crucial to the lives of people in the region. It sustains local transportation, especially as legally refined products imported from abroad or produced from the four stateowned Nigerian refineries are becoming increasingly expensive and

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difficult to access. Although Gbekebor, unlike many other parts of the Delta creeks, is connected to the national electricity grid, it rarely receives a consistent supply of electricity. This means that Gbekebor, like much of the rest of Nigeria, depends for its electricity on cheap portable power-generating plants imported from China and other parts of Southeast Asia. These generators are often powered by fuel produced by local refineries. In this way, the local refineries have become integral to the economy of daily life in the creeks. Beyond the local market, locally refined petrol and diesel also find their way to international markets in places as far away as the Sahel region. Many respondents revealed that their products are often meant to satisfy the demand for diesel or petrol in northern Nigeria, as well as other countries further north, like Chad, Niger, and Sudan. Big boats are used to move large consignments of locally refined diesel at night to remote or abandoned quays in Warri (Delta State), Mbiama (Bayelsa State), or even as far afield as the Waziri Jetty in Apapa (Lagos State). There, the fuel is siphoned into waiting tankers from the north of Nigeria and later mixed with genuine products from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC ) depots, before being moved to the north or to neighbouring countries like Chad, Niger, or even Cameroon, where it is sold at high prices. The market for locally refined products from the Delta is extensive, underpinned by a network of formal and informal actors. The market also provides jobs and income for more than two thirds of the youth population in the creeks. When asked what they would do if the government clamped down on the illegal refineries, many of the boys working in the camps argued that there would be no going back on the refining business until the government offered them a viable alternative. Gabriel, one of the boys working in the refining camps, put it this way: “if they want to stop us, they should give us something else to do … the Niger Delta has been cheated for a long time.”32

Youth and Subversive Politics in the Delta: Rationalizing the underground Oil Economy It is in the context of the armed insurgency in the Niger Delta that we can trace a new development: the mobilization of an intense political consciousness among ordinary people in the oil-producing region, particularly the youth. This newfound social awareness about how events

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were shaping ordinary lives in turn produced an environment of youth activism in the whole region. This was apparent amongst ex-militants at the National Youth Service Corps camp in Obubra, and the youth manning the local refineries in the creeks. They argue that by being directly involved in the violent conflict with the state, they gained firsthand experience of the enormous dangers and risks associated with antagonizing the Nigerian government and the big oil corporations.33 By calling themselves “freedom fighters,” the young militants represented themselves as “doing battle,” and as continuing the struggles of their ancestors against an unaccountable state and multinational oil corporations. The insurgency was triggered by legitimate concerns about the deplorable state of life in the Delta, yet the violent atmosphere that emerged was exploited by criminal elements to further self-serving agendas. Nonetheless, many months after the insurgency, most youth in Gbekebor continue to see themselves as engaged in this “battle of survival” with the Nigerian state and Big Oil. Nigeria’s most recent past president, Goodluck Jonathan, is from the Niger Delta. Jonathan hails from Otueke, a village in Oloibiri, the place where Shell first struck oil in commercial quantities in 1956. The emergence of Goodluck Jonathan as the president of Nigeria not only sped up the peace process in the Delta region, but also redefined the contours of resistance in the area. Seen by most locals as an autochthon (son of the soil) whose strategic position could bring benefits to the Niger Delta, the degree and form of antagonism with the federal centre changed during his tenure. Rather than outright confrontation, most youth from the region now see themselves as being engaged in a “quiet” insurgency in which the struggle for self-determination and direct access to the natural resources from the region will be “fought” in subtle and indirect ways. This is what I refer to as “subversive acquiescence.” While there remains a semblance of peace and an appeasement of angry communities in the Delta by the military and the federal government in Abuja, the local communities in the Delta creeks continue to struggle for access to resources from the swampy wetlands in their backyards. I see this as part of the subversive identity politics that we can trace in the rise of illegal refineries in the creeks. While the army of youth in the region are dissatisfied with the socioeconomic conditions around them, they also do not want to be seen as “rocking the boat” when their own President Jonathan now has access to and control of the national purse, since the latter circumstance might

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open up opportunities for development in the region. While they uncertainly await change, the informal oil sector, invented and superintended by the local communities themselves, becomes the nodal point for all economically disenfranchised people to converge. Here, then, we might see a poignant example of how the informal sector in Africa continues to function as “nothing less than the self-organised energies of people, biding their time to escape from the strictures of state rule.”34 It is within this context that one must apprehend the local refineries which have proliferated within the Delta region. While there is still palpable angst amongst people in the Delta about their degraded living conditions, that resentment is now being expressed in subdued ways because of the strategic political position occupied by a son of the Delta. According to one Gbekebor respondent, part of the reason why the illegal refineries are able to operate in the first place is because their “son/brother” is the president. Put differently, had the president been from the north (Hausa), southwest (Yoruba), or even the southeast (Igbo), the heavy-handed Nigerian military machinery would have been mobilized long ago to decimate the vast operation that is the local refining business in the Delta. So while the local refineries run by youth are illegal, they are sustained by an informal imprimatur from the top political hierarchy in Nigeria, thus forging a hinge between the formal state apparatus on the one hand, and young underground oil entrepreneurs on the other. Here, then, we not only see how “informality is built into bureaucratic forms as unspecified content,”35 but also how “formalization and informalization … occur in continual interaction with each other, producing a plurality.”36 Youth also view the local refineries as an ingenious invention on behalf of local communities who were manipulated and shortchanged by the tribal politics of Nigeria’s major ethnic groups – politics which did not work in their favour prior to Jonathan’s arrival. For Dr Ben Benebai, a native of Burutu and a senior lecturer at Niger Delta University, political decisions at the federal level had far-reaching consequences on local livelihoods. He cites the aborted shipyard project of the 1970s in Burutu that could have been a source of jobs for millions of youth in the Niger Delta today. A ship-building and repair company, which at the time would have been the largest company in Africa and the second largest in the world, was commissioned to be built in Burutu in the 1970s by the military administration of General Yakubu Gowon. The contract for the shipping company was awarded to Navimor Consortium,

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and the contractors had gone as far as constructing a sand-filled dry dock with a capacity of about 150,000 dead weights where the ship construction company was to be located. Finally, however, funding for the project was frozen by the civilian administration that took over in 1979. In the early 1980s, pipes already laid for the ship-construction company were removed to Snake Island in Lagos, where a ship-assembling company was built with a much smaller capacity of 25,000 dead weights.37 For most youth in the Delta, then, the local refineries are self-created “companies” intended to address the skewed development in Nigeria, which they deem to have adversely affected minorities in the region. Many young men acknowledge that running local refineries is a dirty job, but argue that there is nothing else they could do. “This is the only way we can help our parents buy books for children in school,” recounted one young man after a night shift at one of the refineries.38 It is from the earnings at the local refineries that local people are able to pay for groceries, medical bills, tuition, housing, and other aspects of their daily lives that require cash incomes. Many of the youth also see their involvement in the illegal refining of crude as patriotic acts by concerned citizens frustrated with the way that the powers that be are running state-owned refineries. According to nineteen-year-old Tonga Akpoyemi, who lamented the absence of fuel or diesel, “Our companies are doing what government refineries are not doing. But here we produce the kerosene that our mothers use to cook and petrol for the small generators that give us electricity. Government has never done anything for us.”39 While legitimizing their illegal business, the above response also constitutes a kind of acerbic indictment of the tardy management of the four stateowned oil refineries currently run by the NNPC , where corruption and mismanagement have caused production to fall drastically since the 1990s.40 Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been awarded for the turnaround maintenance of these refineries, but Nigeria keeps spending about US $10 billion every year to pay for imported petrol and kerosene. In fact, in May 2010, the Nigerian federal government signed a joint contract worth US $23 billion with a Chinese company to construct three additional kerosene refineries and a fuel complex in Lekki (Lagos) to add 75,000 barrels per day to augment the existing four state-owned refineries.41 What has become of that project, almost six years after the contract was signed, is unclear. But what has not changed is that ordinary

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Nigerians still queue to buy even small quantities of kerosene for domestic use, and licensed filling stations are often without petrol. Licensed filling station operators, who secure allocations to lift products from government depots, prefer to export their products to the Sahel region, where they make huge profits. It is this scarcity, caused primarily by the ineptitude and corruption of Nigerian rulers and the greedy business moguls in the downstream oil sector, that the Niger Delta youth running the illegal refineries view themselves as helping to ameliorate. As most of the youth see it, they are filling the gap in supply created by a corrupt adult generation who are running and ruining the Nigerian state. And, by indicting the formal but failed bureaucracy that runs the state-owned refineries, the youth put themselves on both a moral and organizational high ground. In many ways, the illegal refineries in the Delta quintessentially represent what Osef Bayat has appropriately termed “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” – “a silent, patient, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives.”42 Drawing on the ordinary daily activities and struggles of disenfranchised urban poor in the Middle East in the early 1990s, Bayat demonstrates how tens of thousands of poor families who besiege big cities for daily survival and/ or improvement of their lives take advantage of the collapse or rigidity of formal state structures to organize themselves into a collective force with serious political ramifications. These quiet, everyday activities by common people – mostly economic migrants, the unemployed, and the homeless – are self-driven, unplanned, uncoordinated, spontaneous, and low-key. Such acts are propelled and legitimized by the “force of necessity” to seek alternative modes of survival and dignity through direct individual actions. The ultimate aim of such quiet encroachment on official spaces was animated by the pursuit of “the redistribution of social goods and opportunities in the form of (unlawful and direct) acquisition of collective consumption,” and the attainment of “autonomy, both cultural and political, from the regulations, institutions and discipline imposed by the state.”43 The illegal refineries strongly resemble the radical subsistence activities described by Bayat in the Middle East. While the local refineries may be informal and illegal, they gain legitimacy through the difficult socioeconomic conditions endured by ordinary people on a daily basis in the oil-rich but extremely poor Niger Delta creeks. The refineries represent ordinary people’s desper-

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ate search for economic and social justice for their communities, when the state and superordinate economic regimes operating in the area (i.e., oil corporations) have connived to deny ordinary people equity and social justice.

Concluding Remarks: Youth, Informality, and Environmental Citizenship in the Delta Various trends worldwide – political, economic, cultural, and technological – attest to the fact that we now exist in the “cosmopolitan condition” envisaged by Kant in the late eighteenth century: a globalized world in which far-flung events have huge implications for the lives of citizens in distant places. The current spate of global problems threatening humanity – climate change, terrorism, wars and genocides, drug and human trafficking, global economic crises, rising poverty – are concrete reminders of how, as Garrett Brown and David Held argue, “humans are now increasingly locked into ‘overlapping communities of fate’ whereby events in one part of the world can have profound impact on the lives of those everywhere.”44 As the world gets smaller, condensed mostly by innovations in science and technology, there is now growing empirical evidence that our lives are intricately interconnected. But such global connectedness has come with its own toll. The cosmopolitanization of almost all aspects of human life – the economy, politics, culture, communication, travel, law, the military, intellectual work, etc. – has of course led to broader linkages worldwide. However, it has not necessarily culminated in a cosmopolitan civilization grounded in a system of rights in which human beings all over the world equally share in collective burdens, benefits, rights, and obligations. This is what Ulrich Beck hints at when he declares that cosmopolitanism “evokes at once the most marvellous and the most terrible histories.”45 Beck argues that cosmopolitanism “in the end is just a beautiful idea,” because in the renewed concern for global humanity, very little attention is now being given to real human beings.46 In spite of all the promises of a cosmopolitan modernity premised on interconnectivity, interdependence, and equal respect and value for humankind irrespective of class, race/ethnicity, religion, geography, gender, and other divisive social categories, the reality has been different – especially since the onset of intensive economic globalization in the early 1970s. Changing from what Robert Fine calls “the monopolisation of

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the means of violence on the part of the state,”47 especially under the totalitarian regimes of the early to mid-twentieth century, a remarkable feature of our cosmopolitan age has been the shift to what I now call the monopolization of public resources and the means of wealth on the part of cosmopolitan forces. While the cosmopolitan ideal is proud of its emphasis on equal value for humanity, empirical politicaleconomic trends since the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall (which was the real marker of the worldwide abrogation of political, economic, and cultural boundaries) have pointed not only to evidence of the relentless denial of basic human rights to peoples all over the world, but also the heightening of practices that alienate and dehumanize the poor, minorities, the vulnerable, and many others that occupy the fringes of society. In other words, while Kant predicted in the eighteenth century that global commerce ought to intensify the building of a cosmopolitan global civilization that respects, prioritizes, and values all human beings on the basis of their worth as humans, the reverse has been the case, with rising incidents of social and economic injustices all over the world, especially on indigenous peoples, particularly those with natural resources that generate wealth for both local/national and international economies. Thus, increased global interdependence, and the resultant shared fate that comes with it, now simply means that local communities in different parts of the world have been made allies in a process of internationalization that neither benefits their interests nor protects their rights. Economic globalization, in particular, not only promotes the idea of a global market, but “defends the virtues of neoliberal economic growth and the utility of allowing capital, commodities and labour to move freely across borders.”48 But the deregulation of markets and the liberalization of the global economy has not necessarily led to the democratization of wealth to all peoples as citizens of the world. Instead, it has benefitted only a few, investing great economic, political, and technological power in one axis of the world – the so-called First World – and making the other parts vulnerable in what is supposed to be an equal cosmopolitan relation. Thus, Robert Fine argues that “what is presented in the guise of cosmopolitanism may [in fact] be revealed as the dominance of global capital over the life-world or of America over the globe.”49 While boundarylessness and interdependence are now indisputable features of the human condition, they have not always benefitted all global subjects, instead investing a few cosmopolitan

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subjects with “world citizenship” rights while others continue to lead a distressed existence marked by political-economic exploitation and ceaseless pain and traumas. In spite of the strong evidence that developing countries are increasingly being globalized by integrating into world trade (especially by slashing protective tariffs that benefit imported goods), globalization has consistently led to rising inequality, where “the poor do not always share in the gains from [international] trade” and capital flows.50 With the intensification and expansion of the neoliberal economy, postcolonial African states particularly have become much more invested in protecting state power and the economic investments of multinational corporations than in catering to the concerns and needs of their own subjects as global citizens.51 Such indifference or unwillingness by the postcolonial state to engage its citizens through the provision of social and economic services, is, in many ways, a signature of a new order of negative cosmopolitanisms, in which strong links between global capital and the postcolonial ruling elites, rather than engendering a culture of respect for equal rights and diversity, have compromised world citizenship, leading to the entrenchment of social and economic inequities, oppression, and traumas in both personal and collective lives. But as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri remind us, in spite of the enormous powers and influence of capitalism, there is another form of cosmopolitanism that is often unaddressed – “the cosmopolitanism from below” where boundless and nationally diverse multitudes coalesce into resistant subjects of international struggles. Whether directly or indirectly, explicitly or covertly, such responses by marginalized peoples often aim to secure the social and economic rights and benefits denied them as global/cosmopolitan citizens. This is what has come to be framed as the “cosmopolitanism of dissent.”52 Drawing moral strength from the central cosmopolitan ideals of universal consensus, peaceful co-existence, freedom, and social justice, this notion conceptualizes “dissent as a disruptive practice and action with a cosmopolitan potential.”53 According to Caraus, “cosmopolitanism of dissent does not abandon the universalizing impetus of all cosmopolitanisms, but this time the universalizing impetus disturbs particular given meanings, filiations and identities and, by contesting these, expands the possibilities for alternative political orders, directly or indirectly projecting a new, better and more just world.”54

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At a broader level, then, the history of the underground oil economy in the Niger Delta demonstrates that the informal sector is not necessarily a subversive and anti-development economic terrain which negates genuine efforts to improve the mainstream national economy, as has been suggested by much essentialist Africanist scholarship.55 Kate Meagher, for example, argues that the key concern should not be “the boundary between the official and the unofficial spheres [of the economy], but the distinctive organizational dynamics and the power relations that characterize non-formal forms of order.”56 Although the informal sector is often linked to the innocuous and frantic struggles by the desperate urban poor to eke out a living, non-mainstream economic activities by marginal individuals and groups can also be fruitfully connected to sociopolitical struggles and the quest for global citizenship. Now no longer confined to the small-scale and survivalist activities of poor people, informal non-state economic actors are not automatically the passive or apolitical social weaklings that have been implied in extant literature on informality. Instead, they are active sociopolitical agents seeking to reorder the power relations between them and dominant political and economic forces. It is this particular approach, which recognizes popular economies as offering the marginalized a new language of citizenship and vocabulary of protest (i.e., how informal “economic transactions are implicated in processes of political articulation or discontent, and in the shaping of new and emergent identities”57), that I bring to bear on my reading of private artisanal refineries run by youth in the Niger Delta creeks. I read the rise of these small-scale refineries as new forms of “insurgent citizenship”58 by a disenfranchised generation actively engaged in not only finding “balance and control” in their lives, but also in reordering the power relations between their communities, the Nigerian state, and global transnational oil forces. The illegal refineries now proliferating all over the Delta region are constitutive of unfolding accountability struggles taking shape worldwide. In these struggles, poorer, politically disenfranchised, and economically marginalized individuals and groups are mobilizing and creating alternative strategies – formal and informal, orthodox and unorthodox, legitimate and illegal – to claim the social and economic rights that are denied to them.59 As John Gaventa puts it, “for poor and marginalised groups, struggles for accountability gain traction when they involve access to the basic resources and services that are necessary for survival and for sustainable livelihoods.”60 As

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state institutions which are supposed to act as guarantors and protectors of citizens’ rights have (in some cases) reverted to being rights violators; as the rift between the rich and poor deepens; as economic globalization and the influence of powerful corporate entities continue to weaken the ability and willingness of nation-states to cater for ordinary citizens; as elected representatives of people are increasingly losing touch with the realities and concerns of people on the streets; as all of this occurs, it is imperative that we rethink classical notions of citizenship, especially as something granted by the state, and that we pay attention to the informal, innovative, and sometimes unconventional ways in which ordinary people actively engage in struggles to gain access to social and economic rights and resources through collective agency and the reconstruction of individual identities. The legal, political, and moral basis of citizenship is grounded in equality: equality both before the law and in access to social, civic, and economic rights. The local refineries run by unemployed youth in the Delta creeks of Nigeria are emblematic of the “multiple livelihood strategies”61 and everyday struggles by poor people for what Naila Kabeer has appropriately termed a search for “inclusive citizenship,” especially “from below.”62

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7 Representing Migrant Labour in Contemporary Britain: Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Chinese Whispers and Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields/Two Caravans Pamela McCallum

In the early twenty-first century a horrific event drew attention to the precarious situation of migrant workers in northern Europe and Britain. On 5 February 2004, on the beach of Morecambe Bay in northwest England, twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers drowned when gangmasters sent them out onto the sands late in the day.1 They may have ignored the high winds, the treacherously swift local tides, and the quicksands, or, strangers to the area, they may not have known. On the way onto the sands, the Chinese workers passed groups of returning local cockle pickers who, alert to the predicted high tide, pointed to their watches as a warning. Perhaps the Chinese workers did not understand the gesture or perhaps they were afraid of disobeying the gangmasters who sent them to work; in any case, the language barrier meant that there could be no direct communication. And so, when the tides rushed in, they were trapped on sandbars surrounded by deepening, turbulent water, and eventually drowned. Some made desperate phone calls to their families. A gangmaster alerted the coastguard who

rescued one young man by helicopter; another woman survived by returning early because she felt ill.2 Only these two were left alive from a group of twenty-five men and women who walked onto the Morecambe Bay sands in the diminishing light of a February afternoon. This extreme instance draws attention to the unregarded labour that saturates our contemporary lives: bodies bent over in fields picking vegetables that will be displayed in neat rows under fluorescent lights in supermarkets; the dexterous stirring of a cook briefly glimpsed behind the swing of a kitchen door at a local restaurant; the repeated motions of a cleaner’s shoulders so easily overlooked in a busy hallway. Often isolated by language, performing work that is not readily perceptible in society, sometimes for twelve or fourteen hours a day, these men and women are largely invisible. The Taiwanese-British journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai notes the way in which news of the Morecambe Bay tragedy followed a familiar pattern: “indifference – debate – indifference.”3 “Before the tragedy,” she writes, “the level of coverage of migrant workers’ working conditions was minimal; it peaked for a few weeks, then subsided for two years, only reappearing briefly when the Chinese gangmaster was convicted in 2006.”4 For Pai, society’s disregard for migrant workers is summed up in the latter’s lack of individuality, their lack of that marker of human uniqueness, a name.5 Without social capital, their frequent invisibility adds up to a widespread but often unacknowledged assumption that they do not exist. “It is a moving but pitiless existence,”6 Peter Arkell writes. How might they and their labour be represented? What potential is opened up when readers have contact, if only in imagination, with migrant workers, with those Shaobo Xie identifies as a “transnational population of the excluded”?7 Pai’s reflections on these questions motivated her to use investigative journalism and undercover work at various locations in England to produce a book about undocumented Chinese labour in England, Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour. Drawing on Pai’s research, and engaging in an intertextual dialogue with the book, Marina Lewycka’s novel Strawberry Fields (published in the UK as Two Caravans) offers explorations of migrants who enter Britain seeking work, sometimes legally (those from European Union countries), sometimes illegally (those who overstay tourist visas, who work on student visas, or who are smuggled across borders). The migrant workers depicted in Chinese Whispers and in Strawberry Fields occupy the shadowy spaces of negative cosmopolitanism,

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the dark underside of the global movement of populations that has also been called “deviant globalization.”8 Zygmunt Bauman identifies a population “who seem to have been made to the measure of our fears … the living traces (sediments, signs, embodiments) of all those mysterious forces, commonly called ‘globalization.’”9 Migrants exist as spectral inhabitants of a transnational economy of undocumented labour, in which a man or woman might have papers for several names or none; they might sleep in shifts on mattresses in ill-kept rooms; they might be driven long hours to work in different places each week; they might risk beatings from organized crime networks; they might work such long and stressful hours that death is the outcome. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes about those who are denied humanity, exposed to a “violence of derealization,” existing in a shadowy world that is not quite life and not quite death.10 Pai senses this precarious existence of a “ghost population”11 at the margins of the contemporary state when she comments, “It was the namelessness of the migrant workers that affected me. Because they had no capital and thus no status – it was almost as if they didn’t exist.”12 She continues, “I was determined to give the living ones a name, a voice; to look into their lives and tell the world what it’s like to be them.”13 In taking up such a vow, Pai positions her journalism as an ethical project, an act of bearing witness to conditions and lives that are not readily visible in the urban spaces of contemporary cities in the developed West.14 Bruce Robbins commends contemporary writing that successfully persuades readers to stretch beyond the comforts of familiarity “to become conscious of our interdependence with the rest of the world.”15 A work of journalism and a novel, Pai’s Chinese Whispers and Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields not only present nuanced, situated representations of migrant labour, but also challenge readers to imagine and be open to the lived experience of others. Elsewhere, Robbins takes up the question of globalized labour. Our food, our clothing, our electronic devices, and many more objects in our daily lives are bound up with networks of labour exploitation, and to be aware of this is to experience what he calls the “sweatshop sublime.” How might people learn to change their behaviour, he asks, when the global economy has developed into a convoluted system of “notoriously inconceivable magnitude and interdependence”?16 In his words, “access to the global scale is not access to a commensurate power of action on the global scale.”17 Of course, awareness of global forms of ex-

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ploitation and the act of writing letters to corporations and politicians or participating in demonstrations and signing petitions – all options readily available to western individuals – can in no way be measured against the lived experiences of super-exploited labourers, and so are often felt to be empty gestures without constructive outcomes. At the same time, such actions should not be regarded as wholly unproductive and ineffective. As Robbins notes, social transformation does not emerge so much from conscious reflections followed by decisive action as from more emergent and obscurely understood sensations. Change will occur, he suggests, “as an outgrowth of habitual desires, fears, and anxieties, embarrassed perceptions and guilty pleasures.”18 Within such a context, the writings of Lewycka and Pai work to produce an uneasy, but inescapable, awareness of global labour embedded in the familiar details of daily life: an awareness that troubles influential anti-migrant discourses, and confronts readers with detailed accounts of the lives of migrant workers. It is from this perspective that literature and journalism, which share narrative strategies, complex characterization, and detailed arcs of action, offer especially useful sites of social and cultural engagement. In a significant way, Lewycka and Pai’s writings provide a counterdiscourse to the stories circulating from anti-immigrant, anti-refugee political positions that aim to mobilize social anxieties about strangers and diversity. In contrast to these, they propose attentiveness to the vivid longings, tensions, and disappointments in the lives of others. The legal and ethical theorist Martha Nussbaum notes that “literary works typically invite their readers to put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and to take on their experiences,” and they “convey the sense that there are links of possibility, as least on a very general level, between the characters and the reader.”19 Situated alongside Robbins’s reflections on global labour, these comments suggest that Lewycka’s and Pai’s narratives are spaces where emergent, sometimes obscure, thoughts and feelings which might lead to social transformation can take shape. Over the extended time it takes to read these books – hours, not minutes – the act of reading creates a disruptive affect that pushes at firmly held assumptions and opens new connections and perceptions. Readers are challenged by a dazzling range of encounters: the densities of experiences in which human lives are contested, damaged, and reinvented; the uncomfortable erosion of indifference; the uneasy frustrations and unexpected pleasures of having

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deeply held assumptions shaken and reconceived. To be sure, there is no certainty that any such developments might take place: possibilities emerge in fragile and tentative forms. Nevertheless, this “dialogue among difference,”20 to borrow Anthony Appiah’s phrasing, is but one of many spaces from which new affiliations, innovative ways of seeing, and previously unimagined longings might arise. For the readings that follow, I would stress that negative cosmopolitanism cannot be separated out from the spaces and systems of globalization. The interdependence of national economies and trade, the increasing global flow of commodities, together with information, images, and brands, the apparent collapse of distance in intercontinental travel, the technologies that transfer finance capital across borders at speeds unimaginable a short time ago – all of these processes are at work in constructing an asymmetrical but intricately and unexpectedly interrelated globalized world. In Deviant Globalization, Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer, and Stephen Weber stress the interconnections between mainstream and illicit global commerce: “Deviant globalization is inextricably linked to and bound up with mainstream globalization. Both are market-driven economic activities and transportations systems. Both break down boundaries – political, economic, cultural, social, and environmental – in a dynamic process of creative destruction.”16 Emerging at “the intersection of ethical difference and regulatory inefficiency,”17 deviant globalization or negative cosmopolitanism is a dark cross-current within global business, not a set of separate, parallel economies. Read in this way, legitimate medication to relieve pain is shadowed by the illegal opiates that drug cartels manufacture in heavily guarded rural factories; legitimate banks find their services being utilized to launder money by organized crime; legitimate doctors who perform life-saving operations in local hospitals may also be working in the medical tourism trade transplanting organs purchased from impoverished donors; legitimate vacations to sunny beaches might also be accompanied by visits to bars that employ sex-trafficked underage rural girls. For the western individual frustrated by the long wait for a transplant, who employs his or her money to visit a clinic in Turkey or India, the transaction is likely to be seen as little different from any other purchase. For the man or woman poor enough to be a donor, their biopower has been transformed from work that remakes materiality for human use into a surgical intervention for the sale of a body part. As payment, they will surely receive only a very

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small portion of what the westerner paid. But this example involves a situation unlikely to be experienced by many people; consider instead the many hands (were they undocumented labour? does it matter?) necessary to produce the vegetables in an ordinary green salad. One of the most pressing complexities of imagining otherness is the sheer difficulty of balancing the openness required to enter into a relation with otherness, and the effort to maintain contact with what might seem like incommensurable difference. In The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, David Palumbo-Liu locates the problem around two divergent poles of the reading process: “First there is the notion that we read to open ourselves to experiences that are not ours and will most likely never be ours, but by acknowledging that otherness as otherness, we both see its difference from us and are thereby enriched, and we also appreciate the complexity of the world. Second, there is the belief that we also may be presented with an otherness that, as true and formidable otherness, knocks us off our feet, sweeps away what [Paul] Ricoeur calls ‘the stability of the same,’ and leaves us on the canvas.”18 Drawing on a tradition as varied as Aristotle, Adam Smith, Wayne C. Booth, and Martha Nussbaum, Palumbo-Liu poses the negotiation of literature in and through a tension between a possibly resisted, but ultimately welcomed, recognition of otherness and a more rigid rejection of any comprehensibility. His intriguing use of a figurative language of organized fighting, such as boxing or mixed martial arts (“knocks us off our feet,” “leaves us on the canvas”) suggests the strong psychological investment in self-knowledge that is at stake. As Pai points out, many prefer not to know the conditions of those picking vegetables, processing meat, or packing salads and sandwiches for sale in their local supermarkets. From Palumbo-Liu’s viewpoint, however, it would be more productive to shift the focus away from meaning-making and understanding towards the structure of cultural texts and the process of questioning they might initiate. “We should think,” he proposes, “of how literature engenders a space of imagining our relation to others and thinking through why and how that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically.”19 Such a perspective underscores the possibility of textual construction – “new forms of narration and representation,”20 in his words – to provoke potentially painful, potentially productive ways of thinking, seeing, and interacting. Writing on similar questions of otherness and its inscription within literature, Shameem Black, in Fiction across Borders: Imagining the

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Lives of Others in the Late Twentieth-Century Novels, offers a configuration of text and reader with a somewhat different accent. Border-crossing fictions construct a “crowded self,” which she calls an “expansive concept of selfhood.”21 As she describes it: “In this metaphor for subjectivity, the borders of the self jostle against the edges of others, and this mediating position allows for the contours of each to become more porous and flexible.”22 A crowded self is willing to exist with the tensions of self and other, with a pull towards unfamiliarity that might be predictably resisted, but with openness to change and transformation. As the adjective “crowded” suggests, the experience may not be entirely comfortable, requiring making accommodations with or questioning deeply held assumptions. In Black’s words, “the crowded self expands to include diverse, sometimes contradictory, and occasionally even threatening points of view.”23 Both Palumbo-Liu and Black suggest that narrative innovations have the potential to open up new processes of interaction with otherness. Addressing similar basic issues in the representation of otherness, Pai voices her reservations with the adjective “illegal.” The word contains, she argues, implications that close down understanding: “‘Illegal immigrants …’, ‘Illegal workers …’, ‘Suspected illegal workers …’ It was a useful catchword, and its effect was to distance the reader from the event: if these were ‘illegals,’ then perhaps their lives weren’t as valuable as those of the rest of us.”24 She takes up the project of making the lives of Chinese migrant workers in Britain visible.25 On assignment as a freelance journalist for the Guardian, posing as an undocumented worker – the term she prefers, and one which parallels the French “sans-papiers” – Pai worked in the food service industry, on large farms, in the sex trade industry (as a receptionist at a massage parlour), and in food processing factories. The research led her to live among the “ghost population” or “almost invisibles”26 who are paid less than other workers, who have no protection under labour legislation and scant access to health care and education. Her reportage is harrowing: a woman caring for a child is raped by the man of the household and then threatened with deportation;27 a man selling pirated DvD s is badly beaten when he tries to leave the job;28 agricultural workers need to bribe a private recruitment agency;29 a waiter in a London Soho restaurant receives as little in wages as £5, about US $10, per day.30 Narrating the hardships of migrant workers, articulating modes of oppression and domination, communicating the persistent practices of deviant globalization, are necessary acts, if

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a society is to move towards more equitable employment conditions. Equally significant, however, is the recognition that these strategies risk depriving undocumented workers of agency in a series of representations that depict them as quiescent and passive, simply the objects of others’ manipulation. It is important, therefore, that Pai also depicts the construction of community among undocumented agricultural workers, who in conditions of adversity are able to forge a utopian moment. Chapter 3 of Chinese Whispers recounts the experiences of Gao Jun, a worker who entered the UK after he found himself unemployed in China. Gao had worked in a state-run automobile factory which closed after Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms in the 1990s. A man who had previously lived in urban poverty in the constricted, crowded, and noisy spaces of the northern Chinese city of Tienjin, Gao initially sees the open green fields, the hedged laneways, and the spacious gardens of Sussex to be an enchanted world. Watching from the window of a bus, he felt, in his own words, “blessed by the blueness”31 of the English sky. All too soon, when he begins his new employment as a lettuce picker, the same sky and sun beat down on him with unbearable heat during the workday. Worn out by the bent stance and repetitive movements of agricultural harvesting, Gao is quickly exhausted.32 Only by calling upon “all his inner resources”33 is he able to continue through to the end of the day. Grim and depressing as the agricultural workers’ camp is, it also proves to be a space where community can emerge. At one point, the farm manager arrives with the news that workers are permitted to catch rabbits, whose population has overrun the lettuce fields and endangered the crops. Having grown up in the city, Gao has little talent for capturing wild creatures, but the ex-peasants among the Chinese turn out to be expert rabbit hunters. One evening as the sun is low on the horizon, Gao returns from a walk to “the mouth-watering smell of meat cooking in soy sauce.”34 Workers from other ethnic groups are invited to join the Chinese in a communal feast: “‘the joy was shared,’ said Gao … A young Ukrainian woman did a vigorous thumbs-up sign for the stew, and Gao tried to explain to her how it was cooked, using a few words from his tiny English vocabulary and all four of his limbs.”35 The exuberance Pai conveys in the figure of a middle-aged Chinese worker speaking to a young Ukrainian with exaggerated whole-body gestures is a powerful image of human interaction. From their own agency – catching rabbits, cooking, sharing – connections among human beings

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are created that transcend the ethnically based work groups that employers prefer. “The ‘rabbit dinner,’” Pai writes, “was the talk of the farm the next day. It became an addiction on the caravan site, bringing people together, giving them a social life to look forward to in the evenings.”36 A crucial phrasing of Pai’s description, “giving them a social life,” especially underlines the impact of the rabbit stew dinners: migrant agricultural workers fashion their own utopian moment, bringing a multi-ethnic social space of human commonality to their lives. The production and consumption of the communal dinners underlines a suggestive positioning of the migrants. Just as their labour is built into the economic functioning of agricultural and other industries, their lives become intimately connected to the land of England. In making the dinners, they gather herbs in the forest, forage for vegetables in the fields, and collect seaweed on Atlantic beaches; in other words, they embed themselves within the lifeworlds of the spaces they inhabit. At the same time that they experience disappointment when their unrealistic ideals unsurprisingly prove to be mistaken, they also experience complexities about the social and emotional life of England. In this sense, they become a part of the country – English, except for documents. Marina Lewycka’s 2007 novel Strawberry Fields (published in Britain as Two Caravans) provokes readers into an examination of their own, often unacknowledged, assumptions about agricultural workers and migrants, documented or otherwise. Described by Lewycka as “a novel about globalisation,”37 Strawberry Fields is a “road” novel about a group of culturally diverse workers who meet at a small strawberry farm where they have been recruited as casual labour. The group comprises Yola and Marta, two Polish women, aunt and niece, who have past connections with the farm; Tomasz, a middle-aged Polish hippie who negotiates English with his love of Bob Dylan’s music; Emanuel, a young man from Malawi looking for his sister in England; Irina, a Ukrainian student from the urban centre of Kiev on a summer adventure; Andriy, another Ukrainian from an impoverished mining community in the east of the country; and two young Chinese women, one from Guangdong Province in southern China, the other from Malaysia. Lurking around the edges of this group is the mysterious and sinister Vitaly, who speaks good English, as well as several Eastern European languages, and who frequently disappears from the strawberry farm, never revealing where he has been. A runaway dog joins the group

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and narrates short sections throughout the novel.38 Characters cycle through jobs in the agricultural sector, in a chicken processing plant and in the service industry. It is not accidental that Lewycka focuses her novel around a group that contains a number of people from Eastern Europe. In Modern Slavery, Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd, and Alex Kent Williamson point out that the “transition period in most of the ex-socialist countries has been marked by economic recession, hyperinflation, high unemployment, and armed conflict – prompting large numbers of refugees and economic migrants to seek entry to Western Europe.”39 Viewed from this perspective, Irina and Andriy represent the contradictions of the Ukraine: the educated, urban young woman from Kiev looks westward towards the European Union; the miner’s son from the economically devastated mining region of Donbas is affiliated with the failure of Soviet-era economies. Partly inspired by the contemporary shift to contract labour that is easily discarded and replaced (“people have become disposable,” Andriy ruefully notes40), partly rooted in Chaucer’s tales of a diverse medieval group of travellers, and partly echoing Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Lewycka’s text often deploys language and linguistic misunderstandings to generate humour and to raise serious issues without producing abject characters devoid of agency.41 Sometimes the use and misuse of language plays to the broadly comic. When the student Irina applies for a job, the woman interviewing her lowers her voice to communicate the local gossip from the small farm where Irina had been employed: “They say that Lawrence Leapish was having it off with one of the pickers, and Wendy Leapish had a Moldavian toy boy.”42 As an Eastern European, Irina knows Moldova, and with her schoolgirl English she knows what “toy” and “boy” mean, but she has no awareness of the sexual connotations in the idiomatic phrase. In other instances, mistranslations evoke a wistful sadness: the devout Emmanuel explains that his father died of “canal knowledge” – his misinterpretation of “carnal knowledge.” His father has died of aIDS , but the others understand his phrasing to mean that his father died in an industrial accident on a canal, not an unreasonable perception because Andriy’s father died in a mine explosion. In still other places, confused English takes on an unmistakably sinister implication. When Andriy, desperately searching for Irina, inquires about her to the menacing trafficker Vulk, whose name means Wolf, the reply is “Irina, who is it?,”43 an awkwardness that may simply confirm Vulk’s faulty English – he has not mastered pronoun usage.

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As the conversation continues, however, the use of “it” becomes more ominous when Vulk offers a share of “it” to Andriy: “Ven it is enning money, you vill get percentage. Good money, my friend. This girl will be enning every night five hundred, six hundred, even more. Maybe even ve vill take it to Sheffield.”44 The repetition of “it” underlines the dehumanization of the young migrant woman in a sexualized economy: to a trafficker like Vulk she is an object to sell, whose disappearance into the sex trade is unlikely to arouse the interest of British police. At the same time, the verbal infelicities of the migrants can point in a different direction, towards the density of their own lived experiences, something not readily apparent within dismal lives as agricultural workers. When the African Emanuel describes his one English contact, a young British volunteer he met in Malawi, he concludes with the comment, “with his help I hope I will recover my sister’s wherebeing.”45 Readers will easily be able to determine that he means “whereabouts,” but Emanuel’s neologism has a poignant resonance. His sister is working in a private health care position, hoping to gain enough English experience to qualify for better-paid National Health Service employment. By substituting “being” for a word that designates where she lives, Emanuel gestures towards a brother’s concern for a sister’s entire life: the expressive, psychological, and physical conditions of her existence – in short, her lifeworld. Here the misuse of English by a foreign language speaker signifies far more than a simple lack of fluency. In Rebecca Walkowitz’s terms, this “mix-up” has been able to “create opportunities for effective, if sometimes impermanent agency”46 in a moment when Emanuel is able to express a brother’s love in way he could not in proper English. Chinese Whispers and Strawberry Fields were published within a year of each other by the same well-known press, Penguin Books. Pai had published her research as an undercover investigative reporter for the Guardian as she wrote the book, and on its dust jacket Lewycka praised Chinese Whispers for its timeliness as more and more industries shifted to contract labour, characterizing the stories Pai tells as “deeply moving.” Perhaps Lewycka’s most significant tribute is a refunctioning of Pai’s account of the Chinese lettuce pickers’ collective dinner in an intertextual dialogue between the two books. At the end of a summer day Marta and Yola transform their dreary rations of white bread and sausages, supplementing them with a rabbit caught by Tomasz, wild herbs, green leaves of wood garlic, mauve thyme, and some potatoes

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Vitaly found by the road. Andriy and Emanuel build a fire; the Chinese girls set out the plates and cutlery.47 The valley, normally the site of monotonous, exhausting labour, undergoes a metamorphosis in which visual and aural natural beauty regains precedence: “a summery haze shimmers over the treetops and shadows are already gathering. The cut-crystal brilliance of the light becomes soft and muted, as though shining through layers of silk … A thrush sits on the branch of an ash tree in the copse, singing his heart out, and from the far side of the copse his mate calls back.”48 The evening tranquillity of the valley is metonymically transferred to the group of workers when they all sing, separately and together, ending with birthday wishes to Emanuel. As he writes to his sister, “at the end everybody sang Happy Birthday Dear Emanuel and it came to pass that this outstanding song is available not only in English but also in Ukrainian Polish and Chinese!!! And so united in song we enjoyed the Radiance of the evening.”49 The exaggerations of his stilted English – “Happy Birthday” as an “outstanding” song; the religiosity of “Radiance” – underline the transformation of an ordinary evening into an experience of community and collectivity. Even as readers might inwardly smile at the gentle, joyous gathering of the strawberry pickers, however, Lewycka’s text raises a nagging question. While the other workers treat the Chinese girls with warmth and inclusion, the two retain an unsettling anonymity: they are either “the two Chinese girls” or “Chinese Girl One” and “Chinese Girl Two.” In the midst of many kindnesses, none of the others has spoken to them by name. This abstraction is intensified when the little group ends up in Dover, where the three Polish workers will attempt to return home. There they encounter Vitaly, who reappears “smartly dressed, with a gold chain around his neck and a glittering jewel in one ear.”50 He has reinvented himself into a “recruitment consultant,” or as he explains it, “dynamic employment solution consultant with advance flexible capacity for meets all your organizational staffing need.”51 The code words of the new economy – “employment solution” and “flexible capacity” – are unmistakable clues that Vitaly is recruiting for super-exploitative jobs at the grey edges of the legal economy. His immediate focus is on the Chinese girls, and he promises them positions looking after the “six children” of a Chinese diplomat based in Amsterdam with a salary of €5,000 per month. His reassurances – “You can trust me – I am your friend, I look after you”52 – should sound hollow, as should the absurdly high payment for childcare. Yet the Chinese girls are not

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attentive to the nuances of Vitaly’s language; they neither understand exchange rates nor have the “street smarts” to decode their proposed future as sex workers in a city of legalized brothels. The final image of the two young women waving through the darkened glass of the silver car taking them away suggests the obscurity of the migrant workers’ identities together with the darkening horizon of their possibilities. It is at this point in the narrative that Lewycka reveals the Chinese girls’ identities and background, giving them and their presence in England the density of individual pasts and experiences. Song Ying is the daughter of a bank clerk and a teacher in a large industrial city in Guangdong. A successful student, she has gained admission to the prestigious Beijing University Business School. Her future dissolves when her mother becomes pregnant, and, through an illegal ultrasound, finds out she is carrying a boy. The savings that would have paid Song Ying’s tuition fees go towards the substantial fine for violating the government’s one-child policy. “You have a beautiful brother. Isn’t that enough?” her mother pleads.53 It is this disappointment – the unravelling of her future – that sends her fleeing to a possibly illegal English school in London. The second Chinese girl, Soo Lai Bee, is a Malaysian whose father runs a successful construction business in agreement with a Muslim Bumiputra business partner. It is a strictly commercial arrangement, one which Soo Lai Bee violates by falling in love with the man’s son, Zia: “It is the privilege of young people,” Lewycka writes, “to fall in love with the wrong person, and they did.”54 The two sets of parents act quickly to separate the couple. Zia is engaged to someone else; Soo Lai Bee is sent far away to England. Lewycka sums up the experience of the young Chinese women with a phrasing that combines the gentleness of a shared friendship at the cusp of adulthood with the abstraction and invisibility of migrant workers: “They laughed and cried together. They went off to pick strawberries together. They went off to Amsterdam together.”55 The association of the Dutch city with extremely liberal attitudes towards the sex trade – brothel windows displaying women for sale – leaves little doubt about their fate. Lewycka’s strategy of not revealing the details of Song Ying and Soo Lai Bee’s lives and motivations for coming to England until they have disappeared from the text has a tangible emotional nuance for readers’ receptions of their stories. It is impossible not to become aware of an implicit and obscure willingness to accept the anonymity of the two young women, to not question why they remain unnamed. Just

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as shoppers pick up plastic clamshells filled with strawberries without thinking of the human labour that brought them to supermarket shelves, so it is highly likely that readers have travelled through a third of Lewycka’s novel without considering why two characters have only generic names. In a way that complements Pai’s act of giving visibility to the ghostly undocumented workers of the contemporary economy, Lewycka’s novel challenges readers’ assumptions that make invisibility both possible and acceptable. Whereas the countryside is at once a site of painful labour and utopian community, the urban streets of London offer similar tensions, but with decidedly different inflections. For Irina and Andriy the vibrancy of a metropolitan capital in a globalized world is palpable: “Food shops, restaurants – everything is here, yes, every corner of the globe has been rifled to furnish this abundance. And the people too have been rifled from all over – Europe, Africa, India, the Orient, the Americas, so many different types all mixed together, such a crowd from everywhere under the sun.”56 Although the repeated verb “rifled” suggests the persistent traces of a colonizing economy in a globalized world, the overall impression is one of energy and dynamism. In contrast with what they perceive as the lively bio-aesthetics of the London crowd, Andriy and Irina undergo a double articulation. From one perspective, they are drawn into the indulgences of the city’s offerings. Irina “trail[s] behind, staring into the window of a clothing shop.”57 The luxurious profusion of London comes before Andriy in the window of an electronics store, which displays “minute mobilfons,” “cunning miniature music systems,” and “movie cameras small enough to fit in your hand.”58 The sheer abundance of commodities imparts a misleading, false agency (“small enough to fit in your hand … at your command”) that metonymically blurs the distinction between material object and human being, as the young man’s gaze shifts from the window to interiority, imagining himself watching a football match, relaxing before a widescreen television.59 From another perspective, Andriy and Irina remain marked by their labour in the fields. Irina feels “like a country peasant,”60 her Kiev confidence shattered by a global metropolis. Labour inscribes Irina in another way when she is working as a waitress dressed in a supposedly anonymous white blouse and black skirt that nonetheless renders her the object of male customers’ desires: “the way that old man looked at me made my skin crawl like maggots,” she reflects.61 She has been

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pursued by the “hungry eyes”62 of Vulk, and even as Vitaly looks at her as a potential companion (“a pretty, clean good-class girl”63), he cannot stop himself from thinking, “You could make good money out of this girl.”64 The repetition of “good” with different meanings – respectable, decent individual contrasted with a large amount of money – suggests how rapidly the body of a young woman slips from one inscription to another. Perhaps the most striking example of the young people’s negotiation of the spectral world of undocumented labourers in London occurs in a momentary incident on the streets. When Andriy accidently brushes against a busy Londoner, he is shocked by her reaction: “The look in her eyes – it was worse than contempt. She looked straight through him. He didn’t register in her eyes at all … his clothes make him invisible.”65 Witnessing himself in the eyes of another, if only for seconds, strips Andriy of his fantasies of life among the shiny objects of the consumer world and reflects back to himself the figure of an impoverished migrant worker. It is almost as if Lewycka’s narrative has here staged a mise en scène of Black’s metaphor of a “crowded self.” In the jostle of an urban crowd, the woman fully and abruptly rejects the possibility of even low-level human exchange (along the lines of “Sorry” – “No problem”) with a young man she perceives to be without value. Unsettling Western assumptions about individual social space, the crowded street can be seen as a “literalization” of the figural “crowded self.” To the extent that it implies an openness to otherness that might seem threatening or at the very least unknown, “the formation of a crowded self ” is, in Black’s words, “a disturbing intrusion, sometimes slight and sometimes severe, as the lives of others thrust themselves into view.”66 Clearly, to the well-dressed Londoner in high heels, Andriy is nothing but an annoying poor man, a negative cosmopolitan, interrupting her smooth traversal of urban spaces. However, he is a character in whom readers of the novel have affective investments. If they feel his invisibility as a hurtful rejection, as an unnecessary slight, they will have experienced, only for a moment and in the safety of a text, the unrelenting invisibility of the migrant on the streets of the metropolis. Lewycka’s narrative pushes readers even further. In a powerful scene where the body of the migrant becomes all too visible, the narrative employs a strategy similar to the stories of Song Ying and Soo Lai Bee. An ominous figure, who has risen from selling beer to his fellow agricultural workers to trafficking human labour as a “mobilfonman,”

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always on his cellphone in the midst of another deal, Vitaly enters the restaurant where Irina and Andriy have found work. There he is shot dead by one of his associates who feels cheated (“You owe me one girl, dead-boy. You promise four, and you only bring three”).67 He falls onto the table – “the best table in this expensive London restaurant”:68 Dark blood is oozing in a vivid widening stain into the white damask, along with some other grayish stuff that is bubbling out of a gaping double wound in his forehead. The eyes are open. The hand still grips the stem of the wine glass that has shattered in his hand. Suddenly, a strange music erupts from his body – a grotesquely cheerful jingle – di di daah da – di di daah da – di di daah da-dah! It rings for a few moments, then goes quiet.69 Lewycka’s language evokes a striking contrast of luxury and abjection. When the pristine white damask linen is stained by blood and brain matter, the moment ironically bridges urban spaces of luxury (the restaurant) with the shadowy world of the trafficker (Vitaly’s body). The contrast is repeated with the open eyes and hand grasping a broken wine glass, recently filled with “reassuringly expensive super-chilled New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc,”70 where the image of life-in-death suggests the posturing of the trafficker, tricking acquaintances into accepting the miserable positions he offers. Most intriguing, however, is the ringtone whose “grotesquely cheerful” notes follow his death. “A strange music erupts from his body,” rather than from his pocket or from his jacket, Lewycka writes, signalling a fusion of technology and biology. The cellphone that permitted him to move from strawberry picker to trafficker (“bye-bye strawberry. hello mobilfon” is the title of chapter 2) has become the final functioning part of a biosubject who was one crucial agent in multiple systematic modes of domination. That Vitaly is engaged in the super-exploitative casual labour market is clear from his list of labour practices, methods associated with globalized markets and deregulated economies: “casualization, zero-hours contract, flexible working, no-strike clause, compulsory overtime, compulsory self-employment, agency working, subcontracting, illegal immigration outsourcing, and many other such maximum-flexibility organizational advances.”71 This enumeration adeptly underscores the interconnections between what is deemed the legitimate global economy, and linked underground activities. Just as Gilman, Goldhammer,

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and Weber stress the linkages between mainstream and illicit economies in Deviant Globalization, each one can be used in legitimate businesses and in Vitaly’s spectral markets. Within contemporary Western economies, various sectors – manufacturing, retail, finance, agriculture, health care, public service, education, and more – have all adapted strategies to produce higher profits or manage decreased funding, from subcontracting, hours that fall below labour regulations, and limited-term hiring. It is at this very point in the novel that Lewycka’s narrative turns to Vitaly’s background, recounting his frustration and pain as a young man growing up in Moldova, living through the breakup of the Soviet Union and its empire, watching the deaths of his mother (“died of sorrow at the age of forty-two when your house was razed to the ground”72), his father and two brothers (“shot down in the main street near your home for refusing to pay protection money”73), his oldest brother (killed in the civil war74), and his two sisters (“traded by a Kosovan wide-boy to a massage parlor in Peckham”75). Such cycles of violence, repeated throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe as the Soviet empire unravels – civil war, protection rackets, trafficking of women into the sex trade, breakdown of state authority – are experienced by Vitaly as so many personal losses.76 In a parallel way to the revelation of individual details in Song Ying and Soo Lai Bee’s stories when they are driven off to Amsterdam, so the background of Vitaly’s life and family are recounted just before his death. What are the implications of Lewycka’s representation of Vitaly here? What does an ironically pure capitalist who learned business from Karl Marx in the decaying remnants of the Soviet empire (“to become vIP elite rich you must appropriate the labour of others”77) signify to readers? Together with a second-person address that gestures towards intimacy – Vitaly’s story begins, “for if you have grown up in the faraway Dniester valley in a provincial town”78 – the narrative invites readers to identify with this unpalatable character to the extent that the construction of his exploitative personality and lack of conscience can be grasped as the result of concrete historical circumstances during the breakup of the Soviet empire. Put somewhat differently, readers are encouraged to permit the representation of Vitaly to “crowd into” their understanding as a human being damaged by cycles of extraordinary violence. Cezara Nanu points out that Moldova was one of the most prosperous states in the Soviet Union. Following the

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collapse of the USSr , it became an area of desperate recession, excessive criminality, and widespread corruption. There is no doubt that to imagine a “crowded self ” which might include a distasteful character like Vitaly pushes readers into an uncomfortable space; they may even feel knocked off their feet, onto the canvas (to recall Palumbo-Liu’s metaphor).79 He is a predator stalking Irina, a ruthless contractor of Song Ying and Soo Lai Bee, a character in whom readers will already have a negative affective investment. At the same time, to comprehend the experience of a young man who was “the bright hope of his family, the student, the dreamer of great dreams,”80 who has suffered the traumatic deaths of his closest familial relations – mother, father, three brothers, two sisters – to comprehend this is to comprehend a life caught up in a succession of soul-destroying brutalities. Such a recognition, pushing against readers’ awareness that he has harmed and desires to harm characters with whom they have identified, is unquestionably troubling and disquieting, but it points the way to an understanding that persistent war, the breakdown of state institutions, and the collapse of civil society will continue to produce “Vitalys” unless human communities are safe and support the lives of their members. In this sense, the root meaning of Vitaly – life – comes into view: his was one of the lives, along with countless others, deemed, in Pai’s words, “not as valuable as the rest of us,” or in Butler’s terms, precarious enough to be dismissed without mourning. In The Deliverance of Others, Palumbo-Liu asks, “how many possibilities can or should we entertain, and how much otherness can we invite in from what is not readily available to our imagination”?81 The narratives of Chinese Whispers and Strawberry Fields confront readers with the lived experiences of those who inhabit the shadowy world of undocumented labourers, and challenge them to enter normally unfamiliar rural and urban spaces that constitute negative cosmopolitanism or deviant globalization. They nudge readers to become conscious of interrelationships with others, to become aware of assumptions that work against understanding these associations, and to become attuned to the harsh circumstances of those whose labour is necessary to produce food, objects and services. Of course, these interactions take place within a world of discourse, a fact that guarantees a certain safety for venturing into openness with others. In “The People You Don’t See: Representing Informal Labour in Fortress Europe,” Ashley Dawson stresses that “engaged aesthetic works have a vital role to play in

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offering more sensitive and multifaceted accounts of the lived experience of migrants.”82 Pai’s Chinese Whispers and Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields present nuanced and sympathetic portrayals of migrant workers; they also invite readers to examine their own assumptions about those whose unseen labour so penetrates the contemporary world.

Acknowledgments My thinking benefitted from presenting early versions at the Canadian Association For Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies meetings at Concordia University in Montreal, at the Negative Cosmopolitanisms conference at University of Alberta, and at the American Comparative Literature Association at New York University. Thank you to Susan Gingell, Terri Tomsky and Eddy Kent, and Yasemin Mohammed and Bettina Bryant, who organized stimulating conferences.

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8 Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility in Annalee Davis’s On the Map Melissa Stephens we, there is no “we” let us separate ourselves now, though perhaps we can’t, still and again too late for that, nothing but to continue – Dionne Brand, Inventory, 42

Serving as an engine for global modernity, the Caribbean has been constituted by histories of transatlantic slavery, indentured servitude, and anti-colonial struggle, as well as inter- and intra-regional migrations. However, since the 1970s, the region has been influenced strongly by the emergence of neoliberalism in the United States, the military and economic hegemon in the hemisphere. With its grounding in the logic of the market, neoliberalism promises an opportunity for the Caribbean to transcend the burdensome legacies of slavery and colonialism. This promise, of equality and mobility and freedom, poses difficulties to artists who perceive that neoliberalism has served only to reinforce inequalities, and who wish to imagine alternative forms of community in the region. Barbadian artist Annalee Davis attempts such critique

in On the Map (2007), an experimental documentary film short which addresses how gentrified forms of Caribbean socioeconomic mobility produce racial hostilities, political disenfranchisement, and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. In significant ways, the film renders regional integration as being distinct from and detrimental to the work of community-building that is motivated by desires for decolonization. Giving voice to the experience of documented and undocumented Indo-Guyanese migrant workers in Barbados, Davis’s film is set against the backdrop of a Caribbean region whose borders are being reshaped by neoliberalism and homeland security initiatives. The film explicitly engages the policy of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSmE ), a regional economic integration scheme developed by the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CarICom ) in 1989. The CSmE represents a multi-state strategy to consolidate formal economic and social relationships by promoting regulated forms of regional integration. Chief among its goals is the facilitation of a more flexible labour market, an aim which – as it has elsewhere in the world – antagonizes traditional state efforts to sustain borders in the interest of sovereignty and security. Davis’s documentary raises more questions than it can answer regarding how Caribbean community is constituted by neoliberal markets and mobility regimes. However, by linking colonialist legacies of racism and classism to the political and economic practices of contemporary Caribbean states, Davis’s film invites a theorization of neoliberal identity politics in a region where identity has traditionally transcended the capture of the nation-state; as Shalini Puri has observed, On the Map visually expresses “the ‘tangled intimacy’ of Caribbean relations.”1 In this chapter I address the tangled intimacies of neoliberal globalization, cosmopolitanism, and creolization, as evinced by On the Map’s portrayal of racial and economic hostilities within the competitive migrant labour schemes of the region. My purpose is to explore the implications of what Davis calls the “complex Creole” for her poetic invocations. This culturally conscious identification, conjured in resistance to the xenophobia and neoliberal policy surrounding Caribbean labour migration, should remind us of “the co-existence of different cosmopolitan traditions” historically evident within the region.2 Although often overlooked in dominant discourses of cosmopolitanism, the Caribbean has been defined as “cosmopolitan” because “everybody who is there

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came from somewhere else,” making it an intensely diasporic society, where “creolisation, the cultural mix of different elements” is the really distinctive, indigenous trait of Caribbean culture, which makes the Caribbean individual “sort of a ‘natural’ cosmopolitan.”3 While On the Map inadvertently expresses solidarity with a Caribbean history of “‘cosmopolitanism from below’ – people driven across borders, obliged to uproot themselves from home, place and family, living in transit camps or climbing on to the backs of lorries or leaky boats or the bottom of trains and airplanes to get to somewhere else,”4 it does not self-consciously address what Françoise Lionnet describes as the “convergence between the concepts of cosmopolitanism and creolization,” in its troubling production of “crucial nodes in the global network of militarized sites.”5 Shot on location in Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad, On the Map works to produce the complex Creole by documenting the emerging, shifting, and contested histories of regional consciousness and Caribbean identity. It interweaves voice-over narration, interviews with artists, and testimony from migrant labourers.6 Many of these voices assume a regional consciousness that is crucial to Davis’s notion of the complex Creole. Guyanese artist Peter Minshall, for example, explains that he is a white man who, rather than identifying as European or “Creole” in a white-settler tradition, claims that he is “Caribbean.”7 Elsewhere in the film, a musician who claims to have relatives throughout the islands articulates the Caribbean as “one people, one region.”8 In this way, On the Map works to establish the region as one that is Creole and, implicitly, cosmopolitan, urging audiences to rekindle memories of alternative Caribbean relations in order to challenge state-managed regional integration. So, though the work of “debunking the myth of [Caribbean regional] unity” is a stated agenda in the DvD ’s post-film notes, what the film reproduces is a symbolically resonant form of identification rooted in a very particular historical experience of the Caribbean. As one critic explains, any voice that lays claim to the complexity of what it means to be a Caribbean person, and names it – in this case, as creole – should not be surprised when other voices whisper about their exclusion. Indo-Caribbean people, for example, would not easily identify themselves as creole – complex or otherwise. So,

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ironically, the attempt to confront the Western gaze that has “othered” the Caribbean person in turn can itself be accused of othering those Caribbean people who do not [as Davis suggests in her poem] “commemorate the cobweb we have become.”9 The extent to which signifying practices of Creole identification are collective is contestable; however, as I shall be arguing, those signifying practices animate a politics of resistance by making connections between the residuum of colonial history and the neoliberal present. Poetry forms a key part of the film’s experimental critique of Caribbean community, beginning by embracing Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “rhythmic tidalectics.”10 In On the Map, selections of Brathwaite’s poem “Genesis” accompany the watery imagery of Guyana’s Kaiteur Falls, including the lines “so when God created Caribbean, he took a pebble, skidded it along the water with a sound of our own & this is how it went: his archipelago: my vision: your poem.”11 Taking Brathwaite’s call outward to the poem’s auditor as an occasion for her own poetic response, Davis offers “I Celebrate the Chorus of the Creole Chant,” a poem that begins with the claim, “I am the complex Creole / My context is the Caribbean.”12 Part of the complexity is the admission that “there is more chaos than community” and “some feel like foreigners.”13 Nevertheless, she continues to “celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant,” and, in a Whitmanesque refrain, she disavows singular affiliations: “I cleave to no church, temple nor country.”14 Like “Genesis,” “Complex Creole” is epic in its historical reach to include “centuries” of imagery. It depicts An archipelago crocheted into a crossbreed Of carnival, class and comess Cognizant of Columbus And the Commonwealth That created these confused colonies Correctly criticized for the callous treatment Of the Amerindian And the reconstitution Of a Caribbean caste system.15 Nonetheless, Davis’s poetic voice is empowered by a soulful process of healing:

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I anoint myself with a communion of Cinnamon, coffee and cumin Cocoa, cotton and cane It is with composure and compassion that I conceive my compatriots as compatible Whether Cuban or Guyanese, Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew.16 In turn, Davis claims to be “[c]onfidently confirming a conglomerate / Who speak patois, Papiamento, Spanish and Creole.”17 Creole identification is envisioned as a multiply affiliated subject position; those who would promote “corruption” or “conflict” she would “outcast … from the community.”18 As Karen Fog Olwig explains, Caribbean cosmopolitan practices have both reproduced and challenged Enlightenment discourses and civilizing missions. Among African-Caribbean populations, she finds that these traditions are “mutually constitutive.”19 In her poetry, Davis places a condition on inclusion within the Caribbean community: individuals must uphold the social traditions of “‘linking up’ with others” and the “negation of strangerhood,” or they must leave.20 According to Fog Olwig, this “vital dimension of Caribbean social practice and self-awareness that we can call cosmopolitan”21 is rooted in the social practices of African slaves who, as strangers to new land, to new masters, and to each other, cultivated “an openness to strangers” which became “an important basis of the strong Caribbean migration tradition that emerged in the post-emancipation period.”22 Davis’s “complex Creole” is therefore part of a longstanding tradition, but perhaps it is one that needs revitalization in a neoliberal period that may capitalize on linkages between cosmopolitanism and creolization. Such claims for Creole complexity support the film’s critique of Articles 45 and 46 of the CSmE , both of which focus on the facilitation of the free movement of Caribbean nationals within the region. Because they focus almost exclusively on “labour” and “skills,” these articles assume a portability that is interrogated in the film to the extent that such portability privileges the mobility of a professional elite.23 Davis responds by offering a poetics of creative regeneration produced in the neoliberal age for a historically migratory population. She highlights the productive proximity of differences among inhabitants of the region, a situation and orientation which she implies has had the potential to spark creative and supportive relationships that policies like the CSmE fail to facilitate. Davis imagines the individual “I” of her poem as “a coalition

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/ Of combustible matter” which is nevertheless “a civilized collective,” although she acknowledges the difficulty of establishing intimate and trusting social relations, because the Caribbean is “a community that isn’t convinced / Of the credit of cultural producers.”24 Arguably, Davis is striving for “critical relationality” in this poetic articulation of difference, a praxis which for Carole Boyce Davies “asserts the specificity of the other, but works together and from each in a generalized purpose of resistance to domination.”25 Domination in this film is associated with the multi-state prioritization of a gentrified neoliberal mobility regime enabled primarily for Caribbean professional classes, while the precarious lives of the region’s more socially and economically vulnerable constituents lack security and protection. Such a mobility regime privileges a cosmopolitan elite and works against “critical relationality,” which Boyce Davies explains “is not interruptive or a series of interruptions … nor does it embrace the hierarchy embedded in subalternization. Rather, it argues for the synchronic, multiply articulate discourses, which operate braid-like or web-like as a series of strands are woven.”26 Notably, the image of the braid is also resonant with a French Caribbean perspective of Creole identification as the expression of non-totalitarian totality.27 The poetic invocation of a complex Creole identification can be read to signify Davis’s politics of solidarity with the exploited labouring subjects of this particular film; however, the implications of this gesture are never explored. Nor does On the Map consider how statemanaged discourses of Creole identification can privilege certain Creole histories to promote particular kinds of regionalism that suit neoliberal ideology. While the film’s premise that “the Caribbean has been a migrant region for five hundred years” serves to remind us of the enduring and constitutive violence of plantation slavery, its characterization of the region as “one of the largest experiments in hybridity” should prompt us to consider how the Caribbean serves as a case study for cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization.28 Indeed, such experimentation demands the critical review of outcomes. Shalini Puri’s critique of Caribbean state discourses of hybridity calls into question the cultural logic of Creole identity which historically links mixed-raced identity to African and white European heritages. Chinese, Indo-Caribbean, and indigenous populations, among others, are not easily integrated into this version of mixed-raced ancestry.29 The film’s focus on Indo-Guyanese workers provides an opportunity for its

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audiences to reflect upon how neoliberal integration policies, focused on the regulation and facilitation of free movement for Caribbean nationals, are related to the “experiments in hybridity” associated with earlier coercive migratory histories. Experiences of migration are shaped by the historical particularities of socioeconomic circumstances and political rights. For the Caribbean Diaspora, the “Creole continuum” has been a concept used to signal the fact that there are variations in degrees of familiarity with Caribbean regional uses of Creole language and culture. Creolization, as a process, has been theoretically celebrated as historically effecting the dissolution of “the old formal categories” of “ethnic identity” to promote “an identity that would not be the projection of a unique and sectarian root, but of what we call a rhizome, a root with a multiplicity of extension, in all directions.”30 Linked to “ancient maroonage, which was the quest for new traces,” creolization animates “ambiguity, discontinuity, traces, and remembering” to produce “unpredictable results” and an “unprecedented conception of identity.”31 The invocation of Creole identification has therefore had symbolic power for creative and political imagination. Here, creolization may be linked to “cosmopolitanism from below,”32 working against the Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms and universalizing ideals noted by Kent and Tomsky in the introduction to this book.33 The Caribbean “Creole continuum” invokes a dynamic relation between regional and diasporic Caribbean cultures; as linguistic and cultural practice, the Creole continuum is historically rooted in Caribbean processes of indigenization and anticolonial responses to slavery and colonialism, but it is changing in relation to contemporary conditions. While we might understand the Caribbean Diaspora as an articulation of a global cultural citizenship – a kind of Caribbean cosmopolitanism – it seems that world citizenship, as a cosmopolitan ideal, remains untenable. Despite their cosmopolitan history within and beyond the region, Caribbean people are without reparation for violent histories of slavery and colonialism, and the region continues to feel the persistent weight of disenfranchisement within a global market economy. One might therefore question the practical meaning of a world citizenship, not just culturally or politically, but in ethical and socioeconomic contexts. For those of us who are not Caribbean, we might consider the possibility that, given the very uneven experiences of enfranchisement felt within the region and in the Diaspora, some Caribbean populations might rightly regard

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world citizenship – which is necessarily different from the claim to “one people, one region”34 – with suspicion. The regional history of Creole social formation is often directly related to the survival strategies of Africans enslaved by the plantation economy. In turn, the plantation has figured in creative and theoretical works, as well as in the literature of political economy and elsewhere, as a configuration that continues to resonate with the landscapes of late capitalism. “Although the plantation has vanished,” Glissant argues that “creolization is still at work in our megalopolises … where the inferno of cement slums is merely an extension of the inferno of the sugarcane or cotton fields.”35 Glissant thus forges a link between the socalled peripheries and centres of capitalist development. Within “the Americas” he finds that “languages are emerging or dying” and that “the old and rigid sense of identity is confronting the new and open way of creolization. This phenomenon probably has no political or economic power. But it is precious for mankind’s imagination, its capacity for invention.”36 In this view, both the slum and the plantation are linked by survival strategies that respond to a genealogy of racialized socioeconomic violence. Davis’s invocation of complex Creole identification, then, could be read as signifying upon a historical set of transformative social practices, perhaps perceived as lost or as waning in the neoliberal age, which can be reinvented and shared among Caribbean residents who feel the exploitative effects of colonialist legacies in the contemporary period. Davis’s film is intended to spark the imagination of Caribbean audiences so that they might revisit their own “capacity for invention,” a capacity which seems so crucial to the societies that Glissant imagines. Still, the lack of “political or economic power” that Glissant associates with creolization does seem problematic for a film focused on highlighting the condition of contemporary migrant workers. Michaeline A. Crichlow offers a different possibility, by arguing that the plantation is a limited paradigm for thinking about contemporary social dynamics under late capitalism. Theorizing resistance in the context of postCreole relations, she warns against “conceptualizing multinational corporations (mNC s) as new types of plantation, thereby obscuring the newness in the economy of the changing social directions of subjectivities.”37 That Davis faces similar predicaments in her film – attempting to address contemporary migrant labour schemes by invoking overdetermined significations of regional identity – may be telling of the

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region’s inescapable cultural connection to a history of slavery. Nonetheless, I would press for the need to investigate “the changing social directions of subjectivities”38 because neoliberal ideologies and policies give life to an identity politics that reinforces “mobility injustice,” to use Mimi Sheller’s term. Drawing on Orlando Patterson, Sheller finds that experiences of injustice arise from the ways in which “mobility freedoms” – “personal, sovereignal and civic” in dimension – are “unevenly distributed.”39 In contrast to Crichlow, Katherine McKittrick finds that “geographies of slavery, postslavery, and black dispossession provide opportunities to notice that the right to be human carries in it a history of racial encounters and innovative black diaspora practices that, in fact, spatialize acts of survival.”40 The question of how “acts of survival” are spatialized is important but remains open in the film, which concentrates more on the unevenness of “free movement.” In this regard, the film is not focused on “fleeing the plantation,” as Crichlow might have it, but on pursuing problems of community and justice arising from a troubled relationship between the insecurities of inhabiting and moving through Caribbean space. Davis asks: “Why do we keep running?” and “What will it take for us to stop running?”41 Crichlow’s term, “fleeing,” calls for an escape from the overdetermined explanatory power of social dynamics, understood as arising from the plantation scheme. For Davis, “running” is more evocative of the physical movements motivated by fear and insecurity in an increasingly gentrified neoliberal Caribbean. The developmental dichotomies that conceptually organize geographies into urban centres and rural peripheries seem outmoded in the context of migrant labour schemes functioning in the film. The departure and arrival points constellating the routes taken by migrants who are “running” both away from and across the region are subject to debate. According to the film, there are two kinds of Caribbean émigrés: skilled professionals or intellectuals who operate inter-regionally, and the rest who operate intra- and inter-regionally, both within and beyond the Caribbean. The film certainly references anxieties regarding the brain drain effect resulting from the emigration of Caribbean professionals to the Global North. The narrator observes that “Guyana loses 89% of its population with tertiary-level education to the First World while t&t loses 79% and Barbados loses 63%.”42 The issue of brain drain is made relevant to the human experience of CSmE policy in practice, particularly as regional movement is regulated to liberate

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select groups of skilled labourers. While the policy could be read as an effort to retain Caribbean professionals by empowering their regional mobility, it also clearly casts out and renders disposable populations within the region who are determined to be unskilled. Although Davis’s poetic voice claims a greater racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, the complexity of On the Map’s Creole identification ultimately provides a critical opportunity for audiences to explore not only the “tangled intimacy” of various possible Creole signifying practices, but also the inter-implication of Creole and cosmopolitan discourses in the context of modern Western development and late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalist formations. I read Davis’s “complex Creole” identification as a signifying practice that does not resist so much as illuminate persistent entanglements with the so-called colony’s metropolitan experience of cosmopolitanisms. As Mimi Sheller argues, Caribbean modernity [has] depended on the multiple intersecting mobilities and immobilities generated by shipping routes; airline networks; communications infrastructures; and peoples, cultures, and images on the move. It can be imagined as a series of places in motion, with its panoply of multilingual island-nations and nonindependent territories stitched together by arriving and departing flights, cruise ships and yachts, satellite dishes and high-speed Internet connections, monetary remittances and cell-phone calls, as well as smugglers and refugees.43 A complex Creole identification does not readily enact a decolonizing politics that challenges the construction of “skilled” labourers or the “unskilled” Indo-Guyanese migrant labourers of the film, who are portrayed as facing danger, disposability, and disenfranchisement in the age of Caribbean neoliberal globalization. Davis clearly critiques the CSmE ’s privileging of skilled labour, and yet her poetic aspirations remain abstract. As such, Crichlow’s post-Creole call to move beyond the plantation paradigm remains an important intervention if we hope to capture the nuances of this contemporary construction of labour value and the unanticipated contingencies of free movement – and also if we are to imagine innovative approaches to collectivity and resistance. Yet, it is crucial to sustain consciousness of the colonialist legacies of racism and classism that continue to haunt popular social relations and neoliberal state practices. 158

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On the Map addresses ways in which Articles 45 and 46 of the CSmE treaty impact the lives of undocumented migrant labourers travelling from Guyana to Barbados in pursuit of a living wage. While these articles promote the free movement of Caribbean nationals between member states, the language of Article 46 actually emphasizes “the movement of skills.”44 The cultural capital accumulated through “skills” acquisition is privileged in the context of neoliberal free movement. The identification of that which constitutes “skilled” labour is of course problematic: initially, only university graduates, media workers, sportspersons, artists, and musicians served as the categories of skilled labourers listed by the CarICom Secretariat. Furthermore, “a Certificate of Recognition of CarICom Skills Qualification” is still deemed crucial to facilitate this process and applicants require “a valid passport, certified copies of relevant qualifications, [and a] police certificate of character.”45 Letters of reference from previous employers may also be required. Under this regime, immigration officials are empowered to selectively apply biometric and aptitude assessments, the latter of which seem to be motivated by a desire to capitalize on the professional and educational status of incoming migrants. The CSmE is an “intergovernmental arrangement between sovereign states” which, Davis implies via the voice-over narrator, is designed not only to promote “the Movement of Community Nationals” but “to increase profiteering” for a Caribbean elite.46 This framing invites the viewer to consider the effects of economic policy on the everyday lives of Caribbean populations who move around the region in search of work. Davis suggests that the neoliberal CSmE articles and extant ethnic-nationalist anxieties coincide in the dominant capitalist logic of free movement in the region. Drawing upon colonialist legacies of racial labour to help explain persistent forms of xenophobia, the film asks us to consider how neoliberal policy – which I think is inspired by a colonialist cosmopolitanism – reinforces mobility injustice, by evincing the precariousness of Indo-Guyanese labour migration to Barbados. The haunting rhetorical question – “why do we keep running?” – is undoubtedly intended to incite mixed responses regarding interimplicated histories of violence. This question, I argue, can function to animate “structures of feeling” which Raymond Williams argues give life to “residual” and “emergent” senses of nationalism, as well as class and race identification. In this sense, narratives of successful economic integration are complicated by uneven economies of scale, histories of Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility in Annalee Davis

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debt, and outright discrimination and exploitation. Selma James has argued that “every division among us expresses the division of labour: the quantity of work and the wages or lack of wages mapped out for each particular sector.”47 The calculated value, she argues, is based on a “combination of sex, race, age, nation, physical dis/ability, and so on.”48 The neoliberal logic that would seem to support a cultural imaginary of evenly integrated forms of free movement therefore also seems insecure. Furthermore, if cosmopolitanism is to be an ethical relationship, then such a relationship must confront the divisions of labour and calculated values noted by James. The insecurity of CSmE policies of free movement are made evident in On the Map when it portrays the incident of “Terrible Tuesday,” which took place on 19 July 2005. Reportedly, an unprecedented number of Guyanese travellers of various racial and economic backgrounds, with various purposes for travel, were turned away wholesale by the Barbadian immigration authorities. While it is unclear why this diverse group of Guyanese citizens was not admitted into Barbados, the film’s narrator reiterates CSmE Article 45, which states that “the Member States commit themselves to the free movement of their nationals within the Community.”49 Moreover, according to the CarICom website, “Of particular importance is the right that CSmE grants to any CarICom national to establish a business in any Member State and be treated as a National in that state.”50 The film’s framing of the scenario suggests that while “skilled” workers are privileged by CSmE policy, it is not always the case that socioeconomic class is prioritized over national identity or place of origin in the decision-making that occurs in the context of border control.51 As such, one could argue that the neoliberal Caribbean operates on an inconsistent logic of free movement that prioritizes homeland security. This incident becomes the vehicle for the film to pursue the following question: “Why are Caribbeans moving in undocumented ways throughout the region?”52 Advancing her critique of the CSmE ’s ideology of free movement, Davis interviews Caribbean locals on the street, in places of business, in homes, and on university campuses to collect responses to the politics of Caribbean border control. For one man, living in Bridgetown, Barbados, the CSmE ’s policies have granted his friend the mobility to advance his professional career. On the other hand, a Barbadian woman expresses her desire for increased border control in the interest of preventing the expansion of crime and violence from Trinidad

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and Tobago. Others interviewed suggest that the Caribbean has always been a migratory space while the regulatory mechanisms of the CSmE prioritize selective forms of regional integration. One interviewee endorses the CSmE insofar as it can “balance the labor force” across the region, while a University of the West Indies lecturer draws on Stuart Hall to argue that the Caribbean should “abandon earlier notions of identity, ones inherited by colonialism,” to explore a more productive “relation of difference.”53 That Davis carefully protects the identities of both documented and undocumented Guyanese workers in the film suggests that there may be repercussions for those who openly implicate the CSmE in the persistence of racialized state violence, despite its endorsement of the documented free movement of skilled labourers within the region. The workers appear either in silhouette form, with their backs to the camera, or in partial view. A woman speaks under the protection of a mosquito net. One documented migrant worker interviewed claims that, in his experience as a Guyanese person in Barbados, it does not seem to matter if he has a student visa or papers. He reports that his home was raided at 5:00 a.m. and that he was subjected to police and immigration interrogation. The officials reportedly searched the place because “Guyanese like to hide.”54 Major wage disparities for contract labour are reported. A woman identified as an undocumented worker characterizes her experience as though she lives in “a mental prison”; nonetheless, she claims that her decision to work illegally in Barbados is “a sacrifice [she] is willing to take right now because [she] is young.”55 The film offers a close-up shot of another woman’s hands as she holds a CSmE information pamphlet and describes how she never planned to become a prostitute once she arrived in Barbados in pursuit of work. An undocumented female worker in Barbados states: “I would like to say that being illegal is unsafe, scary, hard.”56 As film viewers, we learn that it is common for Guyanese migrant workers in Barbados to be temporarily contracted for work ranging from construction to prostitution. In Davis’s filmic depiction, Guyanese populations are regarded as cheap and disposable labour in Barbados. The regional conception of freedom, implied by the mobility that the CSmE provides, requires us to rethink a relationship between creolization and cosmopolitanism as historically inter-implicated global processes of modernity, and as discourses which are mobilized by states and corporations to affirm illusions of the positive experience of neoliberal

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globalization. Homeland insecurities are felt by those who are delegitimized by the state and subjected to the policing of free movement. As John Urry and Mimi Sheller remind us, “contemporary airports have historically developed from military airports.”57 The Barbadian border at which more than one third of the Guyanese travellers aboard an airplane were denied entry on Terrible Tuesday serves as an example of a militarized site for neoliberal homeland security. Racism or classism, alone, cannot explain the varieties of discrimination that occur in the militarized sites of neoliberal homeland securities. Rather, it might be useful to consider how neoliberal homeland securities are ideologically informed by cosmopolitan identifications linked to modern Western development ideologies that perpetuate, in different ways, what Theo Goldberg conceptualizes as “racial historicism.”58 While cosmopolitanism has been linked to development ideologies of an imperialist centre, creolization had been linked to those of a colonized periphery. This false dichotomy, Françoise Lionnet argues, ignores the processes by which cosmopolitanism and creolization are co-constitutive in histories of imperialist and colonialist practice.59 Peter Jordens further argues that “while the countries and institutions of the North continue to proclaim the presumed virtues of economic neoliberalism and capitalist globalization, there is a simultaneous attempt on the part of these countries to problematise the free international movement of people and to control and contain migration.”60 On the Map prompts consideration of how the neoliberal ideological construction of the skilled labourer produces a kind of cosmopolitanCreole subject within the region, one whose neoliberal cultural and economic value presumably facilitates global flows and potentially reconstructs the colony not simply as a post-colony, but as a multi-statemanaged space for neoliberal globalization. Paradoxically, then, neoliberal ideology promotes the liberalization of borders to accelerate capital flows but relies upon state regulatory practices of border control to sustain “homeland security” operations. In this context, On the Map raises questions regarding the security of free movement insofar as it is conditional upon the state recognition of skills acquisition.61 In order to address the identity politics which I read as an extension of the paradoxes of Caribbean neoliberal homeland securities, it is useful to consider the implications for constituting a particular kind of enfranchised Caribbean neoliberal subject whose freedom and mobility is predicated on a state-managed conception of

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“skilled labour.” If the construction of “skilled labour,” as understood within neoliberal ideology, can be thought of as a kind of mobile subjectivity, then it must be questioned how certain Caribbean nationals become affiliated with this mobile subjectivity while others do not. In what ways does this mobile subject acquire cosmopolitan cultural capital at the expense of others? Are particular countries affected wholesale by this prioritization of identified skill sets? Are those undocumented labourers who continue to move throughout the Caribbean region in turn racialized and criminalized under a combined logic of homeland security and neoliberal integration? On the Map implies that this is the case. Neoliberalism is clearly much more than a socioeconomic paradigm for global flows of trade, labour, and development. Certainly, it is not a new phenomenon and it has its historical influences, some of which, I argue, are indeed linked to particular cosmopolitan traditions. The culture of neoliberalism has hegemonic effects and, following Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, it can be characterized as having inherent instability.62 In “The Neoliberal Revolution,” Stuart Hall argues that although neoliberal practices and effects vary from time and place, “a provisional conceptual identity” continues to be useful because “naming neoliberalism is politically necessary, to give resistance content, focus and a cutting edge.”63 He finds that “neoliberal discourse [has] promoted two discursive figures – the ‘taxpayer’ … and the ‘customer’ … No-one ever thinks either could also be a citizen who needs or relies on public services.”64 Although Hall focuses on the historical context of neoliberal England, the claim that neoliberal “discourse provides subjects with a ‘lived imaginary relation’ to their real conditions of existence”65 is relevant to experiences of labour migration under the CSmE. The neoliberal subject validated by CSmE policies as eligible for regional integration might be read as one whose productive capacities become “skills” insofar as they accommodate the logic and priorities of the Caribbean neoliberal market. Notably, in the years following the film, legislation was put in place to expand the initial list of “five priority categories” of skilled labour to ten. However, Bishop, Girvan, and Shaw et al. explain in their 2011 report on “Caribbean Regional Integration” that “three of these have recently been put on hold, pending introduction of the Caribbean Qualification system for household domestics and artisans; and a general review of the schedule, which has not yet been completed.”66 The system, they argue, lacks credibility:

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Major problems have emerged in the administration of the [CSmE ] scheme; including standardised procedures among member states for the issuing of Certificates, the need for Contingent Rights regimes (especially as they relate to dependents), and the need for a regional registration and monitoring mechanism. The need for hassle-free travel throughout the region by Community nationals is also a major irritant. Governments have decided that an automatic six-month stay should be granted upon entry; but this is unevenly administered by national immigration authorities.67 The logics governing processes of this state-managed integration seem to fail to respond to the longer histories of migratory practices. The film’s claimed aim “to challenge the notion of homogeneity as a sound integrative scheme”68 does not shy away from racialism which, “not unlike nationalism” is, according to Goldberg, “an abstract presumption of familialism.”69 This perspective should prompt us to wonder what was meant then when the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund claimed in 2000 that “the Caribbean is a valued branch of the ImF ’s global family.”70 Is this an articulation of neoliberal cosmopolitanism? Although, as Kent and Tomsky remind us, “Kant predicted that global commerce would promote bonds of mutual self-interest between the nations,”71 it seems that this nonbiological, familial metaphor invoked in the name of the ImF works to conceal unequal relations of power. Influenced by a racialized class ideology of homeland security, the regulatory practices governing regional mobility contribute to the double disenfranchisement of migrant labourers as unskilled and undocumented. The bio-political and socioeconomic calculations that determine documented and undocumented migrant labour, as well as skilled and unskilled workers, are pertinent to Lionnet’s questions: “Who counts as cosmopolitan? Whose lives count as cosmopolitan lives? How do we define a cosmopolitan life in relation to a Creole one? And finally, is a cosmopolitan life more grievable than a Creole one?”72 While Lionnet’s aim is to give credence to the notion that cosmopolitan and Creole histories are co-constitutive, I find that in the case of On the Map we are also forced to confront ways in which the cosmopolitan and the Creole become inter-implicated in the global production of a professional elite who receive state protection because they

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signify a particular conception of labour value. This trend has wideranging implications for populations working in sectors both within and well beyond migrant labour schemes. Arguably, this multifaceted issue is one around which populations could converge in a variety of ways. While Caribbean states can continue to capitalize upon collective Creole identifications to promote a neoliberal sense of Caribbean unity and integration, it is also true that centre-periphery logics are reproduced regionally and mapped bio-politically across constituents within the Caribbean. Notably, the film’s focus on intra-regional migration is tied to CSmE policy and a history of Caribbean xenophobia. The film cites Guyanese activist Walter Rodney’s 1977 study of migration waves between 1835 and 1938 to suggest that xenophobia arising from job insecurities may be motivated at different times by nationalist or racialist sentiments. According to the film, the labour hostilities that previously existed between Afro-Guyanese and Afro-Barbadian populations transformed into an alliance once the Indo-Guyanese population, who came to outnumber the Afro-Guyanese population in Guyana, began to also threaten their job security. The narrative of xenophobia here implies a shift in focus from hostilities between workers based on nationalist differences to ones based on race or ethnicity. This particular historical context reminds us that xenophobia arising from job insecurities can incite a range of nationalist or racialist sentiments. Cosmopolitanism and creolization share theoretical and discursive value for modern Western development initiatives; furthermore, they can serve to bolster a neoliberal cultural logic of diversity while concealing racialized forms of economic exploitation. The exploitative experiences of disposable and migratory labour are surely part of a negative cosmopolitan experience, since such work often helps to sustain the life of global cities. Yet, this labour is also entangled with histories of slavery and indentured servitude, the former of which is specifically relevant to Caribbean expressions of Creole society. As discussed earlier, Creole discourses can be mobilized to challenge conceptions of racial fixity, but they can also rearticulate hierarchy, gentrification, and xenophobia. This is not surprising, given that Caribbean Creole culture emerged from the social dynamics of plantation economies. Nonetheless, Stuart Hall contends that Creole identity’s “primary meaning has always been about cultural, social and linguistic mixing rather than about racial purity.”73 Creole Caribbean identifications require review,

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in this context, because such processes unfold along a continuum that varies from one Caribbean state to another, often in relation to policy and the racial, cultural, and linguistic composition of the location. While for some these identifications can engender empowering feelings of complex regional unity, they can also reproduce biological and socioeconomic gentrifications while facilitating a myth of a post-racial neoliberal Caribbean society.74 Mimi Sheller finds that what gets concealed by uncritical celebrations of globalization are the “specific histories of Caribbean displacement, migration and transnationalism” contained in the varying “political commitments associated with [grassroots] theories of creolization.”75 The CSmE strives to enhance the cultural and economic profile of the region by empowering the mobility of a Caribbean professional class while undocumented migrant labour is subject to the criminalizing effects of policing as well as the risks of travelling without legal security. While On the Map responds to these problems, in part, through the inclusion of cultural criticism and poetic expression, it is perhaps the inclusion of Ken Corsbie, a famed Caribbean storyteller, that is most striking insofar as his live performance addresses the “tangled intimacy” of the United States and the Caribbean when it comes to the racialized state surveillance of free movement. In his performance he critiques the United States’ Federal Census Report for its production of racial categories which function to mark and limit one’s conception of racial identification. Corsbie undercuts this demographic mode of racial accountability by emphasizing his own self-conscious conception of mixed-race ancestry. He refers to himself as a “true, true Tobagonian,” a “full-blooded Trinidadian,” and “a full-blooded, true, true, stereotypical West Indian.” When he recalls his encounter with the census report, he claims that he could tick off all of the categories including Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Black, White, Portuguese, and Brazilian. In other words, to be a “full-blooded Trinidadian,” for Corsbie, is to be of mixed-race ancestry produced as a result of migrations. That the film begins with a critique of the US-style approach to mapping racial demographics within the nation only helps to reinforce a sense of connection between US and Caribbean neoliberalism. This racialized, bio-political belonging, enacted through the completion of a census report, reminds us that although the “negation of strangerhood” may be, as a cosmopolitan impulse, rooted in the survival strategies of the disenfranchised and precarious, it is also part of the project

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of Empire and the contemporary state practices of managing racial diversity.76 Corsbie’s playful critique thus signals how a long history of “‘linking up’ with others” is subject to state scrutiny and containment.77 The fascinating tension that this performance illuminates is one which confirms a genealogy of migratory subjectivity which is nonetheless constrained and tracked by neoliberal states; ironically, this tracking proves to be inaccurate since the racial categories the system provides cannot possibly support or acknowledge the mixed ancestries with which Corsbie identifies. This early scene in the film is also striking insofar as it acknowledges the persistent significance of US racial categorization, however flawed, in the neoliberal age. Although Corsbie does not address census questions concerning skill sets, educational background, or professional status, one is left to wonder how the “skilled” worker figures into the construction of identity in such reports. The issue of the neoliberal construction of skilled or unskilled workers is also absent in Davis’s poem of complex Creole identification. Is this issue not part of the ongoing history of conflicts which trouble a sense of contemporary regionalism? While On the Map focuses primarily on tensions between Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad, Davis advances an expansive conception of Caribbean community. Yet anti-neoliberal community is not simply affirmed by Davis’s mobilization of a “complex Creole” identification. Towards the film’s conclusion, an interviewee identifies the ongoing challenge of building regional consciousness; the rather disorienting song that follows might be characterized as a patriotic promotion of modern development. The chorus, “Build, Build, Build,” plays over a montage of imagery marking the existence and development of industries and markets. The sentiment of this section of the film is jarring insofar as it could resonate with the marketplace ideologies of CarICom.78 Yet, this song does not have the final word. Davis’s own “complex Creole” poem reaches its completion and the film concludes with the lingering sounds of the Caribbean Sea as its waves touch the shoreline. On the Map strives to reanimate a critical commitment to regional anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, but it does not explicitly take up “what grounds for resistance are lost in making creolization shorthand for cultural hybridization and the fluidity of ‘global’ identities.”79 More to the point, it fails to consider how neoliberal states can work to accommodate racial, cultural, and ethnic diversities in their ambition to

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expand markets. This is the neoliberal age of US federal census reports, the CSmE , and CarICom song competitions, where selective integration is celebrated while free movement and mobility can be gentrified, and the logic of homeland security can cast out an entire planeload of national subjects who have mixed racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. What makes sense in the neoliberal age is unclear, and this is why cultural interrogations of neoliberal policy need to consider how a “grass-roots politics of the subaltern” can always be threatened by “the subsequent metropolitan appropriation of the concept.”80 In short, the signifying practices of “Creole” subjectivity, however complex, do not penetrate the paradoxical and unstable logics of neoliberal identity politics that are constructed, mobilized, and mapped by nation-states in the name of labour integration schemes that cross borders. Cosmopolitanism must therefore contend with its related genealogies, such as creolization, and also address how geographically specific neoliberal policies pose particular challenges to its theories and practices. Historically, Western documentary filmmaking has served colonialist desires to document, study, and fetishize so-called Others; however, documentary film also has a rich history of participating in social justice education and political resistance.81 “Committed” documentaries, for Thomas Waugh, are films that claim solidarity with a specific group or coalition, take an “activist stance” towards certain issues or goals, and work within and alongside political and social movements.82 Davis’s documentary is politically committed, informative, and poetic in orientation. “The recent turn to poetics,” Michael Renov argues in his discussion of documentary film, “is marked by a concurrent activation of history (‘historical poetics’) and of politics (‘poetics and politics’),” but “the fundamental aim of poetics” is “to submit aesthetic forms to rigorous investigation as to their composition, function, and effect.”83 He finds that the “nascent poetics of the documentary” are evident in “four fundamental tendencies” which he identifies accordingly: “to record, reveal, and preserve”; “to persuade or promote”; “to analyse or interrogate”; and “to express.”84 On the Map participates in these tendencies to different degrees. For example, the vision statement for the film project (provided in the notes section of the DvD ) claims five objectives, which invoke different constituencies or stakeholders. On the one hand, the film seeks “to give voice to the numerous voiceless and tell the true story of intraCaribbean migration,” but it also wants “to sensitize the public and

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policy-makers to key social issues.” It seeks to work at “the community level” in order to participate in conflict resolution … while promoting tolerance, understanding, and respective coexistence.” At the same time, it wants “to foster policy debates and political attention to the development of sound socio-economic policies under the integrative scheme.” The film worked to animate discussion through its circulation at festivals as well as in university and community presentations. Renov finds that “in a culture that valorizes consumption – and the disposable culture responsive to that imperative – it may well be crucial for documentarists to consider the stakes of an intervention: to challenge and activate audiences even in the process of instruction or entertainment. In this regard, analysis remains the documentarist’s most crucial support.”85 While On the Map generates a critical consciousness of the CSmE and expresses solidarity with precarious Caribbean migrant labourers, it is not clear how Davis’s poetic invocations of the “complex Creole” intervene to challenge Caribbean audiences to truly rethink grounds for community. However, if, as Michael Warner argues, “counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative” rather than “replicative” of dominant publics,86 then Davis may be inciting audiences to create alternative scenes in which people can converge around particular issues. Perhaps the most salient point made in the vision statement is the final one, which acknowledges the potential significance of the medium of independent film: “To allow Caribbean people to see and hear themselves on the big screen (versus imported North American images) through an indigenously created product which contributes to an analysis of ourselves and our continuing education to survive under the instruments of globalisation.” Here, the articulation of the constraints on indigenous agency is directly related to globalized instrumentation. Caribbean indigeneity, in this context, therefore implicitly challenges dominant cosmopolitan desires. If the post-9/11 era has given rise to a discourse and psychology of homeland security which has, in turn, potentially influenced the shaping of neoliberal policy in the Caribbean region, then perhaps it is worth reexamining how the neoliberal Caribbean is represented and imagined, because surely these processes affect how people feel about neoliberal life. In a recent critique of transnational American studies, Johannes Voelz undercuts celebratory articulations of transnationalism by arguing for the “eerie figural resemblance”87 it shares with

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neoliberal globalization in the context of “the structural changes in the nation-state.”88 I would add that the “tangled intimacy” of cosmopolitan and Creole geographies are now part of shared neoliberal maps: they are assemblages marked by resemblance and linked by the mobilization, surveillance, and containment mechanisms used formally and informally on labouring subjects who, even if they are working in local markets, are always also situated within global ones. Raymond Williams’s notion of “emergent” and “residual” feelings becomes relevant to cosmopolitan and Creole ideologies as Enlightenment discourses that guide state management and procure popular consensus for the protocols established for trans-border mobilities. We should keep in mind, then, that “the skin is not simply in the present (in the here and now),” but rather the skin “has multiple histories and unimaginable futures, it is worked upon, and indeed, worked towards.”89 As such, “the recentring of the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies” is a crucial initiative to interrogate not only the “complex sensuous relationality between the means of travel and the traveller,” but also how individual affective experiences “extend to familial spaces, neighbourhoods, regions, national cultures, and leisure spaces with particular kinaesthetic dispositions.”90 Our current era demands a transformative critical response to the paradoxical relationships between mobility regimes, homeland securities, and the identity politics they enact upon migrant labourers who attempt to cross borders, and the families and communities who are living extensions of these individuals. Annalee Davis’s cultural work to promote a complex Creole identification in On the Map does not seem directed towards a strictly plantation-based conception of time or space; yet, insofar as the film interrogates neoliberal policies, competing migrant labour histories, and xenophobia, it seems overdetermined by plantation-inspired cultural significations that cannot quite account for the conditional yet flexible logics of neoliberal freedom and free movement. Furthermore, a “circum-Caribbean” conception of Caribbean community that includes, for example, “the various island locations, the northern countries of South America (including Guyana, Venezuela, and Surinam) and the countries of Central America (such as Belize, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua)”91 would demand nuanced and ongoing reflection about what the organization of collective cultural resistance to neoliberal

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policies could look like on different scales. Do cultural expressions of resistance in the neoliberal age need to signify an organizational logic? In the context of a wide-ranging anti-globalization movement, Janet Conway and Jakeet Singh promote organizational convergence over consensus thinking as they find that liberal democratic ideals are too seldom interrogated in terms of their links to colonialist thinking. Consensus regarding opposition to neoliberal processes of Caribbean integration would, in this context, seem unrealistic; however, convergence around more particular sets of problems associated with the ideological construction of “skilled” and “unskilled” labourers, and the lived effects of that construction, is a tangible project for the formation of contingent alliances and solidarities. The integrationist logic of neoliberal states is inconsistent and seems to have limited grassroots orientation which has focused on socioeconomic justice or political rights. Neoliberal homeland securities continue to animate residual identity politics while such systems and networks construct emergent ones. The notion of freedom in the neoliberal age is obviously capitalistic and should not have the final word on the philosophical and practical realization of free movement, though it is constrained and contingent upon unpredictable but state-regulated constructions of enfranchisement and justice. Clearly, neoliberalism has never been a simple endorsement of free trade or free migration. There are always contingencies. Neoliberal states can and do mobilize protectionist rhetoric and policy to serve powerful stakeholders and selective economic, cultural, and racial interests. Disturbingly, the US government has too often sought to delegitimize activism, protest, and movements critical of racism and capitalism. Criminalizing dissent, the US sets a dangerous example for neoliberal homeland security agendas elsewhere. Mobility regimes are not unique to the present and perhaps this is why it is crucial to examine constellations between neoliberalism, cosmopolitanism, and creolization. The power to control human movement is the power to shape the circumstances of someone’s life and death. It should be impossible, if not entirely unethical, for us to ignore the ever-present dangers of such state power in 2017.

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9 Reproductive Politics, the Negative Present, and Cosmopolitan Futurity Heather Latimer “Sexuality and gender play a constitutive role in the formation and definition of the nation insofar as the reproduction of nationhood and citizenship remain premised on heterosexuality and heteromasculinity.” – Rutvia Andrijasevic, “Sex on the Move,” 390. “The figure of woman poses the question of how the site of refuge reproduces itself. Is it through women’s bodies? Is it through endless hospitality?” – Ranjana Khanna, “Asylum,” 481.

In this chapter I argue that reproductive politics are foundational to the cosmopolitan project, and its aims for global citizenship and solidarity. I suggest that reproductive politics are not only the struggle over who controls women’s fertility, but are also the cultural context in which certain relationships are perceived, represented, and reproduced, whilst others are not. Seeing reproductive politics in this way allows us to consider reproduction as related to the national structures that give rise to a need for cosmopolitanism in the first instance, as well as to consider reproduction as related to our understanding of whom we imagine as the ideal cosmopolitan subject, and what we imagine as the ideal cosmopolitan future. As the editors of this volume make clear,

not all cosmopolitan subjects are “empowered by the superficial liberal celebration of cosmopolitan diversity in the world today.”1 Similarly, not all cosmopolitan subjects are imagined as equal inheritors of the future cosmopolitan community. Accordingly, this chapter interrogates the future as a neutral concept, challenging the reproductive politics that lie behind cosmopolitanism’s futurity. It suggests that at the heart of cosmopolitanism’s humanism lies a temporal, reproductive narrative, which assumes that the solution to a negative present lies with a different or better future community. Consequently, cosmopolitanism’s utopian impulses are driven by a type of reproductive futurism, which assumes kinship is generational, and which posits heterosexual reproduction as the resource for, or site of, collective reproduction. In order to examine the relationship between cosmopolitanism and reproduction, I begin with an analysis of the role of sexual politics in theories of nationalism and postnationalism. I then turn to two recent films about the difficulties of undocumented migration, Jim Sheridan’s In America (2002) and Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace (2004), as a way to approach the role of reproduction in cosmopolitan theories of belonging and identity. The films make thematic connections between migration, reproduction, and subjectivity by offering intensely personal depictions of undocumented migration. They suggest pregnancy can be a means of attaching to a new community, thereby highlighting the role of generational ties in negotiating and living within multicultural formations. Through this narrative reliance on reproduction, however, I suggest we see the temporal politics of the cosmopolitan project at work. For instance, the films’ cosmopolitan concerns are addressed through a narrative that posits the possible solution to current political problems in the biological or future human. The reason this is possible, I argue, is because the very same narrative drive underlies cosmopolitanism’s futurism. Discussing the films’ reproductive politics therefore provides a useful vantage point for seeing how the idealism of the cosmopolitan project also depends upon hegemonic and futureoriented narratives and fantasies. To that end, the chapter ends with a discussion of how reproductive politics legitimate some forms of kinship over others as the logical gateway to a positive cosmopolitan future, addressing the importance of future-orientated narratives to all political projects. It then suggests that a reconsideration of the sexual politics of cosmopolitan belonging might provide a way to override this temporal logic.

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All Politics Are Reproductive The term cosmopolitanism is often used to capture a variety of philosophical theories concerning migration, nationalism, and human rights.2 Although these theories vary, they share the common value that all human beings belong to a global community, regardless of religious, national, or racial boundaries, and that this community should not only be promoted and cultivated, but could serve as a model for how to theorize a positive encounter with difference. While scholars, including many in this volume, have redefined and narrowed cosmopolitanism’s broad claims, often take differing stances on whether cosmopolitanism is a philosophical worldview, a political project, or an analytical method, there are shared strands of thought that enable us to speak of cosmopolitanism in general terms.3 For instance, by and large, all cosmopolitan theories have three common elements: individualism, universality, and generality. The unit of concern in all cosmopolitan positions is the individual (that is, human beings or persons), and the focus is on these individuals’ universal or global status and their general rights.4 The central ethical concern of all cosmopolitan theories, therefore, is how to imagine and organize politics around the foundational idea that all individuals are entitled to equal status and rights regardless of place of origin or national affiliation. As Catherine Lu describes, a cosmopolitan ethic is “commonly understood to refer to a universalistic morality that eschews parochial, especially national, limitations or prejudices” and “entails the acknowledgment of some notion of common humanity.”5 Or, as Pheng Cheah notes, cosmopolitanism “involves the transcendence of the particularistic and blindly given ties of kinship and country,” so that the cosmopolitan subject is not so much rootless, detached, or even nomadic, as able to embrace humanity. 6 Cosmopolitanism, therefore, is a type of humanism, one that is aspirational and optimistic insofar as it suggests that we share an essential humanity – “not so much despite our differences but by virtue of our differences”7 – and appeals for a world where those differences may thrive. My contention is that reproductive politics are constitutive of the humanistic elements of cosmopolitan theories, in that a fantasy of the reproducibility of the future community shapes cosmopolitanism’s utopianism. I want to trace, or unearth, some components of this temporal logic in order to counter the conviction that cosmopolitanism

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and sexual politics are separate concerns. Just as nationalism and sexual politics have been shown to be related by a number of scholars, cosmopolitanism, as a form of humanism, is also reliant on naturalized or biological (and I will argue sexualized and gendered) notions about the reproducibility of human relationships.8 Like other forms of humanism, it assumes that there is a link between biological kinship structures and birth, birth and personhood, personhood and community; it therefore relies on a set of central formulations, even when it is critical of these formulations, which presupposes a connection between maternity and the reproduction of group identity.9 While political scientists and cosmopolitan theorists are critical of kinship rules, especially citizenship birthright systems, which several see as “the least defensible basis for distributing access to citizenship,”10 most do not question the naturalization of kinship structures, nor the latter’s reproductive or temporal logic. Yet political categories such as “the human,” “the family,” or “the nation” rely on assumptions that genealogy, kinship structures, and community groupings are reproducible. As Alys Eve Weinbaum argues in Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought, reproduction is “deeply embedded within modernity’s nodal systems of classification and social domination,” since the interconnected ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rest on the notion that “race can be reproduced.”11 Systems of classification, such as kinship or citizenship structures, are thus based on “attendant beliefs in the reproducibility of racial formations (including nations) and of social systems.”12 This means reproduction is a significant, if sometimes unacknowledged, factor in all theories that rely on these concepts, including those that address the destabilization of national or racial identities, such as cosmopolitanism. For instance, reproduction is often a focal point of arguments about who should and should not qualify for refugee status and citizenship in Western countries, and it figures prominently in migration policy and bio-political discourse on national health and welfare.13 On the other hand, however, reproduction is also assumed to provide a natural and legitimate link between birth and citizenship, or biology and human rights, and is therefore seen as a process that overrides national law. In each case, there is a presumption that “a natural relationship between babies and mothers [blurs] lines of rights and responsibilities mapped by the state.”14 This not only reveals why regulations for admission, duration of stay, and access to

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citizenship rely on such deeply gendered and sexualized norms,15 but also why theories that are critical of the nation might still rely on reproductive models – such as the idea that birth alone should equal human rights – as a way to supersede these norms.16 In their reliance upon such reproductive models, however, these theories are heteronormative, in that they are part of the “institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged.”17 In fact, I want to suggest that their heteronormativity alienates certain forms of being in a manner that is similar to the way kinship rules for citizenship (including territorial birth criteria) render certain people aliens in current political society.18 I also want to suggest that their heteronormativity is related to a type of reproductive futurism, which is what queer theorist Lee Edelman has identified as the narrative drive that imagines the possible solution to current political problems in the biological, or the future human.19 That is, heteronormativity, like nationalism, relies on a kind of reproductive culture,20 and this reproductive culture “produces a narrative structure that offers an individual a past and future via intergenerational families.”21 Reproductive futurism, therefore, relies on a “time of inheritance,” or a type of generational time, where “values, wealth, goods, and morals” are imagined to be “passed through family ties from one generation to the next.”22 It simultaneously connects “the family to the historical past of the nation,” while glancing “ahead to connect the family to the future.”23 Nations, ethnicities, and races also provide and depend upon these intergenerational forms,24 and I am curious about whether or not postnational theories might maintain an unquestioned connection between sexuality, futurity, and reproduction that secures a similar form of temporal belonging, which is one that most cosmopolitan theorists would wish to criticize, or at least expose. We can see how reproductive futurism, and a related notion of generational time, might be bound to cosmopolitanism in this fashion by discussing In America and Maria Full of Grace. Set in a particularly cosmopolitan location, New York City, both films follow pregnant undocumented migrants who are positively changed by their encounters with otherness as a result of their pregnancies. Their forthcoming children endear them to their communities and vice versa, so that despite the precariousness of being undocumented and pregnant, the future is

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presented as hopeful and optimistic. The forthcoming child is a rallying point for a positive cosmopolitics in the films, and symbolizes that things may be better in the future. Reproduction is therefore foundational to how the films imagine the future; the films overlap biological and political definitions of belonging as they use pregnancy to legitimate some forms of subjectivity and kinship over others and as the logical step towards a positive cosmopolitan future. It is my contention that in this overlap the films not only reveal how kinship is linked to political belonging, but also how kinship is linked to the temporal politics of the cosmopolitan project. If the cosmopolitan community is “not just inherited” but is constantly “made and remade,” as Craig Calhoun argues,25 the films show us that futurity is an important aspect of this remaking. My analysis of the films looks at how they embody this futurity. I argue that reproduction functions as a backbone of sorts to the films’ more overt political concerns about migration and multiculturalism, and is integral to the films’ visualization of cosmopolitan ideals, such as being at home in the world, or being nowhere a stranger. Therefore, in discussing how the films link reproduction to racialized, sexualized, and gendered fantasies of social and cultural belonging, I suggest that the films substitute utopian ideas about reproduction for a cosmopolitics – and that this, in turn, reveals some of cosmopolitanism’s more universalizing tendencies.26

Pregnant Possibilities: In America and Maria Full of Grace Pregnancy is the narrative and affective core of In America and Maria Full of Grace, providing impetus and urgency for the characters’ actions and giving emotional significance to the more compelling scenes. It is because she is pregnant that Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Maria Full of Grace, quits her job at a flower factory, becomes a drug mule, and leaves Colombia for New York. It is also because of her pregnancy that she decides to stay in America. Maria departs Bogotá with three other mules, including her best friend Blanca, a more experienced mule named Lucy, and an unnamed woman who is arrested at the US border. A capsule breaks in Lucy’s stomach en route and when she overdoses on arrival, American drug handlers butcher her. Horrified, Maria and Blanca flee to Lucy’s sister’s house in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens.

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Subsequently the film shows Maria spending time with Lucy’s sister, Carla, who is also pregnant, and watching her happy and multicultural life. Jackson Heights is shot as a vibrant cosmopolitan neighbourhood, and Carla is portrayed as the perfect representative of the hardworking and honest immigrants who live there. As more than one reviewer notes, these scenes have “a certain self-satisfaction”27 in their portrayal of America as a haven for migrants, and lack criticism of the ways the US is implicated in the drug trade.28 This multicultural vision of the city and its happy residents inspires Maria, and at the end of the film she decides to defy US immigration and stay in New York to have her baby. Pregnancy not only propels Maria into action, but also justifies her final decision to stay in America, which in turn gives the film its hopeful, forward-feeling ending. Pregnancy likewise gives narrative weight to In America, acting as the affective core for both the familial and communal relations of the main characters. Set in the 1980s and loosely based on Sheridan’s own time with his family “in America,” the film follows the Sullivan family from Ireland – Johnny, Sarah, and sisters Ariel and Christy – who lie to border officials and enter the United States illegally from Canada. Harkening back to a (pre-9/11) time when, as one reviewer puts it, illegally crossing the border was still seen as a “quintessentially American experience,”29 the film received little critical attention as an “illegal immigrant” story, presumably because of its 1980s setting and the family’s white Irish background. Instead, reviewers such as Roger Ebert termed it a classic immigrant tale, and focused on the importance of the film’s familial narrative. This narrative shows the family becoming overwhelmed while living in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood, trying to deal both with the recent death of their son, Frankie, and with the new pregnancy of Sarah (Samantha Morton). When Sarah is told that her pregnancy is at risk and that she or the baby may die, the family fractures. It is only when neighbour Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), a recluse who is dying of aIDS , enters the plot that they begin to reform. The film sets up Mateo’s life to parallel the Sullivans’ – his condition worsens as Sarah’s pregnancy develops – and his death coincides with the baby’s birth. The narrative relies on both events, as the film uses the birth/death as a moment of inspiration for the Sullivans to embrace their community; the last scene is set at a baby shower the family throws for neighbours from whom they previously felt alienated. Much

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like Maria Full of Grace, therefore, it is through the narrative of pregnancy that the Sullivans are touched by their cultural encounters in New York and become positively orientated towards a new future, and towards a cosmopolitan community. Pregnancy, in other words, is a legitimating force in the films, setting up relationships between characters which, in turn, symbolize who is the natural inheritor of the future. In America, for instance, represents the forthcoming child as the future itself, in large part because it is placed in relation to Mateo’s death, a narrative decision that marks Mateo as a queer outsider to the Sullivans’ “proper” family. A young, single man in New York City dying of aIDS in the 1980s, Mateo is so obviously a “misfit” in the film’s reproductive narrative that even the character himself knows it.30 Confessing to Johnny that he is dying, Mateo compares himself to the Sullivans, telling Johnny, “I’m in love with you. I’m in love with your beautiful woman. I’m in love with your kids, and I’m even in love with your unborn child. I’m in love with anything that lives.” In fact, the film juxtaposes Mateo’s love of the Sullivan family and their unborn child – his love of “anything that lives” – with his rapid decline. The narrative drives steadily towards his death at the same time that we watch Mateo rally around the family for the forthcoming baby. Viewers, too, are encouraged to identify with this narrative, as Mateo becomes aligned with a lack of future while the Sullivans become positioned as its natural and rightful inheritors: Johnny finds work, stands up to his neighbours, acknowledges his children’s feelings, and steers his family out of their grief. It is clear that Mateo’s life will be lost, but that his death is necessary for the Sullivans to see themselves in his eyes. Accordingly, Mateo passes just as the baby is born. The Sullivans are then informed that Mateo has paid for their large hospital bill. He has given them his inheritance, thereby ensuring the success of their migration, and has sacrificed his queer and therefore symbolically dead-end life to the film’s narrative. After Mateo’s death and the baby’s recovery from a complicated early birth, the Sullivans arrive home to a much-changed apartment block. Neighbours who were previously drug addicts have cleaned up, those who were unfriendly now smile, and everyone crowds around them as they throw a baby shower: “the other tenants suddenly develop a sense of community.”31 Christy documents the shower on a camcorder, and as her camera moves from a cake that reads “Sarah

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Mateo” to the multicultural and multiracial faces of the party guests, one of whom is singing in Spanish, the message is clear: the baby has changed things. It has “brought its own luck,” as Mateo predicted it would, and has secured the Sullivans’ position in their community – a moment made authentic through the film’s use of Christy’s camcorder and its naturalized, innocent movements as she documents the event. It is as if the baby has anchored the community in imagining a cosmopolitan future together, or as if a cosmopolitan present is only possible in their shared joy at the futurity embodied not only by the birth of Sarah Mateo, but also by the death of queer Mateo. The film ends by positing reproduction, and the heterosexual family, as the vehicle for symbolic kinship and legitimation. A sexualized and gendered fantasy of belonging is celebrated in lieu of one about race, nationality, citizenship, or other cosmopolitan concerns, and what Edelman argues is the most naturalized of narratives, reproductive futurism, becomes the way to circumvent the other complications inherent in a narrative of undocumented migration. A similar process is at work in Maria Full of Grace, even as the film’s focus on the international drug trade and its violent effects on women’s bodies more overtly lays out a political agenda. The film uses pregnancy in several overlapping ways to address and soothe anxieties about migration. Director Josh Marston states that the film is intended to make viewers rethink stereotypical images of the South American migrants, drug mules, and “illegal” immigrants.32 The film’s humanizing goals, however, are framed via reproductive futurism, considering that the only two characters who survive and thrive in Maria Full of Grace are pregnant. As Emily S. Davis notes in “The Intimacies of Globalization: Bodies and Borders on Screen,” the only “women who are positioned by the film to create new lives for themselves are Maria and Lucy’s sister Carla.”33 Lucy dies graphically, slaughtered to access the drugs in her stomach, and Blanca is portrayed as naive, immature, and unwilling to sever her ties to home in order to better herself. Davis argues that “something had to provide a convincing motivation for Maria’s decision to use the drug trade to get out of her dead-end situation,”34 and postulates that the pregnancy provides such a plot twist. She questions, however, whether or not the film posits Maria and Carla’s “insides” as “more sacred than Lucy’s.”35 This is a question she does not fully answer, and one I would like to take up here, as I think it is

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important that pregnancy not only acts as the catalyst and justification for Maria’s choices, but as the anchor for Maria’s burgeoning cosmopolitan identity. Just as in In America, the key affective moment in Maria Full of Grace, and the turning point for Maria’s character, is structured by pregnancy. Upset after a fight with Blanca – in which Blanca has scolded Maria for swallowing drugs while pregnant and cruelly yelled, “I feel sorry for your baby having such a stupid mother” – Maria walks the streets of Queens alone contemplating her future. At the end of her walk she goes into a prenatal clinic and receives an ultrasound. In this significant moment, reproductive futurism is embraced: we watch Maria watch the screen and smile as she looks at the fetus, one of the only times she shows happiness. It is clear that Maria’s walk, both literally and figuratively, has brought her to this image and the potential it represents as an emblem for the future. In this scene the fetal image represents the very notion or idea of the future itself, acting, as Edelman writes, as an icon of our “whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.”36 Appropriately, this is the moment Maria decides to stay in the US, as indicated when she makes a follow-up appointment at the clinic even though she is supposed to return to Colombia. The juxtaposition of Blanca’s accusation and the ultrasound scene makes the film’s suggestion clear: Maria can either return to the drug trade or stay to build a new future made possible by her pregnancy. Maria is presented as having the potential to stop herself, and her future children, from becoming commodities in the drug world, as long as she recognizes and focuses on the happy potentiality embodied in the fetal image. This is opposed to the presentation of Lucy and Blanca, who are either punished or ignored for using their bodies for non-reproductive purposes, with Lucy undergoing a horrific parody of a caesarean section when she is cut open to access the drugs in her stomach. The ultrasound scene therefore not only suggests that Maria’s insides are indeed more sacred than the other characters’, but also it validates and makes commonsense the film’s decision to have Maria stay in Jackson Heights and not be “a stupid mother.” It emphasizes reproduction as the appropriate vehicle for both personal change and cosmopolitan belonging, suggesting that biological kinship is the best way for Maria to attach to her new community, by the legal citizenship of her future children. This validates a framework that ties

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the reproductive body to social belonging. In a similar manner to In America, therefore, Maria Full of Grace uses reproduction to provide a heterosexual fantasy of change and belonging that stands in for cosmopolitan futurity. The films follow a narrative movement from alienation to community embracement, and it makes sense that they include a recognizable crisis, in this case pregnancy, to inspire their characters to reach out to others. Reproduction is hardly an unusual device, as pregnancy is often used in Hollywood films to signify a character’s proper socialization and all that this entails, including a heterosexual family, inherited rights or property, and social belonging. However, I believe that pregnancy is a trope that makes particular sense to use in these films because of their political themes. Reproduction here embodies a cosmopolitan ethic focused on the future; it is because of pregnancy that Maria and the Sullivans encounter cultural difference in a manner that awakens them emotionally, allows them to transcend the particularities of their location, and think about their futures in a new manner. If cosmopolitanism signals “both the identity (and therefore unity) of all human beings despite their differences, and appreciation for and ability to feel at home among the actual differences among people and peoples,”37 then the trope of pregnancy generates occasions for characters to encounter moments of humanity that change their orientation towards ideas of place and home. The unborn or future child therefore acts as a touchstone for how the films represent their characters’ hopes and dreams, and as a symbol for a better political future. In a similar manner, therefore, the films organize “hegemonic optimism”38 about the cosmopolitan future in a way that resembles more stereotypical forms of optimism about national futures, which are also often displayed via fantasies of multiculturalism. Presenting viewers with irresolvable storylines about poverty, multicultural tensions, and migration, the films rely on their pregnancy narratives to sidestep the uncertainties inherent in their character’s political situations. In this sidestep, heterosexuality gets conflated with love and family, so that “community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship” and “a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction.”39 That is, a sexualized and gendered fantasy of belonging is celebrated, instead of one that might challenge intergenerational forms of nationalism. Biological kinship is presented

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as the best way to cement one’s attachment to a new community, while the heterosexual family is naturalized as the proper pathway to a positive future.

The Sexual Politics of Cosmopolitan Belonging Davis suggests that films about undocumented migrants often consider “possibilities for alternative forms of intimacy and collation based on a shared resistance to certain forms of commoditization and shared fantasies of future realities.”40 As I have argued, reproduction is a vital part of the shared fantasies of future realities in both Maria Full of Grace and In America, as the pregnant body is the focal point of building the future community. The pregnant body is also a site of anxiety in the films, however, highlighting the ways in which women have historically been seen as not only the biological reproducers of national or ethnic groups, but also as natural maintainers of group identity. Women are imagined as the ones who reproduce our future society. We see this in the films in how they imagine “the female capacity to give birth, and the access to origins that birth represents,”41 and in how they utilize concepts such as “nation,” “family,” and “community” via the implicit heteronormative and reproductive logic I have outlined. That is, the cosmopolitan future imagined in these films is reliant on a generational notion of time and a related conception of the future community as a reproducible, organic entity. This is in part made possible because this is how cosmopolitanism itself imagines the future. What might happen to how we imagine the future, however, if we embraced the potentiality of not following certain conventional scripts of family, inheritance, and child rearing? As Sara Ahmed suggests in “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” heteronormativity is largely about “imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course.”42 She calls this the straight line, and suggests that the points on this line are neither neutral nor universal, but accumulate into something we assume is neutral: a sexual orientation. Both films follow this straight line, charting out a heterosexual life course as one that might lead to a cosmopolitan future. In this charting, they reveal that heteronormativity “is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians,” but is the price people feel they “must pay for social membership and a relation to the future.”43 Thinking of the relationship between sexuality, temporality,

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and cosmopolitanism in this way might allow us to acknowledge that the futuristic rhetoric of some forms of humanism, including cosmopolitanism, follow a straight line; and therefore that they foreclose certain desires, orientations, and ways of being. But, what if we moved our temporal modes of identification off this line? Perhaps this might allow for the potentiality of seeing forms of cosmopolitanism that are unscripted by the conventions of reproductive futurism. It might make things oblique, which, in turn, might open up other ways to inhabit these forms of identification.44 Several cosmopolitan theorists already suggest that cosmopolitanism’s “various embodiments, including past embodiments, await discovery and explication,”45 and that there might be different modalities, types, and forms of cosmopolitan articulation still awaiting exploration.46 Accordingly, cosmopolitanism’s temporal politics are not set. In fact, we might look to Jacqueline Stevens, who suggests that “in the final analysis the social movement that will be the vanguard of a revolution against all forms of state boundaries, that could organize on behalf of the unhindered movement and full-fledged development of capacities regardless of one’s birthplace or parentage, is a movement that will be queer.”47 If she is correct, this is because it will be a movement that moves away from a reliance on generational time for its utopian goals, no longer seeing heterosexual reproduction as the natural resource for the politics of collective reproduction.

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PART THREE

Cosmopolitan Communities

10 Standing Outside the Law: ProstitutionFree Zones and the Power of Property Juliane Collard

“Susan M. Marshall is an attorney. She is not a prostitute. But some of the men who drive past her morning bus stop on Northeast Sandy Boulevard don’t get it. First they honk. Then they slow down. Next comes the inquisitive look: Are you working? ‘At first when I moved here I didn’t understand what they were doing, and then it dawned on me,’ said Marshall, who has lived in the Kerns neighbourhood for three years. Marshall’s is just one of many stories from residents and business people whose lives revolve around the streets also popular in Portland’s sex trade … [But] some relief may be on the way. They’re called prostitution-free zones, and they’re heading to City Council for a vote on Wednesday, said Mayor Vera Katz at a press conference Friday.” – Erin Hoover and David R. Anderson, “Prostitution-Free Zones in Portland Will Go to Vote,” The Oregonian, D 01.

Introduction So wrote the Oregonian, the largest daily newspaper in the state, on 25 August 1995. Over the following months, headlines like this celebrated the passing of Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance as a crucial

tool for the police to take back their neighbourhoods and business districts, and rid the city of illegalized prostitution.1 The ordinance was encoded in the Portland City Code and Charter in the wake of longstanding conflict over the rapid expansion and lax regulation of adult businesses within the city limits. Frustrated in their attempts to enact tighter controls on the legal sex industry, neighbourhood activists turned to a more vulnerable sector, instigating a crackdown on street prostitution. Countering standard zoning logic that historically sought to enclose, capture, and contain sex work within a set spatial boundary, the ordinance was designed to map out and eliminate prostitution from so-called “high-vice” areas.2 Suspected or convicted sex workers or patrons found offending within 500 feet of the zone would be legally banned from the area for ninety days, with a one-year exclusion taking effect the day after conviction pending successful prosecution for prostitution, solicitation, or procurement.3 A convicted offender found within the prostitution-free zone during that period of exclusion could be arrested and charged with criminal trespass, whether or not s/he was engaged in prostitution or prostitution procurement when apprehended. As of 2007, the ordinance had established two broad zones of exclusion, West and East, designated by a series of street map landmarks and coordinates. In what Lisa Sanchez calls a “fascinating twist on the private property law of trespass,” Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance categorized and coded people according to their assumed relationship to property, drawing a border between the life space of the propertied resident and that of the illegalized street sex worker.4 This border is legitimated by a legal regime that is both informed by, and constitutive of, a deeply colonial cosmopolitan logic, one that constructs citizens (those with political power) as coterminous with the propertied. Reconceptualizing the public space of Portland’s residential and business neighbourhoods as the shared private space of its propertied residents, the ordinance imbued the latter with the right to decide who and what actions are (un)sanctioned within particular places. This juridical logic, though enacted at the national scale, finds purchase within a cosmopolitan regime that defines citizenship by way of a universalized moral code. While much has been written in recent years about the juridification and codification of cosmopolitan norms at the global scale,5 this chapter focuses on positive state law as a site at which an originary and colonial cosmopolitanism, expressed in the naturalization of private

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property as a precondition to citizenship and full humanity, is reproduced and upheld with often violent consequences for the subject. Specifically, I want to argue that the illegalized sex worker is necessary to the reproduction of a cosmopolitan logic in two ways. First, her6 banishment is necessary to a continued Kantian cosmopolitan ideal, one based on the assumption of a universally shared humanity. Subject to what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls “misanthropic scepticism,” that is, doubt over her own humanity,7 the illegalized sex trade worker’s appearance within public space threatens the organizing logic of this fantasy. Second, and relatedly, the illegalized street sex worker emerges as the necessary negative complement to the ideal cosmopolitan citizen; she is the outcast figure against which the citizen is positively defined, an eternal outsider who belongs to the domain of abject beings.8 Thus is she subject to a double exclusion, first from public space, and second from the category of “citizen” and cosmopolitan, to which she is simultaneously immanent as the abject other. In 2007, Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance was allowed to expire after a study commissioned by the city council on the similar drug-free zone ordinance showed that non-white drug offenders were disproportionately targeted and excluded. And yet, the effects of these exclusion zones linger: in the actions of Portland neighbourhood associations who carry on struggling to rid their neighbourhoods of prostitution;9 in the forced expulsion of sex workers by city police and “Neighbourhood Garbage Patrols”;10 in the persistence of illegalized street sex workers as the imagined embodiments of violence and abjection; and in the ongoing acts of sexual assault and murder committed against them. As such, Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance and its underlying juridico-spatial logic are deserving of continued critical exploration. This chapter contributes to such inquiry by historicizing the intersection of private property, cosmopolitanism, and the law, and their ongoing role in the (re)production of violent social categories. It is in and through forms of spatial regulation like Portland’s prostitutionfree zones that we are confronted with the extensive reach of private property’s power, with the persistent authority of a colonial cosmopolitan logic that mobilizes property as requirement of citizenship, broadly defined. As we look to develop and recognize alternative, plural, and critically productive forms of cosmopolitanism, we must at once remain attentive to this colonial form, both within the law and elsewhere. The violence it imparts demands that we do not overlook it.

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Beginning with a brief exploration of the relationship between cosmopolitanism, positive law, and private property regimes, I examine the formation of law and property in the course of time, querying the exclusions engendered in and through their promulgation as neutral facts, as co-constitutive of a naturalized and univocal juridical regime. I turn to Judith Butler’s theorizing on the constitutive outside for its insights into the systemic processes of othering that underlie the authority of universalized legal constructs. Working within scholarship on the violent materializations of normalized conceptions of private property, this chapter posits both the abject spaces beyond exclusion zones and the body of the illegalized street sex worker as the constitutive outside to law and legal personhood. She is the raced, classed, and gendered other who is at once abandoned by and necessary to the perpetual functioning of black letter law and a Kantian cosmopolitanism.11

Cosmopolitanism and Positive State Law The idea of cosmopolitanism continues to capture the critical attention of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. In part, cosmopolitanism offers a response to the questions raised by an increasingly globalized world. As Peter Nyers notes, the concept provides a means for “rethinking the possibilities of cultural engagement, social affiliations, legal authority and political action beyond the state.”12 Suspicious of its infamously universalistic aspirations, scholars have sought to historicize and pluralize the concept, to attend to the diversity of meanings and modes of conduct that constitute its various practices and interpretations. This work is critical. Recent scholarship has engaged in a process of gleaning cosmopolitanism, “taking what is discarded and re-envisioning its worth,”13 thus prompting a new language that ties cosmopolitanism to the abject, the subaltern, the embedded, and the dialogical.14 Despite such attention to cosmopolitanism’s critical and subversive potential, the concept endures in some registers and practices in its traditional universalizing form. Privileging and reproducing Western and Northern-centric ways of being and knowing as natural and a priori, state law in the West emerges as a significant stronghold of an imperial cosmopolitanism, one born during a period of European Enlightenment that reduced the world to European universality.15 Deriving its power from the degree to which it postures as universal, “set

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apart from the messy realities of local particularities,” state law necessarily trades in generalities, bracketing off the specificity of people and places so as to render them subject to an abstracted statutory code.16 This obfuscation of singularity and difference is justified by recourse to a narrative of belonging, personhood, and humanity that echoes a distinctly cosmopolitan logic: that is, the idea of a shared morality that will come to constitute our imagined global community. Under the law, embedded and very particular understandings of what it means to be a “good citizen” are naturalized, routinized, and abstracted. Bodies and identities are ordered in reference to an ideal form. Made subject to this logic of sameness and inclusion, they must be rational, objective, rights-bearing, law-abiding, human, free. Otherwise put, positive state law constitutes, at least in part, the privileged cosmopolitan subject, who is transformed into a citizen as she is brought into closer proximity with a naturalized and normalized juridical system. To be a citizen is to internalize the rule of law, to abide by its abstracted epistemological and ontological demands. Inextricably linked with citizenship under law, property materializes as an important accompanying regulatory regime, a means by which the world is ordered and interpreted, people and places coded and categorized.17 In a legal system enamoured with oppositional classifications, property provides a means of distinguishing between dichotomous parts: between civilization and savagery, human and non-human, man and woman, us and them, order and violence. Born during the European Enlightenment and reproduced during European colonialism in the West, these legal distinctions were engendered in and through spatial relations, the former category in each binary defined as superior partly by its access to private property. Thomas Hobbes famously described the space beyond the frontier, beyond private property, as a space where “there can be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine”; the absence of government and property underpinned a life of “continual fear, and danger of violent death … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”18 Similarly, private property lies at the centre of John Locke’s theory of the state, which is likewise inflected with the presumption of a natural division between the propertied resident and the other, in this case the slave. “These men,” Locke writes, “having … forfeited their lives, and with it their liberties, and lost their estates; and being in the state of slavery, not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof

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is the preservation of property.”19 I flesh out the significant historical relationship between property, law, and citizenship in more depth in the next section. Here, it suffices to say that colonial occupation and the arrival of so-called modern legal forms established the universality of abstracted conceptions of law and property in the West, anchoring them to security, citizenship, and civilization under a juridical code that must be applicable everywhere and rooted nowhere.20 The link between private property, space, and citizenship persists in the principle of exclusion zones and has proved to be a powerful disciplinary regime.

Property and Citizenship: Temporalizing Portland’s Prostitution-Free Zone Ordinance Located in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the city of Portland, Oregon is well known for its gentrified commercial districts and unique blend of urban and natural landscapes, a testimony to careful urban planning and two decades of slow-growth policy. Iconic views of the Washington Park rose gardens, Mount Hood, and Portland’s bustling business district are splashed across tourist booklets, bracketed by the slogan “The City That Works.”21 Portland’s less-travelled east side stands in stark contrast to these picturesque images. Here, neon-lit outlines of female bodies advertise lap dancing, fantasy booths, and live-nude modelling shows. Decrepit strip malls, empty buildings, and adult entertainment clubs take the place of the skyscrapers and towering spruces of the downtown core. While public and private funds for gentrification have flowed into older districts in the west side, declining economies in the east end have largely been bolstered by the influx of the legal sex industry, which has enhanced related enterprises such as alcohol sales and state-run gaming activity.22 In Portland, as in many cities, the boundaries between licit and illicit sex markets are murky and historically contingent. As Lisa Sanchez has argued, governance and regulation of these activities have likewise fluctuated, shaping the contours of prostitution and other forms of commercial sex work over space and time.23 In the early twentieth century, in-house prostitution in Portland was at least implicitly tolerated, and through the 1980s was practised in massage parlours almost without incident. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of legal decisions striking down proposed zoning ordinances and business regulations facilitated the continued expansion of the legal adult entertainment

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industry.24 Between 1989 and 1995, the number of all-nude strip clubs increased from ten to about eighty, with corresponding growth in the number of escort services, private dance businesses, adult video stores, and gentlemen’s tanning salons.25 Though adult businesses have operated almost without legal sanction since this time, the recent transformation of social and economic landscapes in Portland has incited conflict, as nearby east-end neighbourhoods gentrify and sex work exceeds its conceived socio-spatial borders to spill into upper-middle class suburban neighbourhoods. In the early 1990s, politically active districts, supported by community police and a growing number of neighbourhood associations,26 expressed their displeasure with the burgeoning sex industry, waging frequent but fruitless public protests in front of strip bars and other legal adult businesses. Frustrated in their attempts to curb the ongoing growth and deregulation of the legal sex industry, angered community members turned their efforts to combat illicit street prostitution, resulting in the codification of the prostitution-free zone ordinance. As Sanchez has argued, friction over the sex industry in Portland frames property owners as the adjudicators of the (sub)urban spaces in which they reside. The moral content of the conflict is entrenched in a discourse of “neighbourhood livability” that posits sex workers as a threat to the residents’ quality of life.27 New modes of social control – tools aimed at managing the health, longevity, wealth, and so on of populations within particular places – resonate with this discourse, enabling sectional (class) interests to effectively appropriate public space as their own, blurring the boundaries between private and common property.28 Under the juridico-spatial logic of exclusion zones, the public space of the gentrified Portland neighbourhood, re-imagined as the shared private property of concerned citizens, is territorialized, actively delimiting those who are allowed to be there – the cosmopolitan citizens who have internalized the rule of law – from those who are not. The result is the creation of a hybrid property-space, a public sphere that is intentionally exclusive, in which the “legitimate public only includes those who … have a place governed by private property rules to call their own.”29 The displacement of disempowered individuals from the public spaces claimed by Portland’s neighbourhood-state coalition enrols a colonial cosmopolitan logic which, though seemingly constitutive of a “new” mode of social control, has its roots in much older strategies of

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othering. The spatialization of exclusion zones and the manipulation of the boundaries between the public and the private are closely linked with the colonial geography of early capitalism via the Lockean notion of property, which, to go back to Locke’s quote above, defines the other at least in part by the absence of law and property. In the United States, for example, the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” was interpreted in practice to exclude those Native Americans who retained communal relations to their tribal lands.30 In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment (or Dawes) Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans “who adopted the habits of civilized life” and accepted private allotments of what had been communal territories.31 Simply put, beginning in the colonial era and extending into the late nineteenth century, the possession of property32 became a prerequisite of effective citizenship, of belonging. Knotted with a European legal code empowered by the claim to a singular, universal, and civilized rationality, private property was positioned as exclusively legitimate, as the solution to the supposed parochialism and disorder associated with indigenous relations to land. Anyone who failed to conform to the rules and expectations of European colonial law was imagined as incapable of possessing legal rights and duties, and therefore of participating as a citizen in the sound and reasonable governance of the polity. And yet, though always conceived as absolutely different from it, that which stands outside the norm (of law, of identity) is nevertheless internal to its constitution, as what Judith Butler calls the constitutive outside.33 Disorder, on law’s part, cannot be located within the law itself for fear of delegitimization, but sources and spaces of disorder must exist as that against which an ordering law is intrinsically set. Otherwise said, both law and identity require the construction of a constitutive outside, with reference to which they set themselves apart. During the colonial years of early capitalism, European legal identity entailed the mapping of the colonial subject as a purely negative form from which the positivity of Western law could be derived.34 The life spaces of the other provided the necessary disorder, a concentration of the dangers and violences of non-property and thus non-law. Those figures were and continue to be deployed as referents for recognizing the ordering, securitizing power of property and the law, for order and security accrue in spaces and bodies that these others do not, and cannot,

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inhabit. This process of othering – of inscribing abjectness, violence, and difference onto the bodies of others – is ineluctably reproduced in the naming of the other as necessary for the repeated inculcation of the norm.35 Like the colonial other who comprises the constitutive outside to a universalized and imperial cosmopolitan European code of law, the categorization of the illegalized street sex worker in Portland relies on the imagined link between legality, property, and order. Transient, unpredictable, engaged in illicit economic activities, and inhabiting perceived spaces of violence and criminality, the illegalized street sex worker cannot exist as a propertied resident: she does not embody the order that property is understood to impart. Interpellated in relation to the terms of law, she is irrational, aberrant, and unlawful, and so undeserving of full rights, freedom, or even humanity. She cannot enter the juridical field as a propertied citizen without compromising the ingrained assumption that private property imparts order and rationality, and without threatening the notion of a universally shared humanity: she is disordered and therefore must be unpropertied, less than fully human. She is relegated to the spaces “outside” the law, then, to the space of the outlaw, not only because she acts in contravention to laws against prostitution, but because she jeopardizes the juridical and cosmopolitan order itself: the law cannot include her because she has not internalized it, she does not represent the order it must be seen to impart. As a result, she threatens its perceived authority, which relies on its ability to govern universally, on a fantasy of an evenly distributed humanity. Implicitly condoned by the state – for example through sustained and wilful non-action in the face of serial murders and disappearances,36 or the passing down of light sentences to perpetrators of violence against sex workers37 – the violence done to the illegalized street sex worker only serves to justify her abandonment, securing her categorization as the naturally and inherently insecure. As Sherene Razack writes, this kind of “race thinking, captured in the phrase that ‘they are not like us’ and also necessarily in the idea that ‘they’ must be killed so that ‘we’ can live, becomes embedded in law and bureaucracy so that … violence against the racialized Other comes to be understood as necessary in order for civilization to flourish.”38 The illegalized sex worker emerges as the necessary outside to the body of the ideal cosmopolitan citizen; she is the abject figure against which citizenship is defined in its positive form. Her lived experience is shaped by

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Maldonado-Torres’s misanthropic skepticism, that is, by doubt over the humanity of the subject in question.39 In the face of this doubt, statements like, “you are human; you are a rational being; you have rights” are reformulated as cynical rhetorical questions: “Are you human? Are you rational? Why do you think you have rights?” Though the abandonment of the illegalized street sex worker includes trajectories of colonialism – precisely because they are implicated in them – they cannot be explained only by their reduction to an exclusively historical colonial form. Just as colonial juridical codes emerged in particular socio-historical settings, legal relations and norms today are iteratively articulated anew: expressed in dominant (moral, political, economic) conceptions of civilization and modernity; kept alive epistemologically and ontologically in the ascendancy of science and rationality; and propagated institutionally in courtrooms, classrooms, jails, households, and universities (among innumerable other spaces). These norms are not fixed, not stable, but in process, ongoing, requiring constant reproduction.40 Exclusion zones can be recognized as one such site of reproduction, a contemporary means of segregating different orders of people and places. Trading on gendered determinations and racial configurations – often, in fact, collapsing the two – juridicospatial controls govern bodies both colonially and through patterns of power and control that cater to new spatial relations, dehumanizing and seeking to render invisible the non-included other. Conceptions of space, both imagined and material, are key to the regularization of these systematic exclusions. Treated as abstract, inert, and prepolitical, space – constituted in part by notions of private property and citizenship – appears to have its own rules, and not the rules constructed for it. Naturalized, normalized, and universalized representations of space appear as a priori: spaces are dangerous or safe, public or private. The territorial,41 political,42 and regulatory performances43 upon which these representations rely are understood as rational and necessary responses to the inherent characteristics of space itself. And yet these performances create space in both material and discursive ways, with serious consequences for the subject. In tandem with bawdy house laws that make it illegal to engage in prostitution indoors, for example, the hyper-surveillance of neighbourhoods where prostitution is known to occur (such as the exclusion zones) forces sex workers into isolated areas outside the city where they are too often assaulted with relative impunity.44 Sherene Razack argues

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that these naturalized conceptions of space (as dangerous, destitute, abject) are projected onto the bodies that inhabit them: the bodies themselves become spaces of violence.45 As a result, illegalized sex workers are often considered in law to have consented to the violence visited upon them.46 By inhabiting spaces of violence, the argument goes, the illegalized street sex worker is inviting violence into her life. Her body becomes emblematic of abjection and disorder, a corporeal space of non-law necessary to the construction of law itself. By establishing areas in which prostitution cannot be seen to occur, then, exclusion zones create a constitutive outside of spaces beyond the gaze of the state, where the bodies of sex workers become the naturalized subjects of rape, mutilation, and murder. Relegated to spaces of violence and criminality, the sex worker is understood to embody these characteristics. Her mismanaged life, demonstrated by her participation in an illegal and transient form of labour, becomes grounds for the violation of her self. Consequently, Portland’s illegalized street sex workers experience what Peter Nyers, in his plenary address at the conference from which the present volume emerged, called the irregularization of citizenship: these women are subject to but never subjects of the law. The regulation of space, informed by colonial conceptions of property and citizenship rights and reproduced in contemporary socio-spatial relations, is enacted as a means of control and discipline. Conceptions of space signal the inescapability of violence at the same time as the law encodes, sanitizes, and denies it.47 Material and discursive spaces come into being as a result of continual activity – for example, policing, reporting in the news, legal decisions – through which they are invested with meaning. These activities produce borders, categories, and surfaces that come to appear as natural and fixed over time. For police officers enforcing Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance, the meaning of suspicious activity is hence derived, in part, from understandings of property and space, which inform and are reproduced in dominant understandings of bodies. The knowledges, performances, and discourses that order space intersect with the production of social subjects associated with it. Space actively inscribes the figure of the sex worker with a prostitute identity through her position in place; hers is an inescapable identity reified through the performances of property and law.48 As Sanchez argues, there is an issue of sovereignty at the base of exclusion and displacement, a jurisdictional issue of who will be included

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in the social order to be governed, and who will not; who will appear in the political sphere, and who will be extinguished without sacrifice or neglected to the point of death.49 In addition to the physical experiences of violence, the ordinance performs a discursive – but no less material – violence against the outlawed prostitute. Her construction as the constitutive outside denies her appearance in the political sphere of visibility, rendering her discursively abject just as she is made to be physically so. “Projects of reassurance” require the continual physical and symbolic elimination of the illegalized sex worker from the field of view. Her figure contradicts the image of urban vitality intrinsic to conceptions of quality of life that demand deference to a singular juridical regime, just as it contradicts the idealized foundation of a cosmopolitan logic rooted in the assumption of a universally shared humanity.50 The legal bureaucratic processes occurring in the constitutive outside render violence legitimate through a commitment to the interests of included, propertied citizens, paradoxically suspending the rights of illegalized street sex workers as a means of maintaining order. The abandoned prostitute remains, necessarily, in a relationship with sovereign power, included through exclusion. Reduced to the status of the non-subject, unwelcome in both public and private property, she is forced to the margins of both physical and imagined space.

Conclusion Portland’s prostitution-free zone ordinance provides an empirical window into the entanglement of property, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and state law. But it is by no means an isolated case. The spatial logic of prostitution and other exclusion laws across North America and around the world evince the same principle of exclusion that forces illegalized sex workers into marginal zones of the city. The list of social control strategies is ever expanding, engendering new social relations and (re)producing powerfully regulatory spatial orderings. In each case, property and space are enrolled as important arbiters of the tenuous border between bodily safety and danger, the human and the lessthan-human, the regulation of space performed with the explicit intent of determining where the prostitute (or other abject body) can, and more importantly cannot, appear. For those subjected to exclusionary judicial practices, property, law, and corporeal violence are inextricably entangled, the law effectively creating a safe space for violence. The

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creation of this space services and shores up an important cosmopolitan fantasy: that of a universally shared humanity. Treated with the same doubt that questions the fundamental humanity of the colonial other, the outlawed, excluded prostitute is othered once again in her interactions with judicial justice. She is rendered literally beyond the gaze of the state by her exclusion from propertied space and all the rights associated with it. Not recognized as a subject of law, she is implicitly told: You are not human; You are not a rational being; You do not have rights. Perhaps not always spoken but nevertheless ever present in these reframings is a spatial logic to justice that denies the rights of citizenship to those who otherwise escape law’s disciplinary regulation. To identify and interrogate the particular and historical processes whereby materializations of property and identity stabilize over time and come to appear as fixed, natural, and universal introduces the possibility of disrupting their unequivocal and univocal posturing. The different interpretations and experiences of space in play in the enactment of exclusion laws cannot be reduced to perspective or construction. Rather, they represent highly contested sites of meaning, multiple processes of sedimentation and materialization occurring simultaneously in space and time. The constitutive outsides to positive forms of law and identity, though subjugated by juridico-spatial orderings, exist as potential sources of contestation in which contemporary experiences of coloniality can be challenged and deconstructed. The task is not to interpellate the outside as inside, to include every marginalized and excluded position within a singular conception of law, space, identity, or morality; no singular conception can contain all signs of difference. Otherwise put, the remedy to exclusion is not, as a colonial cosmopolitanism might imagine it, inclusion. Inclusion is “not only a fantasy but also a way of being made increasingly subject to [the violence of the norm].”51 Rather, the task is to illuminate the multiple possibilities of these conceptions (of law, identity, space, morality) – indeed, the multiple forms that already exist – to disrupt the formulation of particular notions of property, citizenship, and law as a priori, integral to the category “human.” In so doing, we may productively acknowledge that other ways of being, other means of relating, have legitimacy, and that they matter for the lived experiences of the subject.

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11 “Internal Racisms” of the Yakuza-eiga Mike Dillon

There appears to be no shortage, from any nation, of conservative politicians whose hyperbolic warnings against illegal immigration smack of alarmism and racial provocation. In the case of Japan, there have been numerous instances of invoking organized crime syndicates, commonly known as the yakuza, to inflate anti-immigrant rhetoric and generate politically handy arguments for keeping immigration under tight control.1 Apichai Shipper has illustrated how misleading statistics are used to reinforce links between foreigners and crime, “[constructing] a public image of foreigners as ‘dangerous,’ with little connection to real events or social situations.”2 The Japanese debate about illegal immigration takes a similar form as it would in any industrialized nation, with conservatives and liberals in disagreement about whether an influx of outsiders threatens the national body or strengthens its democracy. Despite the incendiary assertions coming from some corners about Dangerous Foreigners, evidence shows that rising education levels and regular contact with foreigners among Japanese students have actually increased public acceptance of immigrants.3 Furthermore, legislation beginning in the early 2000s has decentralized government power and bestowed greater degrees of independence and autonomy on local governments; the effect has been a growing civic participation among foreign residents

at smaller, municipal levels. This would suggest that everyday social and political life in Japan is not framed so overtly by xenophobic attitudes toward outsiders.4 Recently, it has become commonplace for younger Japanese filmmakers to depict this matter-of-fact presence of immigrants and people from non-native ethnic groups residing in Japan.5 This has altered the Japanese media landscape as it is perceived by its global audiences. We are long past the days when Western consumption of Japanese films consisted narrowly of its canonical art cinema – the work of Kurosawa Akira or Ozu Yasujirō, for instance – rather than its popular cinema, save perhaps for the iconic Godzilla (Gojira) series.6 Japanese pop culture’s acknowledgment of its own cultural heterogeneity suggests the market strength of what John Maher calls “metroethnicity,” a form of ethnic hybridity that “circumvents traditional conceptions of ethnic affiliation” in Japanese society.7 Amid the widespread availability of Japanese media and, in particular, the robust popularity of anime, Douglas McGray famously argued that vibrant cultural mixing produces an appreciable sense of “national cool” that now constitutes the essence of Japanese popular culture’s soft power.8 The yakuza film (or yakuza-eiga), a staple of Japanese commercial cinema, is among these mainstream entertainment genres with increasing minority representations, a trend verified by genre specialists such as Mark Schilling.9 Several memorable yakuza (or otherwise crime-related) films of the past twenty years – from renowned directors like Kitano Takeshi, Sai Yōichi, and Miike Takashi – have been centrally concerned with the ethnic dimensions of gang violence and the struggles of non-Japanese peoples to carve out a sense of identity in the underworld. Such films pose a conundrum for those, like Schilling, who suggest that ethnic presentations in mainstream films are inherently progressive. This is because such film narratives would also seem to reinforce associations between foreigners and organized crime in the public imagination. Contemporary yakuza films reflect these contradictory impulses in ways that are instructive for understanding how social marginality is managed at the interstices of illegal immigration and organized crime. The genre’s popularity (especially in its earlier forms) owes to its romanticizing of Japanese traditionalism; yet, this presentation is belied by real-life policies that aim to contain the yakuza, both spatially and culturally, to ensure their exclusion from mainstream constructions

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of normative “Japaneseness.” I argue that the recent “opening up” of the genre to include a wider range of representations exposes this fundamental paradox of the genre’s history, illustrating how the genre’s popularity not only reflects but also helps to generate social attitudes toward outcasts in the public imagination. In its more contemporary iterations, then, yakuza films make legible the perennial question of national belonging, and this renders them fascinating texts for studying the pressures that globalization places on Japan to be more inclusive of foreign identities and their cultural practices. Everyday Japanese life does not materially reflect the xenophobic discourses instigated by conservative politicians and agitators at the national level. Yakuza films, in contrast, earn their value by demonstrating the extent to which the perception of the threat of difference still retains cultural and commercial credibility. At issue, naturally, is a fundamental gap between how cultural difference is perceived and how it is experienced – something that becomes a necessary target of analysis in the study of cosmopolitanism as a lived reality or as a trope in popular fiction. Engaging these fictionalized renditions of significant societal change is not merely about addressing Japan’s idiosyncratic relationships to cosmopolitanism. Though the sociological and historical analyses undertaken in this chapter focus primarily on dynamics within Japan, also at stake here is a broader understanding of the role that Japan’s policies toward immigration plays in Eurocentric developments of cosmopolitan thought, as both a historical project and an outgrowth of media globalization. For one thing, Japanese popular cinema journeys through international distribution, consumption, and reception in our global media landscape. As the films reflect certain domestic cultural attitudes, so too do they shape attitudes in the Western imagination about “Japan” as a political ally and economic partner in a globalized world. At the same time, the yakuza films do more than present Japan to the world. In their representations of otherness, they reveal a long history of Japan’s entanglement in Eurocentric ideas about foreignness, which became the fundamental components in early Enlightenment theories of cosmopolitanism. “Perpetual Peace,” the Immanuel Kant essay referenced in this volume’s introduction, includes a telling passage in which he argues that universal laws of hospitality toward foreigners is essential in any effort to “[bring] the human race nearer and nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution.”10 However, Kant includes a crucial caveat – that the foreigner has the right to hospitable treat-

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ment “so long as he behaves in a peaceful manner”11 – citing European colonial violence as dreadful instances of visitor misconduct which betray the ideals of cosmopolitanism. Specifically, Kant invokes Japan (along with China) as cases in which nations have been justified in their intense restriction of their borders. Colonial aggression, naturally, is to be met with commensurate repulsion. As such, Kant shows us that Japan’s isolationist history has a wholly conflicted relationship with the perception of “foreigners” and the agendas they supposedly bring with them. A study of the yakuza shows us the ways in which these historically inhospitable reactions to foreigners are not asynchronous with the domestic treatment of society’s outcasts. Michael Weiner’s phrase “racisms of the interior”12 describes the stratified social frameworks devised to marginalize a variety of social others, such as the Ainu, burakumin (social outcasts), and the poor during the Tokugawa era (1600– 1867). Rather than being explicitly racial, Weiner’s usage of the term includes anybody deemed exterior to the desired national body. I argue that, in recent history, similar “internal racisms,” here encompassing hostile social attitudes toward unwelcome immigrants and the yakuza, have shared a telling trait: they cast both groups into a paradoxical zone between being part of the social fabric and being excluded from it. In a global era, in which the parameters for defining “Japaneseness” are at issue, alleging an overlap in the operations of the yakuza and the lives of immigrants – especially illegal immigrants, assumed by the public to be associated with crime – becomes one way to reassert normative categories of social behaviour and membership in a community. At stake in analyzing these yakuza films is a deeper understanding of how the popular culture legitimizes the battle for political recognition for foreign workers and “various population segments which do not regard the nation as the sole or principal source of identification.”13 While many of these films feature the familiar gangster-sociopath type (who makes for an entertaining villain), some, like Kamikaze Taxi (Kamikaze Takushii; Marada, 1995) and the Hong Kong-produced Shinjuku Incident (Shinjuku Inshidento/San suk si gin; Yee, 2009), dramatize how a life of crime emerges from the failures of Japanese institutions to process immigrants humanely. These films show how the legal frameworks of immigration in Japan consist of tensions between an “ideology of cultural and racial homogeneity,” and the human migration that is a reality of global capitalism.14

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According to Ceri Peach, Japan did not require foreign labour in the immediate years after the Second World War because it had a flexible labour force comprising women and the elderly, who were employed as part of an explicit strategy to keep unwanted foreigners out. Japan’s “official” lack of dependence on unskilled immigrant workers until the 1980s has, historically, offered a unique case study in how labour requirements shape the economies of advanced industrial nations.15 This history also perpetuated the myth that Japan had closed its doors to immigration until labour shortages and global economic pressures forced them open.16 According to this narrative, Japanese immigration policy was compelled to soften its restrictions in order to ensure productivity and tax revenues which, in turn, met domestic labour demands and kept welfare spending affordable.17 With the appreciation of the yen in the 1980s, the admittance of immigrant workers became the inevitable result of the transnationalization of Japanese capital, albeit under strict regulations.18 Recent Japanese immigration policies, however, are teeming with structural hypocrisies that turn a blind eye to “side-door” mechanisms and loopholes used to circumvent those regulations.19 Further, an “official insistence on temporariness has made the presence of foreign workers more acceptable to the Japanese public and has relieved the national government of the burden of providing expensive social services to immigrant settlers.”20 Reforms enacted by the Immigration Act of 1990 are most notable for granting residency to Latin Americans of Japanese descent (nikkeijin), who are given priority status due to their Japanese ethnic lineage. The admittance of nikkeijin, despite their total cultural and linguistic foreignness, helped to reinforce a façade of ethnic homogeneity in Japan.21 Such racialized policy frameworks exemplify the nativist ideology of “‘uniqueness’ and ‘monoculturalism’” that rule the day,22 frustrating the smooth integration of outsiders into the Japanese polity. Linguistic and cultural interactions with the local Japanese are potentially lessened when marginalized immigrant communities band together to form ethnic enclaves23 – for instance, the Nikkei communities concentrated in Ōizumi, the Muslims in Isezaki, the Chinese in Ikebukuro, and the collection of mainland Asians in Shinjuku. Anxieties about criminal conduct among foreigners in Japan, even while statistically unjustified, are partially reinforced by these geographical demarcations; such worries are fuelled further by the “internal racisms” of opportunistic

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conservative officials who claim that illegal aliens threaten Japanese society by colluding with organized criminals.24 This association with the yakuza, in turn, reinforces the social alienation of non-violent illegal immigrants, for whom links to organized crime may be a depressing reflection of their limited economic options.25 As some have argued, this chain of associations leads one to imagine that recent incarnations of yakuza films play directly into anxieties about the threats posed by foreigners, making it the de facto genre for expressing subconscious xenophobic fears among the Japanese.26 Schilling’s observations about the increasing diversity of contemporary Japanese cinema therefore carry aspirational implications for those concerned about, for instance, the political recognition of sangokujin – ex-colonial nationals from China, Korea, and Taiwan, many of whose residence in Japan originates in a legacy of forced migration.27 I argue that these films are not so easily boxed into either the progressive or the reactionary category. In fact, they represent a tricky negotiation, depicting social otherness amidst the increasing inescapability of international cultural integration. In searching for some sustainable definition of “Japaneseness” in a global world, the yakuza/crime genre is useful for thinking about the unresolved relationships between nationalism and internationalism that specifically manifest as worries about the unrestricted mobility of foreigners. The influential film Swallowtail Butterfly (Suwarōteiru; Iwai, 1996), for example, depicts a parallel Japanese society in which the appreciation of the yen has caused a flood of illegal immigration into Japan; we follow the lives of several interconnected characters in the fictitious immigrant ghettos of “Yen Town.” The film’s bittersweet optimism suggests that the loss of stable identities in a global world nevertheless produces meaningful alternative cultural and linguistic practices among communities of displaced peoples. Swallowtail takes seriously the non-normative ways of experiencing Japanese society and does not hesitate to portray domestic institutions as corrupt, racist, and regressive.28 The film is likewise noteworthy for the backlash it has garnered from academics who claim that its stylistic excesses undercut its message of multicultural coexistence,29 and so the film ends up promoting a kind of “hollow multiculturalism.”30 Yet, dismissing Swallowtail’s stylistic indulgences in its treatment of ethnic difference fails to consider how the paradoxically sympathetic and superficial presentations of immigrants is precisely how the genre is now negotiating

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its own mythology. In the yakuza genre, these paradoxical attitudes toward foreigners mirror the simultaneous real-life apprehension of and popular fascination with onscreen gangsters. In this spirit, a crucial person to consider is Miike Takashi, the controversial filmmaker and international cult icon whose yakuza narratives frequently depict violent conflict between ethnicities. Many of Miike’s films reveal a fascination with the struggles and experiences of mixed blooded characters living on the fringes in Japan.31 As some critics have proposed, the yakuza genre matches his sensibilities as a director the most because it allows for a merging of his tendencies toward excessively violent bravado with the confusion and melancholia of ethnic alienation.32 According to Aaron Gerow, Miike’s sensibilities are fundamentally “homeless” – a term that ties together the wandering existences of many of his characters, the seeming lack of consistency in his stylistic preferences, and his frequent alternation between highand low-budget productions. This general lack of adherence to conventional boundaries makes Miike a compelling figure when considering the representations of social difference that pervade his works. In collapsing so many distinctions, his films not only exemplify the hybridized features of contemporary Japanese popular culture, but also raise questions about how cultural categories – notably “domestic” and “foreign” – come into contact within Japanese society. The presence of immigrants and foreigners in several of Miike’s films points to progressive desires for interconnectedness with a world community, as well as to reactionary fears of encroachment and contamination from outside of the nation.33 One particular film, Dead or Alive (Deddo oa Araibu: Hanzaisha; 1999; henceforth DOA ), has been cited by reviewers as an inventive variation on the yakuza film which melds Miike’s ethnic awareness with pervasive formal experimentation and manga/anime-inspired bombast.34 Through the fusion of different stylistic and formal strategies, these types of yakuza films seem most suitable for capturing the immigrant experience and the dynamism of urban cosmopolitanism, a relationship through which the processes of globalization can be observed, measured, and analyzed.35 The films’ depictions of life on the margins also reveal the fragmentations of urban spaces produced by those processes, whether they occur in the fictional slums of Yen Town or in Kabuki-chō (Tokyo’s premiere entertainment and red light district, famously a hive of yakuza activity). Furthermore, the violence and self-destructive characters that conventionally feature

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in gangster films guarantee a persistent state of conflict between the divergent “life-worlds”36 of domestic Japanese and illegal immigrants. For instance, Miike’s presentation of immigrants in DOA makes possible a conversation about Japanese society’s relationship to its minority population and to multiculturalism generally. Ryū (Takeuchi Riki), the film’s chief antagonist, is an ethnically Chinese gangster trying to muscle his way into the Shinjuku underworld. He suffers a catastrophic loss midway through the narrative: his younger brother Tōji (Kashiwaya Michisuke), a good kid with no knowledge of Ryū’s criminal dealings, is killed by a bullet during a shootout. Until this point in the film, Ryū’s ambitions to burrow into the drug trade are presented as being at odds with his desire to shield Tōji from a life of crime. That Tōji would die violently is hardly a surprising plot development for the genre, which frequently employs the death of a loved one to signify a main character’s spiritual downfall. However, the ethnic inflection of this familiar convention is intriguing. Tōji has spent time abroad as a university student, enjoys his studies, and insists that immigrants can excel in their host society (indeed, he becomes distraught to learn that Ryū has been financing his education with illicit money). The two brothers thereby personify opposite poles of the discourses surrounding illegal immigration: on the one hand, progressive arguments favour the societal contributions of immigrants like Tōji and advocate for their access to society’s benefits and protections, while on the other hand, conservative arguments worry about the rampant lawlessness symbolized by men like Ryū. In this sense, then, Tōji’s demise signals the difficulties of reconciling two reductive categorizations of the immigrant experience, one based in progressive idealism, the other in xenophobic paranoia.

The Yakuza genre Some consider DOA to be most exemplary of the “Miike Brand” for its departures from accepted conventions37 and its normalization of levels of perversity well beyond what spectators expect from the genre.38 But the film is not entirely divergent from the genre’s history of negotiating social difference. Some historical context is necessary here. Real modern yakuza descend from peddlers (tekiya) and gamblers (bakutō) who organized into outlaw groups in the mid-eighteenth century.39 Experts on the subject consistently note the nostalgic associations yakuza

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have with “noble values that can be traced back to the samurai warriors of feudal Japan.”40 In myriad popular theatrical, literary, and cinematic traditions, yakuza heroes adhere to strict, hierarchized forms of organization ruled by jingi (a code of honour and clan loyalty), and they are wrapped in a Robin Hood-like mythology as social outcasts opposing the injustices of power.41 But the yakuza are not a bygone, fictitious class of criminals; for decades they have exerted real political power within the Japanese government (and have done so openly, unlike Western mafia groups, which operate in secret). David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro’s expansive English-language work on the subject draws parallels between the modern yakuza and modern Japan itself. Much as the economic miracle has determined Japanese trade power on the world stage, so too have the yakuza developed a global infrastructure trafficking in arms, drugs, sex workers, and illegal labour.42 Specific traits of the yakuza film’s postwar history and corresponding social trends provide the context for understanding the diasporic mob identities that feature in contemporary works. The genre’s relationship to codes of social normativity is important for understanding the political significance of immigrant identities becoming entangled with yakuza violence. In the seminal essay “On Chivalry” (Ninkyō ni Tsuite; translation mine), critic Satō Tadao argues that the postwar yakuza film plays to the viewer’s distrust of state power and desire to be free of its constraints in favour of pursuing the romanticism of nomadism and adventure. At the same time, however, the viewer remains beholden to the belief that society’s laws must be upheld, labour strikes must be avoided, and the police must be obeyed.43 There is, therefore, a tacit acceptance on the viewer’s part that the price a yakuza pays for his nonconformity is eternal loneliness as a social outcast. What Satō calls the loveable yakuza – or, perhaps more accurately, the yakuza who ought to be loved (aisubeki yakuza) – is admired for resisting the status quo, but is relegated to a life on the margins because of this resistance. Consequently, Satō argues, yakuza film spectatorship operates on a moral relativism that makes it serviceable to both conservative and liberal ideologies. This explains the genre’s popularity in the 1950s and 1960s among right-wing nationalists as well as leftwing groups whose anti-capitalist positions merged with increasing anti-Americanism in the wake of the Vietnam War.44 Keiko McDonald’s expository essay “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction” frames the

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genre’s immense popularity at this time, noting that the yakuza protagonist of prewar films – a lone wolf/vagabond archetype who is forced into a life of crime – underwent a makeover in response to Japan’s rising postwar prosperity.45 By the 1950s, the romanticism of the screen yakuza’s Robin Hood-like mythology was revitalized by Japanese cinema’s “enthusiastic return to the jidai-geki (period film) in response to the American occupation’s ban on feudal tales being lifted. The public was hungry for this source of cultural continuity, and a new type of yakuza emerged to satisfy new needs.”46 In being updated from its feudal roots, the genre reflected the social concerns of newly democratized postwar Japan. National policy agendas like Prime Minster Yoshida Shigeru’s eponymous Yoshida Doctrine, which prioritized Japan’s economic recovery above all other public policies, “increasingly became associated with the idea that individuals needed to subjugate their individual desires to the national good.”47 According to Eric Cazdyn, Japan’s very stability in this era necessitated that the individual must be rethought, fleshed out, constructed, fostered so as to prevent a future breakdown in civil society and lack of popular accountability. A sense of self – of one’s capacity and legitimacy to act as an individual and to intervene against the state and collective opinion – was crucial to keep the nation from ever being hijacked again. At the same time, an emphasis on the collective and the nation (not too dissimilar in logic to the discourse promoted during the war) threatened to trump the individual. The individual must be sacrificed, must give himself or herself over to the occupation and the reconstruction project.48 The yakuza genre’s popularity at this time reflects social ambivalence toward a new era of individuality and its uncertain impact on notions of community and tradition.49 As Katō Kenji argues, the genre depicted morality – wherein notions of right and wrong are not necessarily analogous to being legal or illegal – through the strain that a protagonist’s selfish conduct would place on his community.50 Yakuza characters of the period consequently engage in “a kind of moral territorial war” that allegorizes postwar tensions between traditional forms and a new politics of democratization and international capitalist integration.51

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As such, a crisis of national identity brought on by the perception of corrosive foreign influences is not merely a modern response to globalization. It is, in fact, central to the genre’s value system. This interpretation is reinforced by Isolde Standish, who links the genre to the objectives of nihonjinron (literally “theories about the Japanese”), a wide range of pseudo-scientific studies attempting to construe the characteristics of Japanese cultural exceptionalism. She regards the violence between individuals in such films as analogous to struggles between differing postwar sociopolitical ideologies searching for ways to code the tenets of traditional “Japaneseness” in a positive light. These 1960s yakuza films … can be analyzed as sites where academic nihonjinron discourses are fictionalized in popular form. Contestation is reflected in the film as struggles, not as in western Hollywood dramas between the “good” and “bad” per se, but between competing organizations or factions which are cast in either “good” or “bad” roles depending on their commitments to tradition.52 This explicitly ideological dynamic served a sense of national identity that “called for virtues such as charismatic leadership, group loyalty, and social harmony.”53 A celebration of Japanese traditionalism can be seen in the genre’s iconography, which symbolized Westernization’s seeming lethal effects on cultural traditions. For instance, “good” yakuza – those who selflessly embodied “individual sacrifice for social preservation”54 – wore traditional garb and used a sword in battle. The “bad” ones wore slick Western suits and carried “dishonorable” weapons, like pistols.55 If these delineations of yakuza heroism seem anachronistic in the era of films like DOA , it is partially because the genre has since departed from these dominant codes of representation except in the most nostalgic instances. Within a decade of its initial popularity, yakuza films, already a cheaply produced “B ” genre, became further ghettoized within the industry.56 The repetition of its allegorical narratives gradually grew stale for audiences tired of their predetermined patterns. Industrial factors contributed to this decline, too; rising competition from Hollywood and television precipitated the collapse of the film industry, whose survival became dependent largely on schlocky

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exploitation flicks and soft-core pornography, known as “pink films” (pinku-eiga). The idealism and romanticism of the genre simply withered away.57 In response to the waning enthusiasm of jaded audiences, a new spate of yakuza films would feature an alternative, low-budget style. Nicknamed the jitsuroku (“authentic recording”) phase of the genre, this generation of films was influenced heavily by cinéma vérité, and it represented a “radical shift in pattern from idealism to realism” in the yakuza genre’s stylistic priorities.58 The films utilized hand-held cameras, were shot on locations that gave them a gritty authenticity, and were accompanied by narration that chronicled the events in documentary-like fashion. The most iconic of these films, Fukasaku Kinji’s Battles without Honor and Humanity (Jingi Naki Tatakai; 1974), shows the political economy of yakuza organizations without deference to romantic or nostalgic characterizations of yakuza heroes who selflessly defend the weak. These yakuza are conceited, petty, and small-minded; their acts of violence are graceless and clumsy, and assassination attempts mostly consist of them firing their weapons blindly in panic. Fukasaku’s works (and many later films influenced by them) are intensely critical of Japanese institutions. Further, they cynically depict a “radical transformation of the yakuza life … marked by an obviously symbolic growth in the power and purpose of money.”59 This changing mythos of the screen yakuza and its associations in the public imagination with real-life yakuza together provide an important context for deconstructing the complex representations of illegal immigrants in works like Swallowtail or DOA . They have profound implications for how the genre’s nationalistic sensibilities reconcile the growing internationalism of postwar Japanese culture. In noting that earlier yakuza films promoted traditional Japanese social identities, we must bear in mind the contemporaneous international relations that invigorated those representations. As Standish suggests above, the outlaw figure of the yakuza became a popular cultural avatar for ambivalent attitudes toward (even resistance against) the perceived incursion of Western values. Her invocation of nihonjinron specifically links the heroic yakuza’s sense of community to Japanese cultural values that signal a difference from so-called Western individualism. Nihonjiron’s ideological imperative to define Japanese uniqueness in relation to assumed characteristics of Western societies results in a binary between the individualism of the United States and

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the achieve-it-together collectivism of Japan. Kosaku Yoshino’s work characterizes nihonjinron as a market that relies on a process of “selfothering,” whose primary agenda is to promote areas of Japanese cultural and social specificity that can be positioned as unique among external cultural examples. Nihonjiron, therefore, is born from and sustained by a simultaneous need to assert Japanese exceptionalism, but also to essentialize the characteristics of outside societies to serve as points of comparison. That is, Japan’s manufactured nationalism depends on managing the discourse of what constitutes non-Japaneseness inside and outside of its borders.60 Ironically, the urgency with which postwar nihonjiron proclaims this exceptionalism emerges from the international relations that facilitated Japan’s postwar economic boom.

Marginality and the Problem of Space Despite their obvious structural and sociological adherences to principles lauded in mainstream nihonjinron, the yakuza are seldom mentioned in such literature.61 Perhaps this is unsurprising: the purpose of nihonjinron is to construct romantic discourses of Japanese virtues, and undesirable criminal elements were cropped out of the self-portrait that Japanese society preferred to promote. This process of selection explains how it is that the yakuza films of the postwar period reinforce the rosy assertions of the nihonjinron, whilst the existence of real-life yakuza does not. Similar exclusionary attitudes about the yakuza can be seen taking their shape in policies enacted with an eye toward the outside world, such as a wave of anti-yakuza laws that went into effect in time for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Efforts to crack down on organized crime signalled to the world community that modern Japan had no place for its yakuza elements (with the exception of their depictions in popular fiction celebrating Japanese traditionalism). Containment has since continued to be an objective of anti-yakuza lawmaking. As recently as 2011, new legislation has entailed policing any financial association with yakuza organizations, a measure designed to dissuade people from emboldening the harassment, extortion, and blackmail schemes typically employed by gangsters.62 Such laws address the perception – if not the reality – of “the invasion of the yakuza into the lives of ordinary citizens and their inroads into the business communities.”63 The adoption of the term “bōryoku-dan” to rebrand the yakuza as a “violent group” itself is an exertion of control,

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echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that the power to name an object is sometimes enough to define the parameters of its social acceptance.64 This type of policy-making proves problematic for illegal immigrants whose daily realities are bound up in the illicit businesses and industries managed by the yakuza (who, in many cases, brokered their arrival to Japan). Kaplan and Dubro, as well as Andrew Rankin, detail the overlapping dimensions of real-life yakuza activities and the unauthorized influx of foreigners into Japan.65 What is a worrisome byproduct of Japan’s economic clout in an interconnected world has been a boon for crime syndicates that control the flow of illegal labourers and sex workers.66 Parallels between state efforts to curtail the expansion of yakuza activity into financial and business sectors are not unlike the Olympics-era attempts to purify Japan’s image while under the scrutiny of the international community. The 1990 Immigration Reform Act, which gave preferential treatment to ethnically Japanese nikkeijin, was, in part, orchestrated to maintain illusions of Japanese racial wholeness. This was followed merely one year later by anti-bōryoku-dan laws, consisting of legislation aimed at managing the yakuza’s (exaggerated) threats to Japanese social stability, which would presumably impact Japan’s image as a sound investment for global interests.67 The proximity of these laws suggests that serious changes in Japanese state policy are concessions required for inclusion into the international community of industrial democracies. Amy Gurowitz argues that, despite resisting compromises to its ideology of racial purity, the Japanese government often makes such concessions out of sensitivity to its reputation in the outside world.68 In this sense, the threat that yakuza organizations are believed to pose to Japan’s credibility on the international stage (as a cancer within) intersects with unrestricted immigration that supposedly threatens Japan’s cultural homogeneity (a virus from without). Both issues concern the management of a supposed crisis of Japaneseness that informs nihonjiron literature.69 The overlapping zone between these two social problems is where films like DOA can open conversations about constructions of ethnic normativity versus marginality when defining what is “Japanese” in a globalized world. The theme of marginality, to be sure, has been essential to yakuza films, as noted in studies attempting to pinpoint the genre’s precise appeal among the predominantly male, working class young adults who typically compose its core audience.70 The literature on the genre

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suggests that early yakuza film spectatorship sprung from postwar urban industrial growth, which resulted in the internal migrations of workers to Japan’s metropoles. One yakuza film producer notes that, by romantically upholding a sense of communality and national belonging, the genre soothes the profound loneliness people experience upon leaving their families and relocating to unfamiliar cities.71 Those unable to conform to a conventional family life, or to social ideals they do not subscribe to, found vicarious pleasures in the outcast lifestyles of the screen yakuza.72 There are two disparate notions of citizenship and national belonging seen operating in the generic representations and real-world counterparts of such films. As fictionalized entertainment, the underworld is presented as a space in which even those at the outermost fringes can band together with a sense of purpose and belonging; it is a space in which their most selfish impulses can be rebranded as masculine and cool. However, some criticize the genre for its utopic presentations of a community populated by people who voluntarily adopt its rules and codes. Ōshima Nagisa, one of the masters of Japanese New Wave cinema, wrote of his own aversion to working in the genre by describing this very problem: yakuza films instill in audiences the belief that the yakuza occupy a separate social space in Japan, reinforcing their political dismissal as tasha (“other people”).73 He goes on to argue that the influential Battle series, and specifically its use of voice-over narration and title cards (both components of its documentary-like style), titillates audiences with a seemingly historical account. Despite the realism of its presentation, the films nevertheless unfold in an insulated fantasy world in which all conflicts and resolutions are confined principally to spaces of crime. Ōshima calls this projection of social and spatial otherness the “essence of discrimination.”74 In this sense, it is perhaps Miike’s most progressive statement that the genre’s promises of community are ultimately meaningless if they are not shared equally across Japan’s inhabitants, across the lines of race, class, and social standing. Similar arguments against real-life anti-yakuza laws and subsequent crackdowns on gang activities point to naïve understandings of the structural factors and class relations that compel disadvantaged people to join the yakuza in the first place. Making a felony offence of any dealings with criminal organizations likewise fails to comprehend the everyday spatial practices of urban life, which are not so easily

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compartmentalized between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” social interactions and commercial relationships. Upon the enactment of anti-yakuza measures in 2011, several commercial outlets lashed out against the law’s actual effects – for instance, businesses and services must now fear prosecution or legal reprisals for unwittingly delivering a pizza or offering religious rites to a yakuza member.75 Such problems are the inevitable result of choosing to view the underworld as socially independent from its neighbouring community instead of intertwined with it. In actuality, attempts to eradicate organized crime have forced the yakuza to seek out new sources of revenue. Such organizations have done so by exploiting the precarious situations of immigrants (who risk deportation by turning to the police), or by expanding their overseas operations in mainland Asia, and also in Australia, the Philippines, Russia, Western Europe, Latin America, and in the United States, notably in Southern California.76 In other instances, the laws have compelled yakuza groups to consolidate into larger, less penetrable conglomerates (keiretsuka).77 Another tangible impact of these laws has been to reduce the physical spaces in which the yakuza can operate (even while their expansion into new financial sectors feeds the opposite perception). This makes the regulation of space central to understanding the yakuza’s “illegitimacy” in representing normative Japanese society.78 The set of policy frameworks emerging from the kindred view that both organized crime and the mobility of foreigners must be tightly controlled is what appears to have woven its way into these genre films. Consider the frenzied opening sequence of DOA , in which Ryū coordinates an elaborate series of gang assassinations across the city, depicted through rapid, disjointed editing (commonly, even derivatively, referred to as the mtv -style) – all accompanied by pulsing rock and roll audio. But despite its seeming disregard for spatial or temporal coherence, the sequence is organized entirely by frenetic mobility through urban space. The relatively small area of Kabuki-chō permits the impression that its rampant yakuza activity is geographically localized and contained. Yet within that space, criminal activity is fractured by a multitude of agendas and subjectivities, all shown to move with impunity through Kabuki-chō’s gangscapes. At one point during the sequence, Ryū walks into the busy streets, clad head to toe in black, wearing sunglasses (at night, mind), and

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brandishing a shotgun. Without hesitation, he climbs atop a vehicle and blasts away at a rival drug dealer through the sunroof with no apparent worry of the crowd around him. He then escapes without difficulty. So absurd is the sequence overall that it seems to parody the worst fears of immigrant evildoing: despite legal efforts to curtail their movements, they nevertheless move freely and brazenly across space and time to devastating effect. The audacity with which Ryū commits acts of violence and disappears into the incoherence of the montage invokes the sensationalized media visibility and simultaneous political invisibility of the illegal immigrant’s experience in the eyes of Japanese policy-making. DOA exemplifies a genre whose increasing diversity of representations is rife with the ideological contradictions seen in Japan’s policies toward immigration and organized crime; the film’s renderings of Japan’s complex relationship to foreigners is perhaps best seen in the failures of such characters to attain a permanent sense of belonging. As Gerow notes, the “homelessness” of Miike’s characters, like that of his authorial style, is perpetual and without resolution. Perhaps for this reason, homelessness finds a logical place in the yakuza genre, whose characters also have ambiguous relationships to normative Japanese identity. Miike does not celebrate his immigrant characters or appear even to propose solutions to these explosive encounters between ethnic groups. Depending on the viewer’s politics, films like DOA lend themselves to the kind of open-ended interpretations that Satō identified at the genre’s earliest phases. Ryū’s relentless criminality points to the importance of policing criminals and foreigners alike; at the same time, our empathy toward his institutional disadvantages as an immigrant demonstrates the need for a greater civil acceptance of outsiders if Japan is to be part of the international community.79 But both of these readings are predicated on boundaries that Miike seems intent on ignoring. His “homeless” style brings together so many disparate elements and devices (including the Dragon Ball Z-inspired iconography of the final scene, in which Japan literally explodes off the world map) that any singular interpretation of community, honour, and identity remain elusive by the film’s end. We are, in essence, left to muse whether the crisis of Japanese nationalism is at all manageable in a changing, globalizing world. As long as that crisis remains unresolved, the yakuza and illegal immigrants will occupy a shared social space, to borrow a phrase from Cazdyn, “at the dead center of contradiction.”80 216

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12 Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Tolstoyan and Goethean Ideas of World Literature during the Two World Wars Dina Gusejnova

In light of the human tragedies of the twentieth century, any historically sensitive engagement with the notion of cosmopolitanism today must to some extent begin ex negativo. It is not just the case that international institutions such as the League of Nations were “lights” of Enlightenment that failed to provide lasting peace.1 Cosmopolitan ideals had themselves become instruments of inhuman practice. Leading thinkers of each generation used cosmopolitan ideas of humanity to formulate rival conceptions of cultural hegemony, serving the aims of the Axis powers and the Allies, the states behind the Iron Curtain and those in front of it, and non-governmental organizations like the ymCa or the Carnegie foundations. To complicate matters further, in the twentieth century, the very terms “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolite” were instrumentalized in Nazi and Soviet propaganda, where they were embedded in anti-Semitic discourse.2 Nonetheless, despite this complicated history, I believe that a return to the history of twentieth-century internationalism through the lens of cosmopolitan ideals is needed in order to clarify the entangled

relationship between nationalism, internationalism, and transnational agency in a way that transcends the optic of the Cold War. In this paper, then, I use a series of case studies to explore how institutions and practices of cultural internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century adapted cosmopolitan ideals to a variety of goals: national propaganda, and communist and liberal internationalism, among others. I am also interested in retracing cosmopolitan thought through another sense of the “negative”: as photographic counter-image to the reality we want to see in print. Some of the activities of intellectuals who were using ideas to further the war efforts of particular governments or non-governmental associations, and the existence of permanently exceptional institutions such as the prisoner of war camp, also unintentionally led to cosmopolitanization. This is particularly true in the use of world literature as a tool for re-educating the enemy, which will be the subject of the second half of this essay. Prior to the twentieth century, intellectuals had begun to play an increasing role in forming new social identities that transcended the elite republic of letters, as well as imperial or national boundaries. New, interimperial cultural affinities were forged from political journalism in response to particular historical moments, which divided European publics along ethnic or confessional lines in place of national or imperial forms of patriotism. This allowed intellectuals to phrase the reporting of atrocities committed by and against states in terms that called for international solidarity and humanitarian intervention. Instances of this include the American Civil War; the Ottoman imperial authorities’ actions against the Bulgarians in 1873; anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia in the 1900s; the German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War; the famines in Russia; or the crisis after the bombing of Guernica in 1937. These events, many decades before the Holocaust, called on intellectuals across Europe and in the transatlantic world to unite in their assessment of forms of civility and forms of barbarism practised not only in Europe’s colonies but also in its continental heartlands and peripheries.3 A thicker sense of cosmopolitan consciousness was also the result of new forms of cultural management. Culture and standards of education became increasingly global, associated particularly with the German and British educational models and the French art market.4 Like Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the new internationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century rested on societal connections in the spheres of economy and culture. These connections – from

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trade unions to international cultural congresses and exhibitions, or world federations of faiths – had themselves become the substance of a cosmopolitan imaginary.5 The ideal of world literature was one of the core notions that connected twentieth-century internationalism to its Enlightenment predecessors.

world Literature as a Cosmopolitan Project Cosmopolitanism was a family of neoclassical idealist political theories, which imagined human history and its future from a perspective that was potentially both global and universal. The search for a universal scheme for individual and collective rational action based on good will was intended to enable cultural expression, but preserving any culture in particular was not its goal. In fact, despite being evidently part of an informal interimperial or supraimperial culture, also known as a “republic of letters,” classical theorists of cosmopolitanism professed a rather thin concept of culture. If one thinks of culture as a repertoire of diverse forms of human expression, or, to use a geometrical analogy, an infinite variety of different kinds of shapes, one could say that cosmopolitan thought is primarily interested in the square areas of these forms, rather than the more specific habits, practices, and styles. Any interest in more specific cultural habits, or the very idea of the preservation of culture as an end in itself, was initially a tool of cosmopolitanism’s critics – especially those who were broadly sympathetic to the Enlightenment values behind cosmopolitanism, such as Johann Gottfried Herder. Because of this thin concept of culture, cosmopolitanism, particularly in the liberal tradition, is often associated with cultural indifference. One could say that culture in any specific sense is simply not an end in itself for cosmopolitan thinkers: humanity is. Cosmopolitanism may enable culture to flourish, but does not define its content. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the relationship between cosmopolitan outlooks and culture changed. The emergence of different kinds of political internationalism took it for granted that identifying specific cultural forms was one of the key ways of conceptualizing political sovereignty; by extension, the idea of international federations, too, depended on identifying norms concerning the way that cultures relate to each other. Recently, historians have been highlighting the importance of the fact that cosmopolitanism was shaped in

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the interimperial circles of Enlightenment sociability. Here, we have an Immanuel Kant who was at different moments a Prussian and a Russian subject; intellectuals like Voltaire and Jeremy Bentham, who served at multiple European courts; and the European academies and new university foundations, which mushroomed at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.6 Peripheral locations, whether they were Prince Potemkin’s estates in White Russia or Swiss city-states, were as important to the cosmopolitan imaginary as the central courts in Versailles, St Petersburg, or Potsdam.7 Some historians have envisioned the genealogy that links twentieth-century cultural internationalism to the cosmopolitan ideal by pointing to Herder’s notion of a cultural pluriverse of vernaculars, an idea he had set against what he thought to be Kant’s neo-imperial concept of cultural hierarchies.8 However, as I see it, the more important figure in establishing a basis for an idea of cosmopolitanism centred on culture was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The increasing preoccupation with world literature as a project directed from above was intimately tied to the shifting political economy of Europe’s most precarious states, post-imperial Germany and Soviet Russia – which is an economic and intellectual history of cosmopolitanization neglected by accounts such as Pascale Casanova’s Paris-focused study.9 According to twentieth-century liberals like Ernst Cassirer, Goethe exemplified the best of cosmopolitan thought.10 Friedrich Gundolf ’s biography presented Goethe as a theorist of humanism, articulated through the ideal of education and self-improvement.11 Goethe’s authority was also important to cultural internationalism in the Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, the editors of the influential journal Krasnyi Arkhiv were adamant about constructing an idea of culture in which progressive thinkers in Russian culture were presented as closely linked to those in the West. Aside from publishing selections from Tolstoy’s archive showing him to be sympathetic to the Bolshevik vision of history, they also published a selection of letters that demonstrated Goethe’s correspondence with Russian intellectuals of his generation.12 Goethe himself first used the notion of “world literature” or Weltliteratur as a neologism in 1827. Due to Goethe’s international standing and his eminent network of correspondence, it quickly became quite well known, even though Goethe himself did not give it programmatic form.13 Goethe and his correspondence partners had elevated the

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question of the cultural canon to the status of a political debate, and one that appealed to a variety of political strands: imperialist, nationalist, and internationalist.14 At the heart of his idea of world literature was the conviction that there is a way of thinking about literature based on universal standards of classical antiquity, which would theoretically allow each cultural tradition to find its own representative among a pantheon of world literatures. In practice, however, not all world literatures had equal representation in such a canon; such representation depended on the (sometimes arbitrary) distribution of genius among the nations. The Germans in particular, Goethe believed, had a privilege in this respect, not so much because they had so many representatives of world literature, but because knowledge of the German language offered access to a “market where all nations were offering their goods.”15 At any given moment, world literature captured a selection of outstanding pieces of each nation’s intellectual property, which, by means of translation, could become the property of all. Indeed, in Goethe’s lifetime, the German tradition and intensity of literary translation exceeded that of all other nations by far.16 Goethe’s vision of cultural cosmopolitanism associated with world literature was a principle of striving to make the greatest possible number of works of national property into the common property of all humanity. As such, it was not directed at states or governments but at poets and translators, not at the “palaces” but at the “huts.” According to Goethe, the means of attaining such a cosmopolitan ideal included translation and adaptation; reading, knowing and disseminating works in their original languages where possible; and educating children. Independently from Marx and Engels’s appropriation of the term “world literature,” the meaning of “property” in Goethe’s vision of cosmopolitanism became increasingly more literal. Strictly speaking, Goethe never actually developed a theory of world literature in the sense of a fully fledged interpretive scheme like Kant’s, Herder’s, or Schiller’s ideas of cosmopolitan points of view. Rather, his “theory” was a series of remarks which Goethe uttered in conversation and in correspondence with contemporaries such as Johann Eckermann, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Nikolai Karamzin, and others, and which began to circulate in the European intellectual circles of the mid-nineteenth century.17 These remarks were like small speech acts, performances that led to the inception of a new way of thinking about the relationship between the production

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of literature and the production of ideas about the world. Secondly, Goethe was not a radical thinker in the political sense. He was not unpolitical, and indeed was a vocal critic of some contemporary politics, but it is clear that his ideal was not tied to the vision of any grand scheme for a political alternative to the present world, or a critique of imperialism in the spirit of Herder. Much of his productive period was spent in the second-order court of Anna Amalia in Weimar, a modest form of politics he much admired. It was a liberal model of the relationship between culture and politics through patronage, voluntary association, and freedom of speech. Goethe followed this model himself by translating and adapting works of classical antiquity, European and non-European folk traditions, and works by Central and East Asian poets, as well as by engaging in intensive correspondence with contemporary “foreign” writers. The only “cosmopolitanism” that Goethe displayed in a political sense was his admiration of Napoleon even during periods of heightened patriotism, such as the so-called German “Wars of Emancipation” (Befreiungskriege) against Napoleon, which culminated in the Battle of the Peoples (Völkerschlacht, typically translated as “Battle of the Nations”) of 1813. But even that was not cosmopolitan in the sense of an open-minded twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Goethe expressly preferred the company of Frenchmen and Italians to the wild troops of the Russian army, the “Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Cassubians, Sami, Hussars of brown and other skin colours.”18 Thus to enlist Goethe’s cultural ideal in the construction of an anti-colonial imaginary needs to be qualified against our knowledge of these remarks. However, at the same time, the fact that Goethe himself did not tie his concept of “world literature” to any radical political demands does not mean that the subsequent use of the concept should be considered exclusively in terms of an economy of cultural values dissociated from political economy. Contrary to the image that Pascale Casanova gives of world literature as a field of economic and value relations disconnected from political economy at large, world literature was from the beginning a highly contested object of global political economy. It was thanks to Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, written very much under the spell of another work of Goethe’s – his Sorcerer’s Apprentice – that the term Weltliteratur itself gained world currency in German and in many other languages. As Marx and Engels rightly pointed out, Goethe’s statements about the world market of ideas was

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not only an economic metaphor, but also reflected the economic reality of a growing market for world literature. Thus in the bourgeois era, the “intellectual creations of individual nations become common property,” as Marx and Engels predicted that “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness” would “become more and more impossible.” In this process of circulation, “from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”19 Both the translation and circulation of literary texts considered to be canonical by rival individuals and organizations were heavily affected by state and private capital. Moreover, what made Marx and Engels’s interpretation of Goethe’s term particularly influential was the fact that the subsequent emergence of world literature as a product of consumption cannot be separated from the economic development of global capitalism itself. In the later nineteenth century, literature first became the object of national governance, as laws for the protection of intellectual property were passed in the text of the Constitution of the North German Federation (1867). Later, the Paris and Berne Conventions for intellectual property (which remain in force today) were amended at roughly ten-year intervals until the Second World War and twice more thereafter, to include new signatory member states and to enlarge the scope of “intellectual property” from industrial and scientific patents (Paris, 1883) to the circulation of ideas in art and literature (Berne, 1886–1979).20 The only states that did not sign these agreements were the Russian empire and the Scandinavian countries. By the twentieth century, Soviet Russia was the only European power that had not signed the agreements. Thus not only theoretically, but also practically, the way that literature became part of the world market was through the mediation of national governments. At this point in the history of world literature, when the term itself and the practical reality became widely noted, the work of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) began to influence a more radical conception of the relationship between literature and social change than either Goethe or Marx had initially envisaged. For a number of twentieth-century thinkers, notably Thomas Mann, Goethe and Tolstoy epitomized the polar opposites of twentieth-century humanism: Goethe symbolized the old, Biedermeier liberalism; Tolstoy embodied the new and radical socialism.21 Tolstoy had little respect for Goethe’s secularism, and also little interest in the classical attention to form that was characteristic of Goethe’s work.22 Lenin saw in Tolstoy a “mirror image” of the

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failed Russian revolution of 1905: its divided self between radical ideals and the soft power of non-violence.23 Indeed, Tolstoy’s ideas appealed particularly to the generation of discontented Russians who sought reforms in the 1860s, and who laid the foundations of revolutionary socialism without being committed to its more extreme excesses. Thanks to the efforts of Maxim Gorky, Goethe’s imagination of a pantheon of world literatures, combined with Tolstoy’s model of reaching out to the masses, became a cornerstone of Soviet cultural policy. In this transformation of world literature – from an object of consumption into an object of governance and a basic human need – leading intellectuals across what would later be the Iron Curtain played a key role. Under the guidance of the first Soviet generation of Peoples’ Commissars like Anatoly Lunacharsky, the idea of a Christian universal ethics, which had inspired Tolstoy’s image of the world, became secularized. The movement of Tolstoyans, which emerged in the 1880s in Russia, but also with a noticeable presence in Britain, Germany, and even South Africa, became fragmented in the course of the revolution. Tolstoyanism was not a unified movement, but what Tolstoyans had in common was a desire to bring education to a wider segment of society, an equal commitment to world literature and to folk culture, and a tense relationship with imperial governments, particularly Russia and Britain. Soviet authorities under the leadership of Maxim Gorky developed a neo-imperial Soviet institution for international literature, represented by the state publishing houses of Goslitizdat and the Institute of World Literature, which defied laws of intellectual property. At the same time, they broke with an important aspect of Tolstoy’s own cosmopolitanism, which was its Christian message and emphasis on the universal status of the gospel, juxtaposing it with a secular vision of world cultures. After the revolution, Gorky’s literature department took over the numerous private and cooperative businesses that had sprung up in the war and nationalized them into a handful of government-controlled publishing houses.24 Their foreign relations were consolidated into a body called voKS , which organized international exhibitions and invited foreigners to visit the Soviet Union. The publisher Ivan Sytin, who before the revolution owned 25 per cent of the share of the Russian book trade, ended up working as an employee of his own nationalized enterprise and travelling abroad on government commissions.25 Gorky also maintained connections with Sytin, whose publishing house had

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completed the edition of Tolstoy’s collected works shortly before being nationalized. Sytin himself was subsequently offered work for the Soviet government. He died in 1934, two years before Gorky.26 Under Maxim Gorky’s leadership, as early as 1919, the production, translation, and dissemination of literature became the object of increasingly centralized party governance. By means of the right selection of literary plots and styles (socialist realism), the Communist Party hoped to instill the right sort of consciousness among world readers that would make them sympathetic to the idea of a world revolution. This goal itself receded into the background during and after the Stalinist era, but nonetheless, the production in the literary field remained loyal to this original design. Gorky had put cultural cosmopolitanism in the service of political internationalism. Tolstoy’s own specific legacy in terms of the idea of world literature is its radicalization, and the bringing together of cultural with economic and political cosmopolitanism. What remained a common feature for Tolstoyans across the world was the insistence on making literature “common property” as an alternative to the Western European model of governing literature through an elite national market.27 Tolstoy himself had stipulated that his writings and those promoted by his publishing house were to be affordable for everyone, based on a Proudhonian model of socialism.28 On 16 September 1891, he had written to the editorial boards of Russia’s most influential journals that he was granting “anyone who likes the right to publish his work free of charge in Russia or abroad, in Russian and in translations, and to perform on stage all of the works that were written after 1881 … as well as all works that are yet to be published.”29 In practice, however, the Tolstoyans had used financial revenue from the sale of his work in order to create the first Tolstoyan settlement on the land of his manor house at Yasnaya Polyana following his death in 1910. If for Goethe, the “world” was a universe that allowed individuals to transcend cultural boundaries, for Tolstoy, this idea of transcendence pertained above all to the idea of class. Where Goethe focused on translation and adaptation as an act of linguistic and cultural transfer, Tolstoy was more adamant about transferring types of knowledge from the elites to the masses. He was a proponent of popularizing knowledge and a critic of intellectual property laws. In 1884, together with the literary scholar Valentin Chertkov and with support from Ivan Sytin, Tolstoy had launched his own publishing programme of world literature,

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Posrednik (The Intermediary), which included abridged versions of his own works alongside works of world literature. Its purpose was to create a universal library of Russian and world classics that would be affordable to the masses. This was followed by Tolstoy’s public renouncement of 1891 of all copyright on his works published after 1881. In his will, he demanded that the income from the publication of some of his work was to be used in order to buy out his own children and wife and give the land to the peasants. Thereafter, he wished to remain free from copyright and renounce any gains from book sales for him or his family. As the divergent effects of Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s ideas on twentiethcentury cultural policies show, world literature became the object of conflicting ideas of governance. Culture was a sphere in which governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals contested their authority with rival visions of the world: scientific and political. In what follows, I want to look in more detail at how the work on culture brought together intellectuals and institutions across what would become the Iron Curtain.

Kippenberg’s Adaptations of world Literature In Germany, world literature became an object of concern for a variety of interested parties involved in different kinds of political internationalism: on behalf of governments, by private initiative, or as part of intergovernmental associations. This will become clearer if we look at the case of one individual, the publisher Anton Kippenberg, and his efforts at promoting world literature to a German market between the two world wars. On many copies of books published and distributed by Insel during the First World War, we can find a stamp of approval from the German censorship authorities, featuring a drawing of the Monument to the Battle of the Peoples from the Napoleonic wars (a monument completed in 1913 on the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig). Within a year, symbols of internationalism like this monument acquired an altogether new meaning during the Great War: they became emblems of a new international war with an unprecedented cultural production of propaganda material. Here, translation and publication served not to bring humanity together under the banner of a cosmopolitan ideal, but the opposite, to cultivate a cultural justification for war.

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In December 1916, the newspaper of Germany’s 10th army wrote that “Goethe’s dream of world literature continues to work its way” through the publications of Insel publishing house for the front.30 The ad referred to the publishing plans of one of Germany’s leading publishers, Kippenberg, a governing member of the Weimar Goethe Society and founder of the influential Insel publishing house. Established in 1899, Insel originally intended to bring to life Goethe’s idea of world literature by publishing modern German writers alongside foreign works – Chekhov, Turgenev, Browning, Boccaccio, Diderot, and Flaubert. In 1912, Kippenberg also started a new series, the People’s Library, making his books more accessible to less affluent, educated readers, asking only 50 pfennigs per volume but focusing on small works. By 1914, he had sold 1 million copies of world classics from Homer to Rilke in this way. Goethe’s model of cultural universalism through the German language became enlisted in the propaganda of German national superiority during the First and Second World Wars. Goethe’s work, and particularly the interest in oriental cultures exemplified in his East West Divan, had influenced a German school of ethnography and anthropology, which flourished at the fin de siècle, but experienced a peculiar revival during the First World War. Before the war, the Leipzig school associated with Wilhelm Wundt and Karl Lamprecht encouraged a turn towards universal history and ethnography. In the war itself, proponents of this school of cultural studies also turned towards national patriotism. Wilhelm Wundt, for example, who had developed a method of empirical social psychology for the comparative study of cultures, began to speak of the “spirit of nations” in works published during the war.31 In 1915, Alexander Backhaus published a selection of photographs of prisoners of war in Germany accompanied by texts in five languages, German, French, English, Spanish, and Russian.32 The followers of Goethe – intellectuals who acknowledged his inspiration in their work, who were members or co-founders of Goethe societies, or were otherwise active in promoting his work – took different paths when it comes to realizing the ideal of world literature in the context of war. During the war, Kippenberg’s programme had become overtly Germanocentric, but in fact he continued to supply readers with works from a variety of cultural traditions, though only on German themes. Insel’s bestselling War Almanac (Kriegsalmanach) from 1915 contained works dealing with the Germanic spirit of

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victory from Tacitus to the Battle of Sedan, interspersed with images such as Dürer’s Rider, Death, and Devil, and a reproduction of The Dutch Burning English Ships during the Raid on the Medway, 20 June 1667 by Jan van Leyden.33 It turned out that even in order to create national spirit, an internationalist – if not cosmopolitan – approach was necessary. Kippenberg’s friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal complained that a first edition presented the Czechs in a negative light, as enemies of Germany, because the almanac alluded to a poem from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, “when Frenchmen, Russians and Czechs” were trying to capture “our country”; in the following editions texts such as this were replaced to reflect a changing geopolitical situation. After all, during the First World War, the Czech legion, as part of the Habsburg army, formed part of the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Kippenberg adjusted his programme to wartime demands, writing in the summer of 1914 that the new series of world literature he had planned for the autumn would not appear because it was “a work of peace and could not expect the kind of attention that the series has come to enjoy. To respond to the changing situation of our time, the Insel library is bringing out a special wartime edition.”34 But already in 1916, Insel brought a new edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as well as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. After the war, Kippenberg’s Insel publishing house turned to world culture with more fervor than before. Together with the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, he launched two publication series, Bibliotheca Mundi and Libri librorum/Pandora, on ancient and modern classics of world literature. Hofmannsthal wrote to him that he understood well why Kippenberg entrusted this project to a “cosmopolite such as Zweig.”35 Kippenberg’s acquaintances, who received an early announcement of the plan, included D.H. Lawrence, then residing in Taormina, and the Woolfs in Britain. The fourteen out of a planned total of twenty editions included anthologies of Hebrew, Swiss, Russian, and Italian literature. The specialty of the second series, Libri librorum and Pandora, was to publish works by non-German authors “from Homer to Dostoyevsky” in their original languages. Kippenberg explained that due to Germany’s increasing isolation from the world in the aftermath of the war, it would be especially difficult for educated readers to access materials in their original languages. Works included Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in Russian, an anthology of poetry in Hebrew

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by the Jewish community expelled from Spain in 1492, and Russian translations of German poetry. The series Pandora appeared in American and British English, French, Italian, Russian, Latin, Hebrew, but not Greek, and included selections such as Tolstoy’s Folk Tales, Gogol’s Overcoat (in Russian), and works by Byron and Boccaccio. This was an expensive series, which relied on a network of educated and internationally connected readers and editors who acted as advisors and subscribers. Each of these series relied on mediators, many of whom had come to Germany as a result of war and revolution. One of these was the Russian-Jewish translator Alexander Eliasberg, who lived in exile in Berlin in the 1920s. Kippenberg also collaborated with Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s Hogarth Press, through the mediation of another bibliophile press, Count Kessler’s Cranachpresse. The result was a rare edition of Rilke’s poetry cycle, the Duino Elegies, translated by the British society lady and Virginia Woolf ’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Vita herself was the veiled heroine of Orlando (Virginia Woolf ’s autobiographical novel), which Insel published as well. During the Second World War, this did not prevent Kippenberg, who had in the meantime become the president of the Weimar Goethe Society, from publishing wartime works, adjusting to Nazi censorship requirements by excluding works written by authors of Jewish background and by excluding prohibited works (including fourteen works by Virginia Woolf ). But between 1945 and his death in 1950, he would once again recover his previous role as a publisher of world literature. Kippenberg’s case highlights how in the twentieth century, the cosmopolitan ideal of world literature was adapted and adjusted to changing economic needs, and yet was ultimately driven by the motivations of an individual and his publishing vision. World literature could be used to serve national propaganda efforts, and, equally, to create a postwar community of global citizens. It was morally indifferent. One particular institution of war where this became pronounced was the prisoner of war and enemy alien camp, an institution that became pervasive in the First World War, but was then further developed in the Second. Individual publishing houses like Kippenberg’s Insel were not the only cosmopolitan spaces of exception, in which the idea of world literature could be used now to serve the aims of national propaganda, now to recover ideas of peace. Another such space was outside of the

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literary field: in the prisoner of war camp, where literature had the double function of providing propaganda and information, and serving basic human needs for entertainment, all in one package.

Cosmopolitan Propaganda in the Camp In part as an effect of the experience of the First World War, by 1929, access to literature made it onto the list of “intellectual needs,” one of the basic rights of a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Conventions.36 The project of supplying prisoners with literature increasingly became institutionalized internationally. During the Second World War, Swiss philanthropist Martin Bodmer, inspired by Goethe’s idea of “world literature,” launched a committee for providing prisoners of war with books with help from the International Red Cross.37 His own ideas had been prepared by the journal Corona, which he was editing during the interwar period, and which drew contributions from a diverse range of authors, including Benedetto Croce, Selma Lagerlöf, and Viacheslav Ivanov. In fact, many initiatives in the provision of books to soldiers and prisoners belonged to individuals who came from a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions. The Committee for Intellectual Services of the Red Cross, started in 1941, was an initiative of the British and German governments during the Second World War, who had sanctioned the committee to provide their prisoners of war with literature. It comprised the ymCa , the Red Cross, and Catholic missions, and its role was to act as intermediary between librarians and booksellers on one end, and the governments running prisoner of war camps on the other. The international organizations made sure that governments fulfilled the new law passed after the First World War concerning treatment of prisoners, which since 1929 included a new clause that suggested that sufficient intellectual pursuits were necessary.38 According to the records, French prisoners were the first to organize self-taught courses among the interned. In the case of the British soldiers of Indian descent, the Red Cross also provided copies of the Quran and books in their original languages. One important domain of work by the Red Cross was the distribution of books in Braille for readers who were visually impaired by their war injuries. Another was to send out teams to report on conditions in camps. The Red Cross also distributed musical instruments and sheet

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music, particularly European classical music and American jazz. Between 1939 and 1941, the service dispatched nearly half a million books to twenty-seven countries, as well as thousands of harmonicas, over two hundred accordions, and other instruments.39 The prisoner of war camp captures another sense in which, in the twentieth century, we can only speak of a “cosmopolitanism by negation.” Here, ideas of universal culture emerged against the odds of propaganda and the idea of the existential enemy. The camp was an area in which the conceptual contradictions of international legal regulations became evident in the domain where the law of international warfare meets international law of peace – a place where, as Giorgio Agamben pointed out, camps turned citizens into “denizens” and made indefinite what was really an infringement of liberal republican ideas of government.40 The camp was not just a state of exception made permanent in practice: it was a state of exception that had itself become the object of normative rules. The Hague agreements of international law, devised in 1907 and revised and enlarged in 1929, certified that war could be waged both by “combatants” and by “non-combatants,” and that when captured, combatants became “prisoners of war.” In this capacity, they are limbic subjects: neither subjects to the army unit that captured them, nor citizens of the government which administers their captivity, nor criminals: according to Chapter 2, Article 4, they are enemies by virtue of who they are, in some cases, even when they are not military combatants.41 Within this enemy status, liberal rights to property and dignity are protected by international law, even though they may be legally deprived of their right to free movement in accordance with their original rank. Supplements in the Geneva agreements of 1929 specified the rights of prisoners of war in greater detail.42 Importantly, they specified that prisoners of war are bound to give their true rank to the capturing power (thereby affirming an old Kantian principle that telling the truth was one of the universal laws of the cosmopolitan “realm of ends”). Despite internment, which was lawful, they were entitled to health. Importantly, Chapter 4 of the new agreement expressly spoke of the “intellectual and moral needs” of prisoners of war, which included provisions for adequate religious service, intellectual diversions and sports. Special labour provisions deemed it illegal for prisoners of war to contribute with their labour to their enemy’s war effort, and there were also separate provisions protecting

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their time and health. Section 2, Article 9 specified: “Belligerents shall as far as possible avoid bringing together in the same camp prisoners of different races or nationalities.” Prisoner of war camps constituted an exception from the normative ideal of war as it was developed in European legislation of the early twentieth century. They were spaces in which rules of war and rules of peace were suspended: rules of war were suspended insofar as prisoners of war became half-citizens of the government that held them captive, and thus eligible for some protection. Rules of peace were suspended, however, because it was lawful for these governments to restrict the freedom of movement and labour of these captives. In practice, the ulterior purpose of such camps was to punish and re-educate the enemy in view of a possible future conflict. International law demanded that the existence of the prisoner of war camp was limited in time to the duration of war and that prisoners were kept separately according to nationality. In this sense, it was an institution of war, and most camps administered by the war parties in the Great War were strictly divided by nationality. At the same time, prisoners of war enjoyed certain rights, which representatives of their countries of origin could demand to be granted. Such rights entailed the provision of food and the accommodation of religious needs. Governments were not the only organizations allowed to care for the rights of prisoners of war. Relatively new international institutions, such as the International Red Cross and ymCa , were also permitted to send missions that checked on conditions in camps and to supply camps with literature and entertainment materials. Critically, however, the Hague and Geneva agreements, with their awkward way of legislating norms in a situation of conflict that was an exception to the norm, were themselves not universally accepted. Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia opted out of the Hague or Geneva agreements on prisoners of war. Only in 1941 did the Soviet Union unilaterally sign a declaration for the treatment of prisoners’ basic rights.43 Unlike the Geneva agreements, it did not exclude the treatment of prisoners as sources of labour, and did not accept the independent authority of the Red Cross. Conversely, already according to the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, the Soviet government did not promise to protect its citizens in case of their imprisonment, but instead held that the fact of imprisonment by a foreign power equalled treason and was punishable by death.44

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One of the intellectuals who allows us to look beyond the artificial boundary between Nazi, Soviet, Western, and transatlantic efforts at cultural hegemony was the social scientist and librarian Nikolai Rubakin (1862–1946). Rubakin also provides an insight into the grey zones of interaction between dissident communists in the West, and liberal internationalists. Rubakin was born in 1862 in Oranienbaum into a merchant’s family with a mother from lower nobility, and he worked as a librarian and an independent public educator from a young age. He spent his youth in St Petersburg in socialist revolutionary circles, and acquired an authority in Russia as a statistician, popularizer of science, and writer of guidebooks on literacy. He worked closely with Ivan Sytin, who was Tolstoy’s main publisher of popular literature. Rubakin, himself a sympathizer of Tolstoy’s, had him edit a small brochure called “For the Fatherland” (1895). Only after the pamphlet had already been brought to the market did Sytin realize that Rubakin had also “smuggled” in the text of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. Censorship authorities then duly took the book off the market. Rubakin was the head of a prominent public library in St Petersburg, an institution of local and national importance equivalent in status, if not in scale, to the New York Public Library. By the 1900s, he was widely known to Russians as a public educator and theorist of library science. After the failed revolution of 1905 and the internal fragmentation of the Socialist Revolutionary movement over the unmasking of double agents such as Azef, who worked for the Okhrana, to which Rubakin contributed, Rubakin moved to Switzerland, never to return to Russia again (and he even left the Sr party). There he lived first as a private librarian, then, from 1923 until his death in 1946, as head of a scientific research institute which was devoted to a new discipline that he called “Bibliological Psychology.” Nonetheless, through most of this period, Rubakin received a pension from the Soviet state (precisely how much and with what interruptions remains to be investigated), and he bequeathed most of his archive and library to Moscow’s Lenin Library, where they are still housed today.45 Rubakin worked for – or perhaps, with – multiple agencies, drawing especially on the Soviet and German governments in promoting his cause of popularizing knowledge among less educated segments of the Russian-speaking public. As I discovered in the archives of the Hoover Institution, during the First World War, Rubakin, who had lived in Switzerland since 1907, had established contacts with the Culture

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section of the German Foreign Office.46 Under the codename Martel, he was known to the German envoy in Switzerland, Gisbert von Romberg, and to the head of Department K, Count Harry Kessler, who was responsible for fostering international connections on the back stages of the war theatre in Zurich and Bern.47 During this period, he put the German officials in touch with a network of Russian booksellers and Soviet publishers for the purposes of distributing socialist literature among Russian prisoners of war. Immediately after the war, Rubakin, who looked back on a long career as an author of books on popular science in imperial Russia, published his own theory of propaganda. It was part critique of Tsarist propaganda techniques, part a new science of the social psychology of reading.48 His role as a critic of government statistics made his books among the bestsellers of prerevolutionary Russian social science.49 Rubakin’s theory of information was itself cosmopolitan. It was founded on a wide-ranging bibliography of works, which comprised the theories of language of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Ukrainian linguist Aleksandr Potebnia, and the German ethnographer Wilhelm Wundt. He also appropriated theories of the unconscious by Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic school. But it was a now-forgotten thinker who influenced his theory of propaganda the most: the German phenomenologist of the senses, Richard Semon.50 Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, Rubakin reinforced Semon’s findings, which he developed in works such as Die Mneme (1904) and Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (1909). According to these works, impressions of the senses were truly “imprinted” on the human body like “engrams.” The reappearance of any of the elements recorded in memory synaesthetically led to “ecphoric” states, a state of excitement whereby the physical body connected prior and new experience to a current form of action. Rubakin extended this theory of impressions to the word and the concept, which could be transmitted via books from reader to reader. To explore the significance of this theory for the study of readers’ psychologies, Rubakin conducted empirical studies on the recipients of his books. This was the project of his lifetime, which he had begun in prerevolutionary St Petersburg. The preliminary results of these studies appeared in 1922 in Paris.51 He saw himself as continuing the work of “ethnopsychology,” which scientists like Wilhelm Wundt had begun at the turn of the century. He compiled a list of emotive “mnemes” which

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captivated the Russian reader. He was interested not only in word associations but in plotlines, analyzing the way readers interpreted different works by one author.52 One of the more obvious reasons for this was an early review which Lenin had written of his Among Books, in which he accused Rubakin of using too many sources of “bourgeois” science in his theory.53 But Rubakin was more than a double agent who used connections with German and Soviet officials. He also worked closely with international non-governmental organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation, the ymCa , and the International Red Cross. Thus, continuing his work with Second World War prisoners in Switzerland, between 1942 and 1946 Rubakin supplied books to Soviet Russians interned in Swiss prisoner of war camps. He also sent them questionnaires in which he asked them about their professional and social background, their gender, the protagonists of novels they identified with, and words that evoked emotions in them. He did the same with his more regular readers, who received his books by post. Intellectuals like Rubakin, who worked for governments, non-governmental organizations, or their own private institutions, employed a cosmopolitan ideal of world culture in ways that were distinctly anti-cosmopolitan, yet had occasional unintentionally cosmopolitan effects. In my view such individuals are the primary examples of compromised cosmopolitanism. There were individual writers and poets who had been inspired by the example of Goethe and Tolstoy, and sometimes both. Other intellectuals worked for private or non-governmental organizations such as specific publishers. Then there were representatives of governmental and supragovernmental institutions, each of which had particular values such as national propaganda or, as in the case of the ymCa , the dissemination of Christian (particularly Protestant) perspectives on history and society. Finally, there were individuals and groups who had become objects of this kind of governance as consumers, citizens, or prisoners of war, each of whom had their own scope for cosmopolitan agency in Goethe’s sense. While these activities started during the First World War, they intensified and gained scope during the Second. Prisoner of war camps already had a status of spaces of exception between war and peace. But there was a small yet significant number of camps which were further exceptional, in that they were “international” in character. They were not made up in this way for reasons of “anationalism” or national

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indifference, but because the governments believed that there were propaganda advantages to be derived from clustering certain nations together. Moreover, some camps were not dissolved until long after the end of the war because the interned had nowhere to go. Recently, historians have drawn attention to the importance of ethnic differentiation and the recombination of multiple national groups in prisoner of war camps as an aspect of political strategy. As Olga Nagornaia demonstrated, this policy was most consistently pursued in German camps for non-Russian prisoners of war from the Russian army.54 Historians of the prisoner of war camps for Muslims interned in Berlin during the Great War have discovered collective burial places in Berlin-Zehrensdorf, where prisoners were buried not under their own names, but as representatives of their group: 412 Russians (among them Muslim Tatars), 262 North and West Africans, 205 Indians, 86 Frenchmen, etc.55 An inscription reads: “Here rest soldiers of the British Empire who died during the world war of 1914–1918 in Germany. The earth that is sanctified by their graves has been secured as eternal heritage by contract with the German people. May their remains always be kept in honour.”56 A picture that photographer A. Frankl had taken of a group of internees at the Crescent Moon Camp in Zossen in 1920 was accompanied by text explaining where the “Mohamedans from the Tatar tribes of Crimea and the Caucasus” had come from. The special situation of the formerly colonized peoples of Europe’s empires also resurfaced when, during and after the Second World War, a group of Caucasian refugees who had fled to Switzerland from the Soviet army refused to be repatriated to the Soviet Union because they feared prosecution.57 According to an internal memorandum, the problem with this group was that the Soviet Union had not signed the updated Hague agreement of 1929 concerning the rights of prisoners of war, which meant that in refusing to return to their state they were effectively rendering themselves stateless. In response, the Red Cross invited independent and exterritorial collaborators, such as the ymCa and Nikolai Rubakin, to concern themselves with the intellectual provisions of this group. The use of the camp as an educational facility was a particularly attractive goal for those publishers who looked back on a longer history of engagement with the popularization of knowledge. Rubakin’s forays into popular education, which take us from the Russian Empire in the

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1880s to Switzerland in the 1940s, also help explain the transformation of cultural studies in this peculiar institution. In these special camps, governments drew on the expertise of leading scholars in anthropology, such as Leo Frobenius, to study and explore populations who they considered to be their “enemy’s enemy.” Here again, a global perspective on comparative cultural study became enlisted in a particular political direction. During the war, Frobenius undertook research in a German prisoner of war camp where British colonial soldiers were held as prisoners. The project had been funded by the German government’s newly established centre for the study of the Orient. Two sites where Frobenius conducted research, Crescent Moon Camp (Halbmondlager) and Weinberglager, contained mostly Muslim troops from North and West Africa, Afghans, and Muslims from British India.58 The camp authorities encouraged the internees to run their own newspapers, one called El Jihad, which appeared in Arabic, Russian, and Tatar, and the other called Hindostan, which appeared in Hindi and English. In the camps themselves, the teaching programme contained references to a history of the Holy War in the Middle Ages and the work of the Ottoman historian Ibn Khaldun. The papers encouraged viewing Germany as an ally in their struggle against the Russian, British, and French imperial governments. Germany maintained this policy of seeking friendship with purported enemies of its enemies in the Second World War as well, when Subhas Chandras Bose was invited to work with Indian prisoners of war towards building an Indian Legion.59 Frobenius summed up his findings with prisoners in 1924.60 He emphasized that Germany’s chief enemies, Britain and France, had drawn on predominantly “coloured” peoples, whom they treated like “circus animals.” It was Germany’s task to release these wild peoples into freedom by showing them that they have a common enemy in those empires. The liberal politician Friedrich Naumann similarly described the problem of the interned non-Europeans as the “fate of the primitive peoples in the war of civilizations.”61 Just as in Germany during the First World War, in Vichy France, the Nazi government had established a series of exceptional camps, where representatives of several nationalities from the European colonies were grouped together.62 Thus, for instance, a Red Cross report of 24 June 1944 describes the camp Stalag 122 as containing 169 Indians,

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93 South Africans, 14 East Africans, 14 Palestinians, 9 Mauritians, 6 Transylvanians, 4 Egyptians, 4 Syrians, and a number of individuals from other nations. There were about a dozen camps with similar distributions, with some including internees from Indochina and the Caribbean as well. These international camps became sites of contestation. Red Cross representatives struggled with getting definite recommendations concerning the provisions of food and leisure activities to such a diverse group. In many cases, they reported the practice of Muslim religious festivals and language classes in Arabic and French, but lamented that despite the existence of libraries, few of the interned would use them. At the same time, the camp administration had a different goal: to forge an ally out of their enemy’s common enemies. A critique of racism such as Frobenius’s was grounded in older ideas of humanity and world culture, yet it did not serve disinterested goals. In fact, it was itself embedded in the perspective of the particular organization that it served. For scholars such as Frobenius, war was just another opportunity for conducting ethnographic fieldwork. In doing so, Frobenius, Wundt, and many others claimed inspiration from a Goethean tradition of cultural universalism. This was done not from the Kantian position of treating humanity as an end in itself, but from the position of the particular propaganda effort their work was designed to serve. Such cosmopolitanism by negation forms part of a peculiar type of divided cosmopolitan memory in Europe. It is best explained with reference to such post-traumatic concepts of cosmopolitanism as Natan Sznaider has proposed for defining the identity of post-Holocaust Europe.63 In Soviet camps for interned Germans during and after the Second World War, the idea of world literature also resurfaced in the context of re-education, as the interned were encouraged to read the German classics alongside contemporary novelists and poets, particularly German communists such as Johannes R. Becher, Anna Seghers, and Heinrich Mann.64 It was the reverse idea of tutelage to what the Germans had themselves been applying to non-European prisoners during the First World War. Generally, the ideological foundations of the Soviet effort at educating its enemies in prisoner of war camps still remain to be studied. They provide a confusing picture, which suggests, as an initial impression, that the literature available in the camps (where it was available) was perhaps paradoxically subject to far fewer regulations

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than the market for the Soviet Union’s free population.65 Their ultimate purpose was to use interned German soldiers in order to instill sympathy among Germany’s population for the Soviet cause under the banner of anti-fascism.66 According to the historian Boris Khavkin, behind the national system of repressive camps for Soviet citizens, well known thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, was another system of camps that remains unknown: the archipelago of GUPvI , camps for interned foreigners. It was here that a number of imprisoned Germans who later became influential intellectuals advocating for peace had been held. Some of them, like Heinrich Böll or Reinhart Koselleck, developed literary and historical models for comperehending the past that could also be described as a multidirectional and cosmopolitan use of the past.67 In the twentieth century, the two models of literary cosmopolitanism, the national and the international model, existed in tension, but also in a close relationship with each other. Nowhere was the proximity of the two models clearer than in the idea of literature as an instrument for education and propaganda. The case of intellectuals involved in the production and distribution of world literature in prisoner of war camps highlights this particularly aptly. When in 1827 Goethe remarked to his friends that he firmly believed that “a universal world literature was being constituted,” he could hardly have imagined that this intensification of literary production and exchange would happen thanks to, and not only in opposition to, international warfare. The mid-twentieth century application of Goethe’s cosmopolitan ideal focused less on the invention of world literature and more on its consumption and reproduction, and on the function of literature in the education of a captive audience.

Civility and Barbarism in Anglo-American Perspective As the above case studies have shown, the twentieth-century career of cultural cosmopolitanism fluctuated between rival conceptions of the universal: liberal, communist, and a variety of shades in between, some with anarchist leanings, as in the case of Rubakin, and others veering to the political right, as in the case of Frobenius. This evolution of cosmopolitanism came full circle when the line of civility and barbarism became increasingly drawn not from an essentially German

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understanding of culture and its hierarchies, but with Germany as the chief object of critique. During the Second World War, the educational efforts of a number of organizations involved in educating prisoners and interned civilians began to centre around the idea of re-educating the Nazis back into civility. Here it was the cosmopolitanism of AngloAmerican Christian organizations that took the lead. In the US, the provision of books for this purpose was largely the work of a small committee led by the publisher William Warder Norton, who had served in the First World War and initiated the printing of lectures from New York’s Cooper Union in the interwar period. His founding in 1942 of the Council on Books in Wartime, whose aim was to draw up lists of books with an “all-out importance for the war effort,” soon had political and financial support from Eleanor Roosevelt.68 But unlike their German and Russian analogue, Norton’s publication efforts centred almost exclusively on American literature and history, including “a few time-honoured classics and first-rate mystery and western stories.” The single non-English writer mentioned was Franz Werfel with his Song of Bernadette. Only in 1945 did the German-speaking Bücherreihe Neue Welt receive public support in the US. It was destined for a specialized audience of German-speaking prisoners of war, and supplied with a “Justification of the Selection for the First Series of the Buecherreihe Neue Welt.” For instance, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain was recommended because of “the famous long-drawn conversations between a defendant and a critic on the values of western civilization,” while Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March about the end of the Habsburg empire was described as a “historical novel with an Austrian background with special appeal to Austrian prisoners of war.”69 During the Second World War, the idea of a world culture associated with literacy was replaced by the paradigm of “re-education.” The British and the American educational models for re-education focused on the acquisition of English language skills and knowledge of English literature, but also developed the concept of re-education much further than their Soviet counterpart.70 Instead of increasing the share of books appearing in German, the camp authorities focused on providing English language lessons in the camp. To meet the demand, Oxford University Press had started printing cheap (six-pence) editions of authoritative pamphlets on contemporary politics, translated into German, even before prisoner of war camps had opened.71 Re-education in Canada

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and the United States also paid comparatively more attention to the teaching of German history and lessons to be drawn for the future. In Canada, a model camp was Camp Sorel, which turned into a higher education institution of its own, and for which German authors of renown such as Karl Kraus supplied regular “letters” that were used in lectures and seminars. Many lectures focused on the “Weimar Republic” and its “failure.”72 In the twentieth century, elements of the Enlightenment concepts of tutelage, education, and world culture had been enlisted by a variety of interested parties. In this application of the cosmopolitan ideal in internationalist politics, intellectuals played a key role. The term “education” had been previously applied to socially or geographically inferior peoples of Europe and to non-Europeans. But twentiethcentury Europeans and Americans began to use it with reference to their European enemies as well. Thus Frobenius’s critique of racism was also a critique of Britain, the cosmopolitan ideal of Weimar Germany was also a construction of British and American educational authorities, and the anti-cosmopolitan ideal of socialist realism – itself derived from internationalist sources – was used by Soviet authorities to purge internal enemies of the regime.73 At the same time, each of these parties, who used ideals of world culture with their own particular aims, sought to justify their use in terms of universal legal injunctions: conventions on war and peace, declarations of internationalist principles, and references to authors such as Tolstoy and Goethe. It is in this sense, I have tried to argue, that cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century became deeply compromised both in practice and in theory. More than being “rooted” in specific traditions, the cosmopolitan ideal became embedded in political practice, in which transnational actors used their authority for aims that divided humanity not only institutionally, but also intellectually.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for enabling me to carry out the archival research underpinning this paper as well as to travel to the Negative Cosmopolitanism conference during my early career fellowship at UCl . I also thank Axel Körner, Simon Macdonald, Avi Lifschitz, and participants at the Cosmopolitanism reading group at

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UCl’s Centre for Transnational History for broadening my horizons in matters relating to the conceptual history of cosmopolitanism. Thanks are also due to Leigh Claire La Berge, Richard Westerman, and Saul Dubow. Finally, I would like to thank Terri Tomsky, Eddy Kent, two anonymous reviewers, and the careful copy editors, for their constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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13 At Home in the World of the Wound: Feral Cosmopolitics in the Red Riding Quartet Mark Simpson “The convening of the public around scenes of violence has come to make up a wound culture; the public fascination with torn and opened private bodies and torn and opened psyches, a public gathering around the wound and the trauma.” – Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 109. “The conjuncture between violence and the financialization of capitalism is not a casual and extemporaneous one. It’s absolutely structural. There can be no financial economy without violence, because violence has now become the one single method of decision in the absence of the standard.” – Franco Berardi, The Uprising, 88.

In an essay from 2001 on “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” Timothy Brennan ventures to probe the contemporary significance of cosmopolitan desire for capitalist common sense. Reflecting critically on recent “calls for extra-statist forms of political community,” Brennan wonders whether it “would … not be more realistic to think of contemporary neo-liberal orthodoxy as a form of unofficial party organization across national frontiers.”1 The evidence, he continues, is considerable:

[Neoliberalism] certainly commands a vast network of fellow-thinkers in virtually every country in the world, who speak and act in remarkably similar ways, and can be confident of direct or indirect help from their counterparts abroad. It possesses a firm set of principles and a stable programme that has been put into practice with common results by governments across the globe, whose list lengthens every day. As such, it surely constitutes the core of any future community that could plausibly be called cosmopolitical.2 Far from puncturing dreams of cosmopolitan futurity, contemporary capitalist practice is – at least from Brennan’s devastating perspective – crucial to them. The blistering rigours of neoliberal doctrine – deregulation, monetarism, indebtedness, “the financialization of everything”3 – supply the very idiom or texture of global membership, of being at home in the world today.4 The Red Riding Quartet, a sequence of crime novels by the British writer David Peace published between 1999 and 2002, resonates powerfully with Brennan’s account of neoliberal orthodoxy as cosmopolitical futurity. The claim may at first seem surprising, even counterintuitive, since the narratives that compose Peace’s quartet focus so relentlessly on what appears to be a definitively, obdurately, even exclusively regional time and place: western Yorkshire during the period of massive industrial decay from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. In my reading, however, the horrors afflicting Yorkshire in Red Riding serve in Peace’s treatment as a kind of symptom of the advent of Thatcherism, itself a symptom of the onset of neoliberal orthodoxy both in the UK and worldwide in the last decades of the twentieth century. At stake, in this understanding, is the sort of reciprocal and dialectical relation between specific geographical locality – the cities of west Yorkshire – and the cosmopolitical horizon that David Harvey argues is indispensible, now more than ever, to the work of political understanding and critique.5 As brutally as insistently, Peace’s novels ask their readers to consider what happens when violence becomes the adhesive principle and material texture of being-in-common and being-in-the-world. These narratives unfold the condition that, elsewhere, I’ve called distressed publicity – a condition in which abjection, suffering, and fracture serve to constitute the very terms of public or communal life.6 The quartet

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delivers a scabrous view of urban Yorkshire, where horrific damages, both corporeal and social, supply the impulse and texture for an emerging cosmopolitical condition. The novels thus probe what amounts to a cosmopolitan seam: a conjuncture7 of incipient global consciousness but also a furrow of looming global catastrophe. Peace’s claustrophobic plots orbit mass murder, interweaving fictionalized versions of the Moors killings of Yorkshire children with the Ripper killings of prostitutes around Leeds in order to expose pathological corruption in government, industry, journalism, and especially the police service. Across the novels, and with growing intensity, the historical coordinates of late-seventies/early-eighties Britain press in, aligning the rise of Thatcher with the onset of contemporary social catastrophe. As principles, Thatcher and the Ripper prove ambidextrous – mutually animating and enabling. Yet their specific sociocultural significance likewise underscores their fully generalized consequence: to mark and to materialize the wholesale passage, in the last decades of the twentieth century, into the world of the wound. Hence feral cosmopolitics: these narratives illuminate a pointedly neoliberal butchery, the inextricability of mass murder, police brutality, corporate corruption, and government policy in composing and unleashing the wound culture otherwise named neoliberalism. In the quartet, that is, Peace effectively conjoins the neoliberal emergence with a relentlessly negative cosmopolitanism. His novels thus compose a site at which we can trace the negation of cosmopolitan ideals and so the narration of their global counterface: a feral cosmopolitics.8 My argument proceeds in three stages. Focusing on the violence ubiquitous within the world of Red Riding, I examine in particular its manifestation in the quartet’s police service. Next I analyze the ways in which, and ends to which, Peace punctuates his novels with reference to the violating power of mass media. I end by considering the capacity of narrative and genre to anatomize – in order to critique, and perhaps even to interrupt – the dynamics and aesthetics of speculative accumulation that drive the circulation of capital in its neoliberal, financial/cognitive phase, and that educe the subjective modes (whether viciously entrepreneurial or cripplingly indebted) requisite to negative or feral cosmopolitics. First, though, a necessary yet inadequate summary of the quartet’s overarching plot – and a brief account of some key dynamics in the emerging body of literary-critical commentary on Peace’s work.

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Red Riding’s unsettled Terrain Reflecting on the office of crime fiction in social and cultural life, Peace remarks that “crime is brutal, harrowing and devastating for everyone involved, and crime fiction should be every bit as brutal, harrowing and devastating as the violence of the reality it seeks to document.”9 Red Riding certainly achieves such rigorous adequation. In so doing, the quartet joins (yet also complicates) the genealogy Lee Horsley has termed “crime fiction as socio-political critique.”10 The four novels composing the quartet – Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen SeventySeven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty-Three – unfold a relentless litany of atrocities in experimental prose as upsetting as it is incandescent. The resultant disorientation for readers will amplify, provocatively, the cognitive and affective challenges of mapping in the neoliberal moment.11 Nineteen Seventy-Four, the series’ first installment, tracks Eddie Dunford, neophyte crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post, as he obsessively investigates potential links between the murder of the ten-year-old girl Clare Kemplay and the unsolved disappearances of other young girls in the greater Leeds area. Eddie’s digging uncovers the depth and reach of corruption in the West Yorkshire Constabulary (wyC ): blackmail; torture; corporate collusion; and the cover-up of a pedophile ring engaged in abducting, torturing, and murdering local children. The kinds of question Eddie asks and the kinds of evidence he begins to uncover prove intolerable to the police; he pays for his investigative obsession with his life. The next novel in the series, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, features as its protagonists two peripheral characters from the first novel, detective Bob Fraser and senior Yorkshire Post crime correspondent Jack Whitehead, as each probes the mounting evidence that a serial killer – branded the “Yorkshire Ripper” by the press – is murdering prostitutes in and around Leeds. Fraser and Whitehead both suspect that more than one killer is at work – but the fact that both become involved with prostitutes compromises their judgment and integrity in pursuing the case. Events again spin out of control, leaving Fraser dead and Whitehead willingly undergoing trepanation (at the hands of sinister priest and pedophile Martin Laws) to obliterate his torment. The quartet’s third installment, Nineteen Eighty, again features a peripheral character from the previous novel, Peter Hunter, a detective

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brought to Leeds from Manchester to provide new insight into the Ripper case and, at the same time, to look for signs of misconduct within the wyC . Even as the Ripper is finally apprehended, Hunter’s efforts uncover disturbing evidence of police corruption – and trigger vicious harassment of him and his family, a personal and professional terror campaign culminating in the murder of Hunter himself. Nineteen Eighty-Three concludes the series by focusing on the disappearance of Hazel Atkins, another ten-year-old girl from the Leeds area – a disappearance that rips open the communal wound from a decade before. The narrative interweaves the stories of three protagonists (once again, all peripherally familiar from earlier novels): John Piggott, a struggling lawyer hired by the mother of the man imprisoned for the earlier child abductions and murders to prove her son’s innocence in light of the latest disappearance; BJ, a street hustler and casualty of the pedophile ring bent on justice and vengeance; and Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson, the haunted Leeds cop who is one of the chief architects of the systemic corruption in the wyC . Particularly in the sections featuring BJ and Jobson, Nineteen Eighty-Three cycles back through events first recounted in the earlier three novels, elaborating details, developing connections, and affirming inferences and suspicions. Greater clarity cannot prevent continuing misery, however, and by the novel’s end BJ is killed, Piggott is dead by suicide, and only the corrupt, haunted Jobson survives. A growing scholarly literature has begun to chart the contours of Red Riding’s unsettled terrain. The best of this work – particularly by Jarred Keyes, Dean Lockwood, Paddy Maguire, and Katy Shaw – manages to illuminate the quartet’s compound imperative: to tell what several commentators call the “occult history” of the Thatcherite emergence and, in so doing, to model the power of crime fiction for the purposes of sociocultural critique.12 As will become clear in what follows, my own argument resonates in several respects with the insightful readings supplied by these critics; indeed, without their interpretations my own would not exist. Here, though, I would note a tendency in the critical commentary to develop arguments about the significance of late twentieth-century Yorkshire in the quartet by way of two scales or horizons: the national and the universal. Thus, for instance, Shaw observes that “Peace uses the Northern English county of Yorkshire as a cultural and geographic site as well as a microcosm for the dark underside of the UK during the late twentieth century,”13 yet also that Peace

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relates “law and legality to the human condition” in order to highlight “the alienating effect of a contemporary world in which tensions between human values and state control create poverty, crime and prejudice.”14 Such compound emphasis manages, ironically enough, to limit historical understanding (by framing the late twentieth century in solely national terms) while also eclipsing it altogether (by appealing to some transhistorical – indeed ahistorical – concept of elemental humanity). The argument I make offers a different perspective, understanding Peace’s Yorkshire not so much in national and not at all in universal, elemental terms, but instead conjunctively, in the crucible of neoliberalism as a historically and materially global condition. This approach asks us to take seriously urban Yorkshire as a key node of feral cosmopolitanism, and also to assess the significance of crime fiction’s form alongside its content for the circuitry and circulation of neoliberal capital in the contemporary era. MM' : Mass Murder as Happy Accident

As Peace’s novels illustrate relentlessly, violence is endemic in the world of Red Riding. It not only supplies the inescapable content of day-to-day existence in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s; it constitutes the common condition – and so the very form – of social life as such. A history of and a tendency toward mutual violation – shared capacities to violate and be violated – bind the inhabitants of these fictionalized communities inextricably together. Peace makes vivid the interimplication of modes of violence since theorized by Slavoj Žižek: a subjective mode, evident in the sensationalized, exceptionalized murders of young girls and young women that transfix the region; and two objective or systemic modes, evident in the well-grooved police program of intimidation and torture and in the social and cultural damage attending the shift from an economy rooted in mining and manufacture toward one driven by real estate speculation and finance capital.15 The culture of violence operative within the wyC provides a kind of necessary hinge between sensational murder and systemic damage. In one of the quartet’s most biting ironies, members of the Leeds police service belligerently embrace an ethos of deregulation well in advance of Thatcher’s rise to national power. If their defiant refrain – “thIS IS thE North, wE Do what wE waNt!”16 – sounds atavistic in its

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regional chauvinism, nevertheless their unregulated, deregulatory reliance on brutal methods of coercion holds cosmopolitical significance. It signals the place of Leeds within an emerging urban, geopolitical constellation – from Northern England to Chile and Argentina – in which the distinction between state authority and paramilitary license, increasingly blurry, proves effectively immaterial, allowing extralegal alongside legal activity to enable and enforce the neoliberal turn. As depicted by Peace, the brutal habits of the wyC drive home Brennan’s point that “deregulating the market and privatizing public assets does not mean a weaker state” but rather “a stronger state in matters of surveillance and repression.”17 Thus, the Ripper killings, which in these novels (as in history) paralyze communities across Yorkshire, come to serve as a kind of happy accident for the Leeds police: a crisis and catastrophe legitimating some kinds of violence (the brutal interrogation of suspects) while obscuring and occluding others (the elimination of problematic witnesses). For, as becomes gradually clear over the course of the novels, more than one of the murders attributed to the Ripper – but difficult to fit within the killer’s prevailing pattern – have in fact been committed by members of the wyC , in order to silence women with insight into police corruption and criminal conspiracy. Add to these murders the violent deaths of several men and women possessing inconvenient knowledge about the police’s role in sanctioning, so as to profit from, the pedophile ring in Nineteen Seventy-Four and the prostitution and pornography rackets in Nineteen Seventy-Seven and Nineteen Eighty, and “police service” starts to seem like a simple synonym for “death squad.” What’s most chilling about that prospect, in the world of Red Riding, is precisely its unexceptionalness, its ubiquity, its homologous power: the advent of feral cosmopolitics means that “there are Death Squads in every city, in every country.”18 Much of the carnage in the quartet stems from collusion by a group of officers in the West Yorkshire force with local builder Don Foster and local architect John Dawson. A retrospective passage from the Jobson narrative thread in the final novel illuminates the terms of this collusion. The event takes place in 1972, at the wedding reception for Jobson’s daughter. As Jobson recollects the scene: “An upstairs room … The gang’s all here” – detectives from the wyC , gathered together to drink and talk.19 The toast they make – to “the bloody lot of us”20 – is,

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we know too well by this point in the quartet, as descriptively accurate as it is chilling. The ensuing conversation concerns investment and profit, as Bill Molloy, head of Leeds CID , makes clear: This is just the beginning; what we planned, worked so hard for, it’s finally coming together … Controlled vice … Off the streets and out the shop windows, under our wing and in our pocket … It’s going to make us rich men … Very bloody rich men … We’ve got an opportunity here … An opportunity to invest the money from our little ventures and turn it into something even bigger … Something great.21 The investment opportunity in question involves real estate speculation: “a shopping centre” planned for development by Foster and Dawson – “the biggest of its kind in England or Europe,” to be named “the Swan Centre.”22 All involved, boasts Molloy, stand “to make some bloody money too … some fucking real bloody money!”23 For readers all too aware of the carnage that chronologically follows yet narratively precedes this boast, the adjective bloody holds talismanic power, signifying the stained and visceral condition of these corrupt men and their grisly profits. The wedding reception episode illuminates the police decision two years later (but recounted in Nineteen Seventy-Four) to raze the Romani caravan camp at Hunslett Carr and brutalize its inhabitants: Foster and Dawson want the land in order to develop the Swan Centre. (Not for nothing does Barry Gannon, Dunsford’s Yorkshire Post colleague, maintain that “all great buildings resemble crimes.”24) The destruction of the camp comes early in the quartet’s first narrative, and constitutes our entry, as readers, into the culture of violence pervasive in the wyC . A horrified Eddie Dunsford relays the scene: A gypsy camp on fire, each of the twenty or so caravans and trailers ablaze, each beyond relief; the Hunslet gypsy camp I’d seen out of the corner of my eye every single time I’d driven into work, now one big fat bowl of fire and hate … The new West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police putting in a spot of overtime.25 Coming only pages after a sidelong reference to “dark factories and silent mills,”26 this episode highlights a key condition of the neoliberal

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passage: in a landscape filled with the wreckage of outmoded industry, the razed camp at Hunslet Carr materializes the topographical (and social) wound necessary and preparatory for the real estate speculation that will come to drive the new, post-Fordist economy. Here Peace emplots, in the space of violation, the sort of “urban entrepreneurialism” that, for David Harvey, characterizes the “general transition from a Fordist-Keynsian regime of capital accumulation to a regime of ‘flexible accumulation.’”27 Harvey’s account of this process intimates its cosmopolitical character, with cities world-wide competing to secure the multinational capital requisite for urban infrastructural adjustment: “the declining powers of the nation state to control multinational money flows” mean “that investment increasingly takes the form of a negotiation between international finance capital and local powers doing the best they can to maximise the attractiveness of the local site as a lure for capitalist development.”28 In delineating the brutal collaboration of the wyC with corrupt Leeds builders, Peace grimly ironizes what Harvey sees as the “centerpiece” of the “new entrepreneurialism”: “public-private partnership focusing on investment and economic development with the speculative construction of place.”29 At stake – as the carnage at Hunslet Carr confirms – is nothing less than a process of “accumulation by dispossession.”30 From the very start, an open (and hideous) secret attends and underwrites the collusion between builders and police: John Dawson and Don Foster belong to the pedophile ring that is abducting, abusing, torturing, and murdering local children. The police, it seems, do nothing with this knowledge because, as Molloy reminds Jobson (in an exchange from 1969 recalled by Jobson in 1983): “we fucking owe John and Don.”31 But when in Nineteen Seventy-Four the body of Clare Kemplay, grotesquely violated with the wings of a swan stitched to her back, turns up on another one of the Foster/Dawson building sites, events begin to spiral out of control, as the very fact (and the record) of police collusion necessitates a savage program of cover-up. Foster and Dawson both end up dead, along with George Marsh, their general manager in construction and pedophilia; so too do Paula Garland, mother of one of the missing girls and, briefly, Eddie Dunford’s lover; Mandy Wymer, a psychic enlisted to help in the investigation into Kemplay’s death; and Dunford himself, among others. As over the span of the quartet more and more people who get too close to uncomfortable truths end up dead, corpses come to supplement the futures and derivatives of real

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estate speculation. In Red Riding, the mm' phase proper to speculative finance renders money and mass murder inextricable.32

The Bloody Press Peace solicits our revulsion at the narrative events we read – but he also signals our complicity, chiefly by invoking the dynamics and problematics of mass mediation. Nineteen Seventy-Four opens at a press conference called to announce the disappearance of Clare Kemplay – a scene of anticipation and anxiety, as journalists strive to acquire inside information they can convert into exclusive copy. The commercialization of violence thus presses in from the outset – and thereby indicates, tacitly, the material role of readers in licensing and motivating the production and circulation of such news, the impossibility of this commercial system without the riveted attention of the audience it assembles. If news is the medium that permits modern community to imagine itself,33 then in Red Riding this act of imagination cleaves again and again to what Seltzer calls “the wound and the trauma.”34 “There are no spectators,”35 the fourth intertitle in Nineteen Eighty-Three announces: not because no one watches, but because watching means participating. The mass public and the mass subject, hailed by the narratives of serial murder, cannot say no to the violence that carves up collective life. Only some kinds of violence, though, will serve to hold this woundworld in thrall. While Dunsford struggles to wrest from Jack Whitehead the primary responsibility for investigating and reporting on the killing of Clare Kemplay – “a story everyone wanted to read”36 – fellow journalist Barry Gannon becomes more and more obsessed with the story of “Dawsongate: Local Government money for private housing: substandard materials for council housing; back-handers all round” – “crap that no-one but Barry gave a fuck about or wanted to read.”37 As readers come to learn (and as I have outlined above), the stories of child murder and entrepreneurial corruption prove to be fatally entangled – indeed, Gannon’s obsession costs him his life. In the context of the quartet’s critique of news as commerce, though, what seems all too telling is the selectiveness of the fixation of press and public. To recall and reframe Žižek’s incisive categories, the sensationalized drama of subjective violence – the murder and mutilation of Clare Kemplay – captures and captivates public attention precisely to the extent that the

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objective violence at work in the crime behind the crime – Dawsongate – remains unremarked and unremarkable. The constitutive violence of the media relation that underwrites narrative action in Nineteen Seventy-Four reverberates through the quartet’s subsequent installments. It is embodied in the figure of Jack Whitehead, the cynical and increasingly anguished journalist central to Nineteen Seventy-Seven who – shattered by events in that novel – lurks on the edges of Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three. This violence also materializes throughout the quartet in repeated references to Spunk, the porn mag that corrupt officers in the wyC use to keep “controlled vice … in [their] pocket”38 (yet that, containing clues to the murderous extent of their corruption, also threatens their undoing). In Red Riding, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate, licit and illicit forms of media – much like that between legal and illegal kinds of police activity – entails a difference that makes no difference. Mediate violence is total: it subsumes and saturates this wound-world. And the condition, significantly, serves to inflect the framing of narrative, especially in the quartet’s middle two novels. In them, Peace treats the violating powers of mediation not just as an element of plot but also as a kind of conceptual syntax with which to punctuate novelistic structure. The effect serves at once to abstract mediate violence and to render it increasingly a condition of narrative form. In Nineteen Seventy-Seven, talk radio provides the mechanism, as each chapter begins with an excerpt from the fictional John Shark Show broadcast on Radio Leeds. Callers weigh in on various signs of the collapse of the social contract in the Queen’s Jubilee year: Caller: That little girl in Luton, the four-year-old that was raped and murdered? You see they got a lad of twelve for it? Bloody twelve years old. John Shark: Unbelievable. Caller: And all papers can go on about is the Royal Bloody Flotilla and Yorkshire Ripper. John Shark: There’s no end to it is there? Caller: Yeah there is. There’s the end of the world, that’s what there is. The end of the bloody world.39 In exchanges such as this one, talk radio supplies the media venue for outrage, not just about the state of the modern world but also about

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the condition of modern media. As a structuring device, the conceit figures the kind of background chatter that, periodically rising to audibility and so consciousness, marks the implication-by-participation of the public in the continual remediation of pervasive violence. In Nineteen Eighty Peace develops the strategy more provocatively still, replacing talk radio snippets with excerpts from “a citizens band broadcast of pictures at an atrocity exhibition” introducing each of the novel’s twenty-one chapters.40 Every excerpt is exactly a page long – a presentation method that interrupts or dismembers what, as we read, we realize must constitute a continuous broadcast. CB radio – illegal in the UK until 198141 – constitutes another sort of illicit media, this one powerfully associated with the culture of long-haul trucking and so with suppositions that the Ripper is a trucker. Yet at the same time the “citizens band broadcast” also designates the space of citizen subjectivity: the bandwidth open to disembodied public voice. And what does this voice communicate? An unremitting catalogue of horrors, shifting in perspective among police reports about the killings, the view of the killer, the views of his victims, and some indeterminate view – perhaps the voice of publicity, or of the narrative itself: embedded in her chest a broken bottle of pop the screw top still on the cuts that will not stop bleeding the bruises that will never heal thoughts lost and thoughts found transmission twelve noon Sunday the twelfth of june nineteen seventy seven the body of janice ryan a twenty two year old known prostitute found secreted under an old settee on waste ground off white abbey road bradford death due to massive head injuries caused by a blunt instrument or bolder or rock … on top of the cuts that will not stop bleeding the bruises that will never heal occult dreams psychic themes war crimes to map of the demon spheres with webs and wires that bind the days together … a killer more victims as murder hunt police say there is no copy cat dear george from hell e am sorry e cannot give my name for obvious reasons e am the riper e have been dubbed a maniac by the press but not by you you call me clever because you know e am you … horse hair from the sofa had been stuffed into her mouth and the autopsy revealed she was also pregnant and told a friend e was going to earn some money …42

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As this characteristic excerpt will suggest, the CB broadcast punctuating Nineteen Eighty works to disorient the prospect of reading as a process of comprehension. Oscillating pronouns – above all the vexing, slippery “e”43 – make the Ripper spread: now a generalizing condition, the social bleed of Ripperism. Significantly, each new “transmission” seems to announce the discovery of another corpse, with the thirteen total correlating exactly to the number of Ripper victims. Yet as the language here – “transmission twelve … the body of janice ryan” – will imply, each transmission is at once report and body: mediation transmits not just news of homicide but its visceral matter as well, not just sign but likewise substance. Medium is message, we infer, precisely to the extent that it is murder. The “citizens band,” the name for a media mode yet also for collectivity as such, vocalizes and materializes serial killing as its stream of consciousness, its relentlessly percolating ontology. As media modes, talk radio and CB broadcast presage the advent of social media in our current era – the former by anticipating user-driven content provision and the latter by anticipating user-driven networking, dynamics now integral to the contemporary attention economy.44 Nineteen Eighty-Three, the quartet’s closing installment, dilates the frame of such premonition by intimating its philosophical horizon. Aphorisms from Voltaire introduce each of the book’s five sections, counterposing the denouement or, more accurately, the ultimate unravelling of the series with the philosophical advent of Enlightenment modernity. Peace’s decision to frame the final novel in this way drives home the dismal condition of the social world depicted therein – but in bringing together eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Voltaire’s enduring barbs and Yorkshire’s recent carnage, the narrative reframes or rescales (albeit very obliquely) the history of passage into neoliberalism and feral cosmopolitanism across a much longer, cyclical duration. At issue is what Ian Baucom, channelling Bloch and Benjamin, Arrighi and Žižek, calls “a contemporaneity that is not contemporary with itself,”45 in which the emergence of speculative finance in the eighteenth century reverberates, intensively, through the neoliberal turn at the end of the twentieth. For Baucom, decisive within this oscillating history is a template for modern social subjectivity “annulled, cancelled, barred” by speculation:46 subjects “transformed from bearers of personhood into bearers of an abstract quantum of value.”47 Baucom focuses on the 1781 Zong atrocity and its archival traces, but his argument expands to

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encompass the reiteration and reproduction of speculative annulment as constitutive of modernity in ways, I would maintain, that illuminate the wound-world in Peace’s fictive history of late twentieth-century Yorkshire.48 Again and again in Red Riding, Ripper-terror and unregulated police violence confirm as they spectacularize the ongoing erasure of social subjects cancelled and eviscerated by the speculative tendencies of an emergent neoliberalism – or, as Baucom might prefer, a “reapparitional”49 culture of finance. Under either designation, the investments on offer prove obscene, rendering co-lateral interest a species of co-lateral damage. Thatcher is the late twentieth-century incipience – or derivative – proper to this speculative (re)turn. Insinuated obliquely over the course of the novels, her name glosses the systemic carnage everywhere on view: “The papers, your paper, everybody’s paper –Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher – Fuck ’em all and watch their Rome burn”; “They are playing that record about ghosts again. You change stations but all you get is – Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher”; “‘I think her appeal has always been to baser emotions like fear and greed’ … Only Thatcher – Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher.”50 Gutting the social body with a systematic strategy of deregulatory cuts, consigning society itself to erasure: Thatcher is the other Ripper, the one neoliberalism’s cancelled subjects, in Yorkshire as everywhere, can hardly bear to see – yet have helped, for all that, to make and to motivate.

Through the wound The novels in Red Riding materialize the cosmopolitical violence they stage not least by way of narrative style. Peace uses a brutalizing narrative method to compose for his readers a sort of violation-by-proxy, and thereby to make visceral our penetration by and implication in the system of violence unfolding page after page. The approach affords a critical engagement with the contemporary attention economy, capturing both aspects of Franco Berardi’s insight: “money and language have something in common: they are nothing and they move everything,” yet “their destinies do not coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange.”51 Key to the process I am describing is the use of repetition, the recursive accumulation of textual detail. Red Riding is a punishingly repetitive series, grinding away again and again at the same spaces and

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scenes, images and tropes, details and phrasings. Among the most memorable (because brutal) instances of such patterning is a tight repetition at several points in the four novels of the favoured procedure of police interrogation, one that always delivers vicious physical torture and harrowing psychological and emotional abuse in lockstep sequence. Suspect left in room handcuffed to chair; piss and shit thrown in face; hosed with ice water; hand on table smashed with handcuffs; hand burned with cigarette; made to stand; blanket over head; smashed into wall; shot at with joke pistol; confronted by dog (or rat). The ritual is dire, and devastating. Repeated so tightly over the course of the quartet, its unfolding in narrative begins to break free from any specific expository objective so as to derive meaning and value only from itself. Reiteration drives home the content of the form at stake in police brutality: the aestheticization of politics – torture for torture’s sake. The repetition on offer in the quartet entails a kind of additive recapitulation – a practice that, amplifying and compounding recursiveness, intensifies as the quartet unfolds. Take, as an example, the sequence punctuating the episode from Nineteen Seventy-Seven that finds detective Bob Fraser beside himself because Janice Ryan, the prostitute he’s involved with, has disappeared: In a hell … In a hell of fireworks … In a hell of fireworks, she’s gone … In a hell of fireworks, she’s gone and I’m alone … In a hell of fireworks, she’s gone and I’m alone on the street … In hell … In hell in a stolen car … In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red … In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost … In hell in a stolen car, the lights all red, the world lost like us … In hell.52 Interspersed through the chapter’s more descriptive account of Fraser’s increasingly frantic search for his missing lover, the “hell” incantation vividly registers obsessional damage as the everyday psychic texture of the quartet’s world. Over and over again on the pages of these novels such incantatory passages recur, coupling situational banality with existential horror. The method causes linguistic value to accrue

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derivatively, through grinding reinvestment, while at the same time provoking queasy speculation about what must come next – about what the narrative future, line by line and page by page, will hold. At stake, I would argue, is precisely the trauma of accumulation, relentlessly unfolding, bleakly inescapable.53 The effect of such accumulative repetition in narrative is powerfully unsettling. Words shadow words in a reverberant circuitry of linguistic exchange. In keeping with such dissonance, accumulative repetition as narrative technique activates, at the level of the sentence, an aura of hauntedness commensurate with the emphasis on ghosts that runs through the quartet. For if Red Riding is a repetitive series, its recursions and returns overwhelmingly concern spectral matters and spectral effects. The introduction of the medium Mandy Wymer (“Mystic Mandy”) in Nineteen Seventy-Four announces the prospect of spirit communion as a significant thread in the series, but ghosts and spectres also proliferate in less plotted, more associative ways. Characters in the quartet become increasingly haunted by the transgressions they carry as by a broader history of horrors in Leeds and in Yorkshire, while spaces in the quartet (Room 27 at the Redbeck Motel, the Murder Room and the Belly at Millgarth, the Griffin Hotel, the Strafford pub) reappear insistently, ever more suffused by traces of violation and suffering. The issue of ghosts understandably preoccupies commentators on Red Riding. The hauntedness of the series serves to illuminate, for critics, the problematics of history while, at the same time, animating the ethics and politics of critique on offer in Peace’s work. Alec Charles calls Red Riding “a nightmarish and phantasmagorical history,”54 while Dean Lockwood observes that, with “spirits … abroad in these books,” “the occult is a route into the untimeliness and virtuality of [narrative] events.”55 Developing an extended analysis with reference to Derridean hauntology, Katy Shaw contends that “throughout the Red Riding Quartet, hauntology is offered as a way of conceptualizing the past and foregrounding the act of return; spectrality – the ghostliness of history – participates in wider historiographic debates to illuminate struggles over knowledge, language and power.”56 And, in a reading pertinent to my own analysis of feral cosmopolitics in the quartet, Jarred Keyes interweaves Derrida’s hauntology with Hobsbawm’s more materialist account of the spectral traces of industry in a postindustrial urban landscape, arguing that “spectrality … simultaneously

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connotes the social effects of [information and telecommunications technology] and deindustrialization and the political consequences inferred thereafter.”57 Keyes’s argument proves most compelling among these perspectives, to me, because it identifies the spectral in Red Riding as a trope not for a generalized historical uncanny but instead for a specifically neoliberal condition. Where he associates the spectre with the communications technologies emerging in the post-industrial moment, though, I would connect it instead to financial speculation itself – the regnant mode of neoliberal accumulation, and a process and practice enabled, spectacularly, by the advent of contemporary communications. “Speculation” and “spectre” are intimate, etymologically – both derive from the Latin specĕre, to look or see. If, as Shaw maintains, the spectres in Red Riding signify indebtedness,58 then they do so less metaphorically than materially: precisely in order to signify the inescapability, under neoliberalism, of debt (which operates, according to Maurizio Lazzarato, “as a ‘capture,’ ‘predation,’ and ‘extraction’ machine on the whole of society”59). Thus, in the novels of the quartet, spectres in all their abundance trail as they haunt the speculative methods enriching those criminals who necrotize the social world (and thereby proliferate ghosts). Put more succinctly, the aesthetics of the spectre as narrative strategy countermand the economics of speculation as neoliberal method. The association of spectrality with speculation makes the pastness of haunting a matter of futurity as well. These narratives are not just haunted but also portentous: filled, alongside teeming spectres, with looming horrors much too keen to arrive. Illustrative, here, are those moments in the series when characters dream grisly dreams that later unfold in narrative reality. Such anticipatory horrors render speculation, frighteningly enough, predictive rather than capricious. If the past clearly haunts the novelistic present – most palpably in Nineteen Eighty-Three, with its unrelenting returns through chronologies and events from the earlier novels – nevertheless the time of the series likewise presses onward, intrusively, into the contemporaneity of narrative writing and reading. Red Riding, in other words, is as much prospective and proleptic as spectral: its novels are threshold texts, announcing the passage into the wound-world we have come to inherit from the Thatcherite moment and continue still to inhabit. Offering incipience alongside déjà vu, these novels script the future

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anterior – the “what-will-have-been” in the neoliberal turn and the onset of feral cosmopolitics.60 The argument I am making will reframe the issue of apocalypse addressed so energetically by so many commentators on the quartet. A sense of catastrophe – for Katy Shaw “a doom-laden … apocalyptic vision,”61 and for Richard Brown a “crisis-torn millennial atmosphere”62 – unquestionably suffuses these narratives. Yet I would argue that the kind of apocalypse on offer in Red Riding is really one of beginning, not ending. The obsolescence and remaindering of Yorkshire in the series marks the advent of feral cosmopolitics and the onset of its wound-world. Peace’s Ripper, Peter David Williams, confesses to police near the end of Nineteen Eighty (in a near-echoing of the capture of his historical counterpart, Peter Sutcliffe, in January 1981). In conventional crime fiction, this event would provide the climax, yet in the quartet it makes little difference at all to the grinding sense of crisis. The end of the series in Nineteen Eighty-Three, meanwhile, coincides with the opening up of neoliberal possibility: the full consolidation of Thatcher’s power in the 1983 general election.63 Thus crisis in Red Riding is less apocalyptic than chronic – a condition encapsulated stylistically by the extensive use of the present tense in the quartet’s final three novels, which indicates that Red Riding has arrived and is going nowhere.64 Such emergency, in other words, is emergent: the rule not the exception.65 The time of neoliberalism, as Peace’s novels confirm, gives no respite from the damages it inaugurates; carnage is, instead, its necessary symptom and supplement. The economics of attention – cognitive capitalism’s requisite syntax – bear on the argument I am developing here. In emplotting financial speculation while materializing linguistic accumulation, the novels in the quartet use the neoliberalization of urban Yorkshire to expose and unfold, symptomatically, the unrelenting coordinates of contemporary capitalist life in its total capture of human attention. Hence the prevalence of sleeplessness in Red Riding: these protagonists, in anticipation of the coming world we readers now inhabit, cannot afford (even if they wanted) to turn off the all-consuming enquiries they ceaselessly pursue. The condition is what, in 24/7, Jonathan Crary calls “a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning … a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of experience … both of and after the disaster.”66 And something of the restlessness that torments

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the quartet’s protagonists likewise afflicts its readers, who will struggle to disengage from its cognitive and affective demands. Red Riding affords no rest to its characters and likewise no respite to its readers. We might manage to put these novels down – but we are less likely to let them go. Their scenes and plots and modes will leave us restless, returning to sift their words and probe their meanings in a perilous, proximate deviation from the attention engine we prime every day. At stake in the quartet’s brutal reckoning of the present conjuncture is a critique of the place of crime fiction within neoliberalism’s speculative culture. For the aesthetic economy of the crime fiction mode is nothing if not speculative: soliciting and rewarding interpretive hypothesis as a means to realize affective profit – and so educing speculativeness itself as the proper or normal orientation for contemporary subjectivity. Narratives of crime – in countless novels and films, television shows and video games, ubiquitous and pervasive in the contemporary era – help to compose and to circulate the accents and syntax of feral cosmopolitanism. Such stories go a long way, in the current moment, toward making their global audience of consumers feel at home in the world of the wound. Put another way, crime fiction does not simply reflect the wound-world of feral cosmopolitics at the level of plot; it mediates and reproduces that world through the formal and material dynamics of genre, especially the modes of speculation intrinsic to its protocols of reading. For Peace, these prospects are queasy-making – they provoke in him what he has called “very, very strong feelings about the whole mystery/crime genre … as a commodity and an entertainment industry based on the sudden and violent deaths of innocent individual people.”67 Hence the significance of the critique of crime fiction that is palpable, if oblique, in Red Riding. Relentlessly tracking the relays between consuming and being consumed, these novels eviscerate from within the genre they exemplify. Their critique (and so their auto- or self-critique) of crime fiction as a mode unfolds by refusing its normative pleasures and normative closures, its habitual, habituated speculations – those narrative mechanisms of mystery, of suspense, of ratiocination that inform and, arguably, enable the genre’s commodification while training its readers in properly speculative modes of subjectivity. Against such tendencies, the Red Riding Quartet is determinedly counter-speculative: abounding with spectres, yet itself hardly spectral. Its narratives instead remain relentlessly, resolutely, viscerally material in unfolding their horrific

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vision of history and the present – and thereby prove, as Antonio Negri might suggest, politically monstrous, “carrying too much history … dripping historicity.”68

Coda: Fearsome Melancholy Unravelling the elaborate cycles of capitalist modernity, Ian Baucom finds in melancholy a counterpoint to the actuarial aesthetics of financial speculation. “At either end of the long twentieth century,” he observes, when the possibilities of progressive politics seem to be dominated by universalizing end-of-history narratives, triumph-of-themarket rationalities, speculative epistemologies, and the twin ideals of consensual disinterestedness and liberal cosmopolitanism, the melancholy fact of history and its dominant genres of articulation (now as then) offer the promise of an alternative vision, knowledge, and politics of the global, one which can predicate itself on a frank avowal of interestedness: in the subaltern, in the hauntological, in the multitudinous scenes of global injustice, in an entire planetary array of melancholy facts, scenes, images, and fictions of history.69 Thus for Baucom, while “melancholy may constitute an inability to forget what cannot be remembered … it also comprises the obligation to see what has not been seen.”70 In forcing us to reckon the costs of speculative violence alongside our inescapable implication in its dynamics, Peace’s quartet avows as it intensifies just such interestedness – so much so as to render melancholy fearsome, ferocious. These novels confront the question of cosmopolitics not as some alternative to global capitalism but rather as its pervasive texture, abrasive and scarring, and thereby make forgetting impossible and seeing as obligatory as it is unbearable. The combination constitutes the abiding imperative of Red Riding: to confront our habituation to the world of the wound – in order perhaps to speculate, against contemporary capitalism’s speculative grain, about the aesthetic, ethical, and political conditions required to produce that world’s unmaking.

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14 Homiletic Realism Timothy Brennan

When I began writing on cosmopolitanism in the late 1980s, some critics accused me of negativity, a view often harshly treated in the euphoria surrounding the triumphant globalization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.1 Whatever its openings and correctives, that event marked what I think we can all agree in retrospect was a powerful resurgence of US imperial ambitions and domestic political foreclosures in matters ranging from trade unions to public spending and media access. The attention in this volume to “negative cosmopolitanism,” then, is very welcome since it suggests that exploring this potent concept’s contradictions – its negativity, if you will, as I had tried to explore in a lengthy study of the mid-1990s – is now more generally felt.2 As I mean it, though, “negativity” is not just the downside of the upbeat, as it were, but rather bringing to fruition by an antithetical logic what the position of the uncritical celebrants of cosmopolitanism in the 1990s felt they were expressing. If the particular arguments within world literature today are among the most prominent forms in which the problematic of cosmopolitanism is being expressed, the current options are frustrating. They range from the neo-positivist fantasies of computer readings to the Franco-centrism of taste-markets to the recent recyclings of Goethe (under the inexplicable banner of the new) à la Fritz Strich from the 1940s, as though Erich Auerbach and

Edward Said had not already mined this ore in the 1950s and 1960s.3 What constitutes the new, though, would seem to lie elsewhere, some distance away from these attempts. It would mean to locate, for example, a world republic of letters that emanated from Mexico City, Calcutta, and Moscow rather than Paris, and would involve recognizing that the issue is not whether we can read Arabic to understand the Palestinian poetry of Mahmoud Darwish or Mourid Barghouti, but whether we have the political coordinates and aesthetic sensibility to recognize their art once we have learned Arabic. In almost every case, the problem lies with modernism, which as literary style, attitude, or optic is not a movement in the arts alone, nor an experimental style, but a conceptual and political analytic that overwhelms every aspect of our discourse. What lies outside modernism, and what cannot at the same time be written off as merely its negation (viz. “realism”) is what I try to describe in the essay below. In any discussion of realism as either genre or mode, it is important to remember what Irina Gutkin recalls in her work on socialist realism: that one of its principal definitions was to be indifferent and even hostile to the bad reality of the present, seeking instead its projected destruction. The symbolists, futurists, and Left Art movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not call themselves “avant-garde,” she observes. This they were called only in the 1960s when people began to rediscover Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinskii, Vladimir Tatlin, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Aleksei Kruchenykh. They did intend, though, to be “in advance of, and the cause of significant social change.”4 She sets out to show, rather, that their being sick and tired of mimesis was a feeling shared across the political and artistic spectrum in Russia from Leo Tolstoy to Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Andrei Bely to Maxim Gorki, from the symbolists to the futurists. All strove for a point beyond realism, for that something new on reality’s other side. What later became known as socialist realism was not an artificial departure imposed from above, Gutkin suggests, but grew out of deep, widespread cultural currents. To her insights, one could add an important footnote. Realism of the sort that interests me in this essay does not correspond to its many received and hackneyed definitions: for example, subordinating form to content, emphasizing natural determinations, portraying the homely and the commonplace, writing as

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though the author was not present, exposing the falsity of ideals, eschewing edification in favour of “what is.” In the actual practice of the peripheral European/Asiatic sites of its Russian and Eastern European composition, realism set out rather to portray an interpenetration of economics and ideology independent of individual psychology and outside the latter’s modernist scope. Even as it dwelled on economics, it reviled the autonomy that economics had come to assume under capitalism (recognizing this privileging of the economic to be the obsession of the market and its defenders, not its opponents). The reality depicted was one of permanent crisis; its watchwords were violent and destructive change. “Realist?” – yes, in the sense of hating reality’s present forms. The stress was on relationships and mediations, and, in good Hegelian fashion, against confusing the inessential, surface elements of materiality with the world. We can see at once, then, what Walter Benjamin might have meant when writing about montage under the influences of Bertolt Brecht and Asja Lacis, and in pursuit of his own efforts to construct a realism of this sort in the Arcades Project: To assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. Refuse of history.5 His comment invites misinterpretation. Here the archival fragment is not meant to be a ready-made riposte to the historians who only dabble in historical detritus; nor is it the flotsam and jetsam of a past to be reassembled by the artistic intelligence. He is rather saying that the philological detail is a component of a larger social whole and without semantic depth of its own. It is not a monad to be fathomed in the pseudo-scientific laboratory of historical naturalism as though under a microscope, but is, like a hologram, a miniature total event. The latter remains the point of his commentary, which is to say, that it is precisely an opinion or position rather than a dissimulated objectivity earned by a self-serving modesty in the face of the aleatory fact. I would like to dwell on this unlikely coupling of an active and argumentative (projected or unrealized) realism, on the one hand, and the

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technique of montage, on the other, since the latter is usually taken to represent the triumph of visual over verbal art in the twentieth century, and is much more closely associated with a philosophy of the fragment in the very different sense of monadic experience, fractal thinking, and chaos theory. I am suggesting that we have no vocabulary for naming the form that Benjamin (and many of his contemporaries) was trying to create. The term I provisionally give it is “homiletic realism”: a realism that exhorts an audience, testifies to an experience, and – despite its religious connotations – is less involved in that Kabbalistic perspective so often attributed to Benjamin than it is drawn to the real mystery of the everyday that Henri Lefebvre would describe so well in Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (1947).6 Much of peripheral aesthetics, including that large branch of it known as Marxism, is characterized by homiletic realism, whose aim is to register bad reality as reportage in order to exhort consciousness to connect, assess, and by moving beyond, conclude. In this environment, one is not indifferent to knowing reality – indeed, the conviction that there is a knowable totality is paramount. One only recoils from letting it simply be. The interwar forces against which the aesthetic of homiletic realism was poised (for example, phenomenology) were all, from its point of view, eager to disorient or fetishize the static real as a kind of revelation. This is what Ernst Bloch has in mind in his comments on fascism when he speaks of the “sweet [terror] of demagogy,” the “magnificent scale of mendacity” that is designed to allow “its customers [to] get to the bottom of the product only when it is too late to exchange it”: The real situation, the character of reality cannot themselves be “influenced” by the lather of clichés, which pulls the wool over people’s eyes. For rhetoric is not a theory which leads to concrete practice; on the contrary, it is the dazzling which prevents the breakthrough of reality into consciousness and practice. But by turning white into black and red into brown, it ultimately gives the victim the same insensitivity to the truth which the duper already professionally calls his own.7 Taken by itself, “homily” means above all to have communion or hold verbal intercourse with a person. In the New Testament, homilia means “speaking with,” that is, a dialogue or a talking-through in company, and so to that degree bears a resemblance to the term “dialectics,”

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which derives from dialogue seen as the making of one’s positions clear, developing arguments out of their own principles, bringing to fruition the ideas immanent within them. A homily is also, technically, the close reading of and commentary on scripture in the presence of a congregation, and it therefore captures well the hermeneutic basis of Benjamin’s gestures to philology and the archive that I considered above. A homily, moreover – once again despite its religious overtones – casts off much of the theological weight of doctrinal interpretation. It is one of those terms in the ritual orbit of religious history that turns outward to a more secular rendering, since it actually refers not to a process of scolding, preaching, or indoctrination, but to using the text to discuss practical matters. Etymologically, it derives from the word crowd. There are dangers, obviously, in invoking such a term given its Christian connotations. Why when defending this form of literary realism would one want to burden it with a term that evokes for most readers the rudest kind of boring didacticism? To answer that would mean grappling with why didactism takes on a negative connotation to begin with. For certainly the objection forgets the larger secular appropriation of Christian doctrinal terms, not only in Euro-America but globally – where several of them have been re-inscribed. “Martyr,” “epiphany,” and “communion” are all terms, for instance, that are already used freely in discourse without summoning either Christian subtexts or the forcible conversions from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods in Europe. To jettison “homiletic” on the grounds of cultural or religious sensibilities would also be to overlook an even more latent war of positions. The very idea of the earnest, the petitioning, the rallying – especially when joined with the textually scientific – are anathema in today’s modernist literary dominant. This, rather than the threat of Christian monoculture, is part of any of the term’s negative valences. One is not supposed to exhort or persuade. That is quite narrowly considered always already aesthetically crude. But think again of Benjamin in this context, at least as Susan BuckMorss correctly observes. “It is no secret that the Jewish Messianic conception,” she writes, “which already has the attributes of being historical, materialist, and collective, translates readily into political radicalism in general and Marxism in particular.” She does not forget to add that “Bloch had argued forcefully that Christianity itself had a tradition of chiliastic Messianism anticipatory of Marx’s communist goals,” and Benjamin knew well Bloch’s seminal book on Thomas Müntzer

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(1921), the Reformation-era Christian mystic he called “the theologian of the revolution.”8 In the following section, I would like first to offer a speculative context for placing homiletic realism in a broader literary history, allowing us to see it as a tradition rather than a neologism forced on intractable contemporary material. Then, in a final section, I would like to provide a reading of an interwar Russian novel written in France – not atypical in an era of montage, reportage, and world revolution – which demonstrates what homiletic realism is and how it works.

Civic Hermeneutics In “Beyond the Poetics of Privatization,” Kirill Medvedev explores the odd hybrid found in 1940s Leningrad: a philological avant-garde. It was this new-old, old-new hybrid, he argues, that paved the way for an obliteration of the “strict division between official and underground culture” that so many Soviet readers welcomed in the thaw years of the 1950s and 1960s.9 As members of a formally experimental movement that somehow, at the same time, trained its eyes on linguistics and the archive, these philological rebels saw this new strange and welcome beast as a way of bringing letters into the world of public policy (specifically in those years, to announce the disparity between the proclamation of democracy and its actualization). His point in introducing this genealogy is to give us a portrait of the precursors to a contemporary paradigm in Russian letters he calls “civic poetry.” This he defines as a form that “not only contains a record, experience or interpretation of the given realities” in the manner of philological historicism, “but also takes an unambiguous stance on them.” Quite unlike the lofty and dispassionate objectivity of the scholarly ideal, civic poetry agitates for policies. It is a positional aesthetics – partisan, but only in the sense of denying the possibility of not being so. It exposes, as it were, the pretense of not being so. What Medvedev registers as a Russian movement cannot be confined, as we first expect it might be, to an idiosyncratic reflex in the agonizing turmoil of the former Eastern Bloc after 1989. We can discern in it something larger and less localized, a neglected lineage of civic hermeneutics in world literature. What we normally consign to the concept of realism, whether social or socialist (in Pranav Jani’s useful

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distinction), is more accurately conceived instead as the work of a lineage of thought drawn to civic letters.10 The consequences of such a shift in terminology would be to take politically dissident art out of the historical ghetto of Marxism, seeing it as being of longer standing with a subtler and more enriching experience of form. What characterizes civic letters? First, figurative language – symbol, metaphor, metonymy, and all other figures – is seen as the persistence, following Vico, of the simplest forms of everyday speech as they were devised by the earliest peoples of prehistory. They are not associated with hieratic forms of the clerisy or the mandarinate or with the later Romantic conception of the poetic refinements of the vulgate. Invention is seen less in terms of the specialized or revelatory properties of the artistic imagination than in terms of an act of reporting. In this thinking, the individual artist is a mere improvisation on inherited techniques, drawing on the wisdom and talents of thousands of anonymous precursors. Separated by vast geographical spaces, the first humans acted on their own without outside instruction or direction. And yet they arrived at similar institutions of laws, fashioning sacred myths of nature as they cleared the forests for planting, devising monuments to the spirit in the form of the first cities. Perceived by its makers in antiquity as an anthropologico-artistic creation, the political state itself emerged as a medium of collective values rather than as a brutal imposition from above. It was admired as a hard-won human invention, like the wheel. Born in poetry, the state relied on a civic hermeneutics that considered language fundamentally interpretable rather than cryptic, with the corollary notion that some interpretations are better than others. Meaning was not what could be made of texts – what was useful for the reader to concoct from them – but discovered in a painful process of weighing connotations, evaluating contexts, and considering the social meaning of utterances in dialogue. Textual evidence rather than textual authority reigned. A civic hermeneutics also evokes the scenes of language and an unabashed insistence on the physicality of the oral encounter: personalities in place and time, listening to one another, capable of touching one another, where language is a matter not only of inherited definitions or syntax, but of facial gestures, impromptu inversions, intonations. Everything from one’s fatigue to ambient smells and the weather affect the experience of meaning. It is

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deeply and unashamedly invested in the metaphysics of presence, to use a popular phrase with a typically negative connotation in our modernist dominant. In civic hermeneutics, paradoxically, there is no reverence for the script of the written law, no exegesis as revelatory act. For meaning is not the target of erasure in the act of claiming the semantic infinitude, and hence indeterminacy, of meaning. It evolves in a dialogue of agents. At the opposite pole from high modernism, the civic tradition sees literature as a socially agreed-upon indirection, as the register of the conflict of constituencies wanting to be heard – a conflict seeking a resolution by way of imparted meaning. Rather than being the text of the sacred Law or the epic architecture of the futility of truth, language is a creation that, like other civic creations (civil law itself, for instance) is a human defense. It is not – just as in a different context the state is not – an alien master from which literature sets out to establish its own estrangement. This theoretical ensemble grows out of an older, misrecognized, descent. Although Hegel tried in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy to correct the prejudice, we overlook that the Sophists (unfairly maligned by Plato for confusing eloquence with truth) linked rhetorical skill with the realization of legal virtue. They empowered citizens, demystified figural magic, democratized rhetoric, and persuasively argued that a comprehensive truth was attainable and political.11 They certainly belong to the tradition of civic hermeneutics. In another oriental reference – since Greece too was the Orient, borrowing its religion and philosophy from Egypt and Phoenicia – we might look to the great theorist of social contradiction, Ibn Khaldun, the first prophet of universal history. Khaldun’s impact on medieval Europe was significant, later acquiring its relevance within the civic tradition, which had always been keen to reject the myth of Greece as the birthplace of the West, and drew instead (like neo-Platonism, but without the mysticism) on a more cosmopolitan principle of the equality of peoples. Its point was to re-establish a sense of the reliance of the West on the learning of the East and South before the modern age of empire. In this debate with other traditions, the civic can also be said to have a tone as brash, earnest, direct, and uncompromising as debates in a parliament chamber, or as take place on the hastily erected stage of a public rally. A worthy illustration of this tendency can be found in the biting, colloquial histories of Tacitus exposing the work of empire

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while describing the trickery and brutality of Roman generals. The oral-literary ideal that undergirds legal institutions is one strongly found in Dante’s Comedia, of course – a poem that helped make political didacticism poetically attractive and intellectually beautiful (as Milton, Blake, and Brecht all set out to emulate). As we know, the Comedia finds its authority in the study of Dante that preceded it and provided its apologia – De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Italian Vernaculars). The legal significance of the oral-literary is given its most complete expression in Vico, who honoured the satirical earnestness of Tacitus while rejecting his dim view of human machinations, and consciously took on features of his caustic style. Vico’s fundamental principle was that modern urban politics – that is, “civilization” before it acquired its imperial connotations – are found embedded in the pre-historical figures of popular poetic language, a theory later elaborated in the vernacular cosmopolitanism and etymological politics of Johann Gottfried Herder, the true progenitor of world literature (rather than Goethe, whose West-Östlicher Divan succeeds Herder’s world literary essays by almost half a century).12 Already in the midto late eighteenth century, Herder anticipates in great detail what the Soviet language theorist Valentin Voloshinov later writes about the limitations and evasion of a one-sided literary formalism, and the importance of the spoken utterance in the vitality of literary form. Both share an emphasis on the plastic and emotive properties of a literature based not on escape or contemplation but on love, labor, conquest, nationalism, and (very specifically) resistance to foreign occupation. These explicit themes – especially the last of them – are deployed by late nineteenth-century linguists, such as, for example, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who later influenced the literary theories of Antonio Gramsci and the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr, among others. This sketch of a civic tradition in letters requires much more development, obviously, and I do not pretend that its existence or significance can be proved in this abbreviated treatment. But even in this short portrait, one can begin to see the stakes of such a constellation of writers and thinkers who over significant stretches of time saw themselves belonging to a similar outlook, the result of conscious influence and emulation. As I have already implied, early twentieth-century Marxist literary theory was not the break with the past that critics have at times claimed, but rather a development of earlier suppressed trends and sensibilities – a point that is clear, at least, in the acknowledgment

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paid by the early Soviet avant-gardes to nineteenth-century literary precursors like V.G. Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and of course Tolstoy. The “similar outlook” is the one I began to outline above: a characteristic assemblage of related civic notions involving, among other things, an emphasis on the oral within the literary, the concept of a physical meeting of bodies in communal space, the idea of the urgent social dimensions of aesthetic practice, and the idea of language itself envisioned as a kind of conflict between peoples eager to be known, forging a linguistic identity as a means of resisting the cultural impositions of foreign occupiers. What we find, although not exclusively, in actually existing Marxist literary practice in this period is precisely this ensemble of notions, the last not least, which is what makes the emergent aesthetic of Marxism a vital core of any peripheral aesthetics. Even though it may seem to yield diminishing returns, it is necessary in the end to speak in this way of a “peripheral aesthetics” despite the fact that it encompasses mind-boggling literary variety and scope. Neil Lazarus, it seems to me, is persuasive when he refers to “the vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle systematisable archive of literary works that, considered in the round, might be taken to constitute the corpus of ‘postcolonial’ literature.”13 Significantly, he does not limit himself to the familiar names of postcolonial criticism but demonstrates familiarity with an impressive number of writers usually ignored in the Western academy – among them, Iftikhar Arif, Ismat Chughtai, Mia Couto, Odia Ofeimun, Shu Ting, and Lesego Rampolokeng. And it is true also, as he points out, that this body of work exhibits “certain themes, optics, situations, and kinds of writing [that] are very widely distributed” within its uneven array.14 This body of work is reassembled like Benjamin’s shards out of the fragments of a civic tradition that usually finds its way to us in literary history under the reductive headings of social or socialist realism. Almost nothing is said in recent criticism on world literature of the unusual number of writers from the periphery who adopted the general civic outlook I have just outlined above, or who independently found their way to its structures and outlooks, its social drama and its peculiar emotive tenor and ambitions. The list of “homiletic realist” authors would have to include by-no-means minor figures: César Vallejo, Jacques Roumain, Sembene Ousmane, René Depestre, Roque Dalton, B. Traven, Jack London, Anna Seghers, Otto Rene Castillo, W.E.B du Bois, Mulk Raj Anand, Chen Duxiu, Lu Hsun, Eduard Dewes

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Dekker, Mahasweta Devi, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, K.P. Poornachandra Tejaswi, Michael Zoshchenko, Max Eastman, Nadine Gordimer, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez, Nancy Cunard, Miguel Ángel Asturias, William Plomer, Abdelrahman Munif, Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, and many others. And we can think also of the process carried on in the largely untold story – although a crucial one for literature – of the large numbers of African and Asian intellectuals and writers who studied for years at a time in Eastern Bloc countries in the 1950s and 1960s, internalizing and building upon an often idealized vision of communism there. The most obvious examples are Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alex Laguma, Mahmoud Darwish, and (in an example not widely known) Ranajit Guha.15 Is not “socialist realism” by its nature, like the early Soviet Union itself, peripheral in the sense of belonging autochthonously to the global periphery, the non-West, the colonial world, or however we choose to designate it? And if that is the case, can we not say that there is a genetic link between Marxist aesthetics and imperial form, if by that we mean the formal trends and tendencies of writing from the formerly colonized world – at least a significant and neglected branch of it? Marxism might be seen, then, in this early twentieth-century form, as simply one expression of a larger peripheral aesthetics, the inheritor of the civic tradition by way of its own Vichian sympathies, which were explicitly spelled out as Vichian, in fact, by Marx himself, and by Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, and other thinkers within this tradition.16 The Hegelian influence on early twentieth-century Marxism contributed to this civic poetics not only by way of Hegel’s Khaldunian themes of social contradiction and universal history, or his many borrowings from Vico, but by way of his own independent theories on the literary vulgate in his first philosophical system – the Jena system – which has been surprisingly neglected by literary scholars who assume the philosopher had little to offer a theory of language.17 For in Hegel’s First Philosophy of Spirit (1803/4) – which is all the more interesting for being written in a more awkward, rough, and, for that reason, transparent way – he lays out what can only be called a populist linguistics quite at odds with both literary modernism and the major trends in recent literary theory such as surface reading, object-oriented criticism, and distant reading, which by contrast draw on models from the natural sciences.18 Vividly revealed in the First Philosophy of Spirit are hints of what preoccupied him as he began to map out the Phenomenology. His

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emphases in this draft closely resemble what will become self-defining for interwar Marxism’s Vichian currents: the prioritizing of speech, the social scene of the utterance, and language as a meaningful act of what Jürgen Habermas would later call “communicative rationality,” connecting individuals in an ensemble, often quite literally in the same physical space. Speech only is as the speech of a people, and understanding and Reason likewise. Only as the work of a people is speech the ideal existence of the spirit, in which it expresses what it is in its essence and its being; speech is a universal [mode of expression], recognized in itself, and resounding in the same way in the consciousness of all; every speaking consciousness comes immediately to be another consciousness in it.19 If speech is evanescent, melting into “the aether” (as Hegel puts it) at the very moment it is coaxed into existence, it is nevertheless sounded into life by sensuous bodies filling the air with tones. Here he repeats a theme found widely in Herder: “the vowel distinguishes itself because the organ of voice indicates its articulation as an organ [of conscious spirit] in its distinctions.”20 These emphases at the level of sound, tone, and situation in language have several corollaries at the macro-levels of aesthetic form. The colonial violence, for example, that implicitly lurks behind the calculatedly indistinct imagery of travel, transport, and escape in modernism’s aestheticized pain and naturalized vice (Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Arthur Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre, Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen) is deliberately exploded in the satirical rejection of a system of colonial violence in counter-modernist novels such as Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, William Plomer‘s Turbot Wolfe, and H.G. Wells’s Tono Bungay. This particular un- or non-modernism emerged in the context of what many at the time perceived as the first resistance to European empire that was global in scope. Even as the Eastern periphery of Europe was the birthplace of the avant-gardes, so was it the place where peasant insurgencies in Russia in 1905 prepared the ground for the later formation in the 1920s of the first global organization explicitly dedicated to overthrowing imperial Europe. The Mexican peasant insurgencies of 1910 were just as important for laying the groundwork for what emerged in the following decades. The Third

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International as it was called was unprecedented: the first organization in which intellectuals and activists from throughout the periphery worked with Europeans as equals in a common cause.21

Montage and the Homiletic Although peripheral aesthetics invented the quintessential modernist figure of “montage” in early Soviet film theory, it did so curiously – not in the name of the fragment, as we might expect, but of the whole in every part. The generic holism of homiletic realism is articulated very well by Edouard Glissant, for instance, in Caribbean Discourse, when he writes of “the poetics of duration.” At no point does language in the African epic claim to delight, surprise, or dazzle. It does not harangue the listener; it appeals to him; it captivates him; it leads him through its dense accretions in which little by little its message is outlined … That which is dazzling is its conciseness, the brilliance of its revelations, the extreme edge of clairvoyance. A poetics of the moment.22 In other words, homiletic: exhorting without merely salving or indulging, prompting an engagement with the actual lying behind the apparent. The breaking down of generic distinctions involved a wedding of the novel to reportage and memoir like that of John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico. That book was itself part of the enterprise of Soviet “factographic literature of the 1920s, represented as well in the remarkable caoba (mahogany) cycle of novels by B. Traven (a.k.a. Ret Marut, a refugee from the Munich commune, who fled under sentence of death to Mexico and became part of the country’s authorial patrimony). But the breakdown also involved, as Sergei Tret’iakov made clear, the suturing of literature to film and photo, and this is where the homiletic and montage most closely meet. Almost every canonical Marxist thinker of the twentieth century wrote in the style of literary montage. Their seminal statements were composed in the form of ambitious volumes composed of fragments, occasional entries, notes for future work, précis, embodied but partial observations. The repetitiveness with which we find this generic choice cannot be an accident. It is there for example in Brecht’s Versuche and his Short Organon for the Theatre, Bloch’s Spuren (“Traces”),

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Benjamin’s One-Way Street, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Gramsci’s Notebooks, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Lefebvre’s Introduction to Modernity, Vallejo’s Aphorisms, and Galeano’s Memories of Fire (but also, of course, on the other side of the spectrum, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Literary Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations). Is this not a paradox for theorists of totality in the lineage of Hegelian “system” philosophy? Each of these works is characterized by searching and open-endedness, constant experimentation with ideas, observations layered over decades of mixed moods and reconsiderations. In pursuit of a future, these fragments were perhaps the result of being overwhelmed by activism, by swimming against the current, by the burdens of others’ prejudices, and by prison. Many things militated against turning these obsessive short insights into narrative wholes. Contrast this with the grand finalities and eternal verities declared from the heights of philosophical modernism: the Last Man, being-there, the death of the Subject, and so on. Marxist literary theory – whether First, Second, or Third World – did not simply have recourse to, but theorized the “fragment,” which Vallejo called “a new esthetic: short, multiform … on evocative moments or presentiments, like … [a Dziga] Vertof film.”23 Benjamin explains before the fact why montage cannot be taken to mean what it has come to mean – namely, the fetish object of a world broken forever into fragments that the artist must then be honest enough to represent in that form. Montage, rather, as Bloch puts it, “breaks off parts from the collapsed context and the various relativisms of the times in order to combine them into new figures.”24 As with Lukács, homiletic realism does not mean neutral photographic objectivity, as in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement about which Bloch and Benjamin were so unforgiving. Instead it means the exhortatory depiction of a world as though it were real, in quest of creating a model of the world as it should be; or, as in Tret’iakov, Larissa Reisner, Egon Erwin Kisch and César Vallejo, to create an aesthetic experience that turns the eyes forcibly to a dismal everyday life for the very purpose of moving the reader beyond it. “Realism” registers, as in Hegel, not passively but interactively, in a dialogue with the object – that is, relationally – whose reality is understood as the actualization of the transformation of a world that does not measure up to our ideas of what it can be. Ilya Ehrenburg’s Life of the Automobile was published in 1929 in Berlin by Petropolis, a major Russian language émigré publishing house under the title Desiat’ loshadinykh sil: Khronika nashego vremeni (10 276

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hp [horsepower]: A Chronicle of Our Times).25 A decentred fiction whose cast of characters ranges from industrial magnates to factory workers nodding off in movie theatres to rubber plantation workers to silly Hollywood entrepreneurs, it is a novel in which none of the aforementioned achieve the status of actual people. They are rather cardboard cut-outs even though they are “real” in the very different sense of being historical personages. In a series of short chapters, the novel leaps wildly from New York to rural France to Indonesia and elsewhere, describing the life of characters unknown to one another and unconnected except by way of the connecting threads of the production and consumption of automobiles. An understudied book, the novel has several claims on the attention of students of comparative literature interested in first causes and formal experimentation. Above all, one is struck by the novel’s prescience. It lays out a vast but detailed portrait of what is today called “globalization” without any of the celebrations of hybridity, bordercrossing, or saccharine appeals to Kantian perpetual peace that mark mainstream cosmopolitan discourse today. It is unthinkable that Ehrenburg could have devised a factographic epic of this sort outside the framework he inherits – namely, the intellectual curiosity about the life-effects of economics, the doctrine of left internationalism, and Marx’s theories of the world-historical ambitions of capitalism itself. The contemporaneity of the book (already almost a century old) is arresting. One is unable to read it seriously while continuing to maintain that globalization is a recent outcome of communications and transportation technologies or the supposed decline of the nation-state. The novel’s own emphatic point is that the seeds of this explosive movement across borders dates at least from the French Revolution when the car as such was first dreamed up in the utopian sketches of Citizen Philippe Lebon (like almost all the other characters of the novel, an actual person from the historical record). In fact, Ehrenburg links the French Revolution with imagination itself, and imagination in turn with its market doppelganger, innovation, and then finally innovation with a fatal story of the triumph of a commodity unlike any other. The automobile arises as the commodity of commodities, the glue binding the entire world irrationally together in pursuit of an ill-conceived and unwanted desire. Can we call this a thesis novel? Not exactly. Ehrenburg’s fictional reportage does not assume the form of an economic tract because the story involves fragmentation, interruptions, wild schemes, irrational Homiletic Realism

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acts, fantasies. And he nowhere provides the comforting seamlessness of narrative closure because the initiatives of his many “characters” (in the sense that one speaks of real-life types as “real characters”) founder on the rocks of an inexorable financial logic. On the contrary, they give support to that logic, making it up completely and collectively. It is a genre in-between genres, as the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin always argued that the novel must in the end be. The work in that sense peddles no thesis. It reports. This is why Vladimir Nabokov (the darling of Russian letters in the postwar United States) snidely called Ehrenburg basically a journalist, a comment he meant as a slur but that was an unwitting compliment. For it fits the parameters of Ehrenburg’s aesthetic intentions, and separates him radically from the thesis novel. And, anyway, what a journalist! To capture the real, Ehrenburg seems to say, requires fiction; fiction is unpersuasively illusionary without the reality of the newspapers and the archive at its core. Something like an editorializing police report, his novel lays out the facts of a world system without agents. This realism of the fragmentary and the fissiparous is like that of vignettes assembled in a group portrait. In quest of the factographic, whole sections are quotations from other sources, including documents that reveal Francis Picabia’s and Juan Gris’s theory of collage (a form of “found” fiction). The fragmentary by these means arises as the exact literary equivalent of a type of Soviet-inspired painting at the time – depictions of groups of people in activity over stretches of historical time represented in a collage of shards or slivers of specific social settings made into a totality by the painting’s compositional efforts. We know something of this compositional technique from Mexican muralism, or from Soviet agitation posters, but a very brilliant example of the genre can be found in Heinrich Vogeler’s remarkable Baku 1927.26 Although Ehrenburg seems at first to want to capture a transnational ethos, a movement across and athwart borders, that is not his move. While the global dimensions reign, the people interconnected by the dream of a certain commodity and the commodification of dreams are anonymous to one another. The principal actors operate in their homely spheres oblivious to the whole. The novel achieves the aesthetic illusion of reality only because of its narrative incoherence, as if to say that life as lived is similarly incoherent, the product of relations and connections unknown to us, but binding all of us together nevertheless. The main character and hero of the novel can, then, only be

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a commodity. Noticeably unlike socialist realism with its attention to labour, work-plans, self-sacrifice, plebeian heroism, and the sense of a goal larger than the individual, this novel rendered the individual insignificant from an entirely different angle. Not about the discipline of the self in the name of a collective project, the novel instead dwells on the personal whims and desires of subjects, giving them full rein in the elaboration of the plot. It is precisely these “individuals,” sleepwalking through the machinery of larger processes that strip individuality of its meaning. They acquiesce to a system in which capitalists and workers are alike devoured. What Life of the Automobile diagnoses, moreover, is the cultural core of commerce comprising curiosities, pursuits of fashion, feelings of grandeur, quests for personal freedom. And Ehrenburg is saying that these individual initiatives are typically misunderstood, that they run against the stream of culture or are delimited in arbitrary acts by the authorities. In this pursuit, the novel demonstrates that capitalism makes the Third World matter, bringing the colonies into the everyday life of the metropolis. Like Marx, Ehrenburg suggests that capitalism is revolutionary in the bad sense: that what it does, it does in the name of “mankind” and in pursuit of creating new people, as well as in the name of universal prosperity. Its uprooting, severe disciplining, obliteration of customs, are every bit as radical as the firebombing of a city. Its erecting of high ideals by means of immense social misery realizes the negative image it projects of revolutions from the left: dogmatism, religious fervor, and the rhetoric of “Man” so that actual men and women can be more readily sacrificed. It is for instance a conquest of nature that motivates one of Ehrenburg’s main characters, Henry Ford, whose arrogance and lack of respect for the natural world seems a fitting prelude to the forces condemned in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. There is no clearer evocation in fiction of what is called “reification.” Ehrenburg’s “novel” is one of the few, non-technical descriptions of the existential experience of reification: its family settings, its effects on leisure, its tyrannical effects on taste in art (or rather the tastelessness of escapist art). If the fabric of human sensibility and feeling was being destroyed so was the the sense of the possibility of change: Pierre [once] believed in books and discussions, in self-education groups, and in the world revolution. Pierre no longer believed

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in anything … [Earlier] he believed in the victory of labor and in the brotherhood of man … Pierre no longer ran the machine, the machine ran him … The conveyor belt moved. Against that, all arguments were powerless. If he hollered, they would kick him out. They would hire someone else – an African or a boy.27 Art itself takes on the droning tyranny of the machine. There is little fascination for Ehrenburg in the aesthetic possibilities of the cinema: “This was art, the culture of the lower classes, this was Paris, the ‘light of the world.’ Thought writhed, legs went to sleep, eyes were dazzled by the mother-of-pearl screen. The projector whirred. The belt kept moving. And all at once, a roar. It was the laughter of a hundred throats, loud, gross guffaws, like the noise of a valve, a laughter of ‘o’ – ho-ho-ho! The theater roared.”28 But Ehrenburg’s analysis is, of course, even if modelled on a report, more than that. Language in the novel is itself taken over by reification. The name used for the coupling of joints in a car, he notes wryly, is a “marriage”; that which deprives the human of all feeling and intelligence (the conveyor belt) is labelled a “victory of human intelligence.” If fiction relies on metaphor, Ehrenburg demonstrates how in capitalism the metaphor becomes a prosaic, indeed stifling, reality. For whereas capitalism binds everyone and everything together, forcing them to lubricate the gears of the machinery of “dividends,” the conveyor belt literally binds the parts of the process together, actually linking them on a canvas ribbon like an “iron chain” whose workers are to this degree like a gang of convicts.29 All is inverted, the abstract concretized. And this particular feature is demonstrated by the colonialist mentality that accompanies capitalism. The Japanese are called “barbarians” by the organic intellectuals of industry because the Japanese resist automobile culture, preferring to walk, favouring humans over cars.30 The desire of encircling the earth is passionately described in terms of the “noiseless wheezes” accomplished by “oil filters,” which will supposedly make cars inviting everywhere (at least in the imagination of another key character in the novel, Monsieur André Citroën), and prove that the “earth is so small!” How do we know it’s small according to Citroën? Because everyone is doing the same thing: “A revolution in Russia. The Chinese slaughtering one another. And the Africans – they simply climbed up trees.”31 What are such “destructive” or “useless” activities in relation

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to the drama of commerce? They are disturbances to commerce, problems brought on by domestic bliss and mobility. No novel has ever been written that is more theoretically global. Ehrenburg concocts a splintered form of mini-portraits like the individual images of a cine-book, with pages flapping in order to conjure the felt presence of other places brought here by the linkages of a commodity relationship. The vignettes, the breakaway portraits of the personalities associated with the automobile, allow this to be more than a tract. Instead, they demonstrate logically that capitalism is not only about profit (in the mind of those who run things): for Citroen, supplying everyone with a car “wasn’t an assignment. It was a vow.”32 One notices the passage at the beginning of the stock exchange chapter.33 In Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, or in the short stories of Chekhov, we would have, in fact, something that seems very close to this – reflections on the animating, preoccupying culture of money, comparing the bourse to a god, the pun on “high vaults” (church, bourse), its creeping character permeating the surrounding city in all of its minute pockets. However these would be passages that set up character, or provided the mise-en-scène for the progression of the plot. They would be reflections on the undeniable character of the present times irreverently reported in a fit of honesty in order to penetrate the reality of character. But everything is much more anonymous here. There is no other character than the calculation of profit itself. Profits are given to certain persons, but the ownership is reversed, since they are the sole object of the analysis-as-rendition, the end and focus and cynosure of the entire display. And it is not a wry reflection on an unhappy feature of what has evolved and crept up on us, but a disgusted rendition of a force set into motion by ignoble yet ultimately small-minded quacks and pseudo-prophets. This novel, among other things, proves that interwar communism was capable of producing anti-capitalist tracts in the form of entertainment fiction, and that a defiantly political literature – one composed of historical anecdotes, newspaper reports, rumours, economic data, and encyclopedia entries – could at the same time exist independently of any official strictures, written entirely out of conviction, and for a market abroad. Ehrenburg was a Russian communist who worked under the auspices of the Soviet International in Paris, but in another era he would have written travel literature for the Atlantic Monthly. He

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has been called an opportunist and a political metamorph. But what does this prove? Communism in these years became a default position for many in the broad center of intellectual life, and prompted a creativity and a vision whose energies we are all still living off. Life of the Automobile enters the debate over the avant-gardes themselves. The opening of the novel is a send-up of Italian futurism, a sharper and more mocking jest that comes from the same angle as his mockery of capitalism’s ludicrous prophets. It appears that when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s father died in 1907, Marinetti inherited the family wealth and immediately bought a four-cylinder Fiat, which he crashed in a ditch in 1908. According to legend, this crash provided the impetus for The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.34 Ehrenburg takes this pseudo-mythical gesture as the opening scene of the novel about a fatuous young man of wealth who, excited by speed and gullibly awed by the “machine age,” buys a car and kills himself by crashing it into a ditch. In the face of Marinetti, whose Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel indulges sadistic fantasies which know nothing about consequences, Ehrenburg’s novel is entirely about revealing the pathetic consequences of this same machine age. Montage as Benjamin saw it is very much in play in Ehrenburg’s homiletic realism – a technique that allowed the author not simply to map the experience of reality by capturing it in the mercilessly precise frame of a photograph, but by explaining the structure in movement of history. Against the mimetic Humean or Kantian reality, Benjamin posits a non-mimetic Hegelian one in the sense that the reporting of what one sees and experiences in this bad reality of the present is itself an illusion. On the surface of things, nothing could be more antagonistic to a left Hegelian worldview than Life of the Automobile’s agentless subjects caught inexorably in the processes of global capitalism. But those addicted to surfaces overlook the agential dimension present in the exhortations of the author himself – the reflexive gesture we associate with dialectical thought, which places the witness in the very picture being witnessed, affecting its “reality.” As in Benjamin’s concept of the conscious reassemblage by the critic of archival fragments in a philological reading of history, will enters in the form of an author adequating the world to our conception of it, and refusing to see in the present empirical thing its actuality. The global nature of the text, its constant reminder of what is happening now outside our field of vision, is its principal way of intimating that.

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Afterword: Incipient Cosmopolitanisms Peter Nyers

Today, cosmopolitanism has become much more than an idea. It has become the meaningful political horizon for how subjectivity is enacted. I will have to return more fully to this formulation in a moment because the cosmopolitanisms presented in this volume are not, at first blush at least, the happy universalism celebrated by advocates of world citizenship and global democratic governance. The negative cosmopolitanisms of this book have little resemblance to the form envisioned by the Enlightenment tradition. The halcyon days of a cosmopolitanism focused on building universal institutions in order to enable world citizenship have run their course. In their place has emerged a more agonistic and conflictual conception of cosmopolitics. The catalogue of negative cosmopolitanisms in this book is extensive. We see how cosmopolitanism gets enacted as a practice in support of the dividing logics of nationalism, capitalism, and heterosexism. The chapters by Gusejnova, Dillon, and Latimer each discuss this paradoxical element of liberal cosmopolitanism. In other chapters we see many of the main figures of cosmopolitanism lose their lustre. The cosmopolitan figure par excellence – the migrant – has suffered greatly under the securitizations of twenty-first-century capitalism and the “War on Terror.” The ethos of hospitality to the migrant that was central to Kantian traditions of cosmopolitanism is being replaced by outright hostility to refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants. As McCallum and Stephens make clear in their chapters on the struggles of documented and undocumented migrant labourers, global inequalities, oppressions, and dispossessions have only deepened and become further entrenched. The cosmopolitan responsibility toward the other

is also shown to be a site of hierarchical and exploitative relationships. Miller’s chapter on global philanthropy shows how such seemingly altruistic and selfless acts of cosmopolitan giving are actually dependent upon the inequalities and violences of capitalism. In the end, the philanthropic mentality reproduces and further entrenches divides between us and them, yours and mine, here and there, self and other. Negative cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of disenfranchisement, exclusion, and abjection. But it is also at the same time the cosmopolitanism of contestation, rupture, and resistance. The book Negative Cosmopolitanism admirably combines these two distinct elements in a way that does not have one element cancel the other out (e.g., dispossession makes agency impossible), but which collectively makes each dimension into something different. While the contributors may mobilize different definitions, sensibilities, and histories of cosmopolitanism, they are all engaging in a struggle to move beyond a form of cosmopolitanism that is concerned with institutions, governance, and legitimate authority and toward another cosmopolitanism – one that sees it as an activity, a practice, and a site of social struggles.1 Let me now return to my earlier remark that cosmopolitanism has become the political horizon for the enactment of political subjectivity. A few points need to be clarified about this claim. In the first place, the metaphor of horizon is significant, for it speaks to many of the profound paradoxes that are to be negotiated when thinking about cosmopolitanism. The paradoxes begin with etymologies of the words “politics” and “horizon,” both of which share an affinity for limits, borders, and enclosures. It is well known that the word “politics” is a bordered concept, derived as it is from the Greek polis, which is itself derived from an older root word *pelә-, meaning citadel, or fortified high place. What Thomas Nail calls the “etymological and historical triplets: politics-city-wall” speaks to the highly spatial conditions of possibility for statist visions of the political.2 Interestingly, etymologies of the word “horizon” – from the ancient Greek term őρος, meaning “boundary” or “landmark” – also suggest a lineage to borders and limits, divisions and separations. Thomas Blom Hansen speaks to this limiting function when he says that the horizon “is always situated, historical and subjective; it structures thought and limits imagination.”3 Does this mean that all political horizons are doomed to be walled, striated, and bordered? Do the walls that surrounded the polis paradoxically re-emerge in the desire to open up the city’s doors to the

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world? How does cosmopolitanism, which is supposed to designate an unlimited and open moral and political community, negotiate the matter of political horizons? To begin the task of answering these questions, we should immediately note that the horizon does not only operate as a limit. The horizon involves the interplay between opening and closing; it conjoins as much as it separates. For example, while the horizon brings the sky and earth together, every landscape painter knows that this line is rarely linear or one-dimensional; more often, the horizon consists of “an arabesque laid out and multiplied in the lines of trees, clouds, hills and paths, branches and vaults, loops and angles, so many fractals of a single horizon, which never stops drawing back and renewing the partition of its elements.”4 The boundaries of the horizon are indistinct and fuzzy, with different elements (earth and sky) indeterminately slipping into the other. This complexity of horizons is further illustrated when approaching the concept from a temporal perspective. Here, too, the horizon can be seen as both limiting and liberating. After all, horizons are never reached; they represent the line that recedes through the very act of moving toward it. This can be read pessimistically: that is, horizons are always elusive and so their mobilization as a political metaphor should be viewed with some skepticism. In my view, there are better alternatives to seeing horizons as representative of an impossible future. Horizons are precisely the impossible that is enacted presently through social struggles. This position I hope brings vitality to a distinction made by Balibar between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics.5 Cosmopolitanism, he complains, all too often refers to an idea, a future aspiration, or an ideological position. Cosmopolitics, by contrast, describes something that is practised and enacted, and therefore involves agency, action, social mobilizations, and struggle. Whereas cosmopolitanism is endlessly exalted for its nobility, hospitality, and inclusiveness, it is also quickly chastised for its naiveté about the political realities of world order. It therefore becomes an impossible project for the present; its time is deferred for the future; in the present it is the political horizon of progressive politics. Cosmopolitics, by contrast, has the advantage of speaking directly the messy practice of politics, its contradictions, inconsistencies, and contingencies. Balibar favours cosmopolitics for this very reason: it “explicitly addresses the paradoxes involved in an unlimited or ‘global’ use of the category of the citizen.”6

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Balibar’s cautions about global citizenship can be applied to state citizenship as well. In both its naturalized and birthright forms, citizenship has become something to be unmade, undermined, and irregularized. The enacted political subjectivities of cosmopolitics must, therefore, negotiate a deep and pervasive tension. This tension speaks to those negative cosmopolitanisms that are brought about through the “securitization” and “irregularization” of citizenship.7 If it was once thought important to keep the figures of the migrant and the citizen as distinct, that distinction is becoming increasingly blurred in the precarious economies and anxious security states of the twenty-first century. Governments and lawmakers are finding it politically expedient to establish a lineage between the irregular migrant and the unwanted citizen. Refugees, migrants, temporary residents – in short, non-citizens – are regularly subject to irregularizing practices that transform them into subjects with only a precarious hold on rights. We can thus add citizens to the list of irregular subjects with less than full citizenship rights. This is one of the key ways in which the ranks of the world’s negative cosmopolitans are increasing and diversifying. States are both rediscovering and inventing new powers to denationalize and deport their citizens, especially those with dual citizenship. They expend a lot of creative energy to enact “irregularity” in ways both formal and informal, official and unofficial, legal and extralegal, so that formal, official, and legal citizens – but nonetheless unwanted ones – find their rights claims unheard, unfulfilled, and denied. The denial of passports, consular services, and travel assistance are common means through which citizenship is not so much being taken away as being made unworkable. Irregular citizenship is therefore a path to negative cosmopolitanism in the abject sense of the term. Like many concepts, there is a doubleness to irregularity, and its other dimension is not concerned with reproducing dominant identities, laws, and institutions. This form of irregularity involves a critical stance towards these identities, laws, and institutions, and a creative openness to remaking subjectivities in terms other than those shaped by state citizenship. This is a form of irregular citizenship “from below,” and it is enacted through social struggles about what it means to be political. Its emergence speaks to the fact that many social and political struggles today have a profoundly ambivalent relationship to existing identities, laws, and institutions. This is not to say that they do not engage, negotiate, or become caught up in dominant political relations

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and institutions. Rather, I would emphasize that these struggles no longer accept the inevitability of those identities, laws, and institutions. The movements against wars, tyranny, neoliberal globalization, environmental destruction, and social injustices of many other kinds all reject, in one way or another, the limits imposed on people and their political imagination. At the same time, however, these struggles may not have yet found a language to articulate terms beyond these limits. Struggles caught in the intermezzo between the old and the new, the “no longer” and “not yet,” are what I call “incipient cosmopolitanisms.” There are several things to note about the meaning, scope, and lineages of incipient cosmopolitanisms. First, the cosmopolitanism in this formulation is pluralized. The social and political struggles involved in cosmopolitics imply that more than one cosmopolitanism is in play. Cosmopolitanisms are what are at stake here. This problematizes those theories of cosmopolitanism that reply on a scalar conception of politics, with cosmopolitanism involving a move “upwards” toward a higher “level” of politics that is “above” the nation-state. Incipient cosmopolitanisms emphasize the temporality of this form of global activity. When Pollock et al. argued for speaking about cosmopolitanism in the plural – as cosmopolitanisms – they did so in order to “leave open the question of the center and periphery in intellectual debates, and … to avoid the imposition of practices and histories that do not necessarily fit interpretations devised for historical situations elsewhere.”8 These remain laudable attributes of contemporary cosmopolitics. Yet, while cosmopolitanisms implies that many “situated universalisms” exist across the world, cosmopolitanism was for these authors something that was “yet to come, something awaiting realization,” with its substantive character something that “must always escape positive and definite specification.”9 In other words, cosmopolitanisms are always incipient cosmopolitanisms. What is meant by incipient? The term carries the connotation of emergence, of something that is about to arrive on the scene. Politically, we need to be wary that the idea of “to come” does not translate into an endless deferral of cosmopolitics. To the contrary, incipient cosmopolitanisms are concrete, enacted, and cannot be reduced to a desire for some future world order. The time “to come” is not a longing for that which has been outcast and labelled impossible. Robbins’s term “actually existing cosmopolitanism” captures the enacted quality of this cosmopolitics.10 And yet, the temporality involved with

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incipient cosmopolitanism is less “actual” and more ambiguous, occupying the space between the “no longer” and “not yet.”11 This ambiguous space is the time-space of cosmopolitics. This is because incipient cosmopolitanisms must always contest the already established norms, authorities, dominations, and power relations that seek to limit, shape, and define them. Incipient cosmopolitanisms suggest a cosmopolitanism of contestation, dissensus, and struggle. The temporal dynamic “no longer” and “not yet” allows us to approach contemporary struggles that refuse to fit them into already known sequences (such as “liberal democracy” – “good governance” – “responsible citizenship”), while still acknowledging their lineages and inheritances. Methodologically, this means that researchers and analysts of contemporary struggles need to keep a keen eye and ear out for the practical vocabularies that are deployed and in use. These vernaculars can then be evaluated for whether, and if so to what extent, these struggles constitute incipient forms of cosmopolitics. This is a point underscored by Gunew in her chapter, when she argues that cosmopolitans must always negotiate the difficult and complex tension of “rooted” and local vernaculars and their engagement with highly mobile and globally interdependent cultural and political dynamics. Life is at once, if unevenly and unequally, global and local. Vernacular cosmopolitanisms work with and through these tensions in the space of the “no longer” and “not yet.” Incipient cosmopolitanisms can engage with existing identities, laws, and institutions while still enacting themselves in ways that exceed, bypass, or transgress them. This is what I mean when I say that these are struggles that occupy the space between the “no longer” and “not yet.” In this book, Parikh’s chapter illustrates this dynamic in the context of international human rights laws and institutions, and the transformative effects that can emerge when “humans” start making claims to rights once reserved for citizens. At stake here is how those who do not possess what Arendt called the “right to have rights” come to claim those rights and thereby constitute themselves as political subjects.12 Incipient cosmopolitanisms are both enduring and untimely cosmopolitanisms. They are enduring because it takes time, perseverance, and above all patience to invent, sustain, and enact new subjectivities. Their persistence speaks to the fact that incipient cosmopolitanisms coexist with dominant forms of political community and subjectivity. The temporality of the space between the “no longer” and “not yet” is, therefore, one of coexistence and the coeval. We can see this tem-

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poral coexistence at work in Collard’s chapter, which illustrates how colonial-settler cosmopolitanisms of old have nonetheless endured with great effect in the present day in the form of codified laws about prostitution and sex work. Incipient cosmopolitanisms also emerge at the unlikeliest moments and are enacted by unanticipated subjects. In this way they open up the new and the unforeseeable. The chapters by O’Loughlin and Mischke illustrate this well when they investigate the forms of cosmopolitanism that emerge in the context of disasters, atrocities, and the ruins of post-apocalyptic life. These are instances not only of the perseverance of the human spirit’s creativity in times of suffering and distress; they are also generative of a historical perspective that is attuned to the re-emergence of the security state with its governmentalities of unease. Similarly, as Ugor illustrates in his chapter, the alternative underground oil economies in the Niger Delta are a source of resistive cosmopolitanism from below. They provide a resource for daily survival, but also a basis to articulate claims for environmental justice and ecological citizenship. Negative cosmopolitanisms may emerge from social, economic, and political conditions that are to be criticized, denounced, and resisted. But negative cosmopolitanisms are also incipient cosmopolitanisms, the dynamism of which can serve as a resource for warding off despair and malaise about the possibilities for contestation and transformation. Incipient cosmopolitanisms recognize that state citizenship is a citizenship of limits, limits which are also simultaneously limitations on citizenship, on the desire to claim rights and enact obligations across boundaries.13 In the end, therefore, negative cosmopolitanism negates the idea that the horizon of politics is a horizon of limits.

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Introduction 1 Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism,” 6–8. 2 Beck, “Global Inequality and Human Rights,” 112. 3 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 51, emphasis in original. 4 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 110. 5 Ibid., 106. 6 Ibid., 107. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 107–8. 9 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 223. 10 Ibid., 223–4. 11 Friedman, The World Is Flat, 421. Friedman’s “Dell Theory” is an “updated” version of his “Golden Arches Theory,” expressed in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), which claims that no two countries which have a McDonald’s restaurant have fought each other since they got a McDonald’s restaurant. 12 Bush, “State of the Union Address (January 29, 1991).” 13 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 104. 14 See Habermas’s “Bestialität und Humanität: Ein Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und Moral”; Kristeva’s essays are collected in Nations without Nationalism. Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” appeared in the Boston Review, 3–6. 15 Delanty, “The Emerging Field of Cosmopolitan Studies,” 1. 16 Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” “Literary Criticism and the Southern Question,” and “India, Nationalism, and Other Failures.”

17 Brennan, At Home in the World, 308. For Brennan’s critique of commodified cosmopolitan cultures, see 39 and 199–204. For his assessment of cosmopolitanism in corporate culture, see 119–62. 18 Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 69. 19 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, 150. 20 Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence. See also Miller and Ury, “Dangerous Liaisons.” 21 Goodlad and Wright, “Victorian Internationalisms.” 22 Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” 243. 23 Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 74. 24 Ibid. 25 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” 618. 26 Fine and Boon, “Cosmopolitanism: Between Past and Future,” 7. 27 See especially Sloterdijk, Globes: Spheres II : Macrospherology. To be fair, it is unlikely that Sloterdijk would happily accept our description of his “sphereology” under contemporary globalization as cosmopolitanism. Indeed, in a later work, In the World Interior of Capital (2005, trans. 2013), Sloterdijk divides globalization into three phases. The first occurred when Ancient Greeks began to imagine the world cosmopolitically; the second when Enlightenment Europeans began to traverse the globe through maritime technology; the third phase began with networked communication, which has effectively collapsed geographical distance and rendered the earth as a temporal synchronicity. Sloterdijk says that this third phase marks a move away from (Enlightenment) cosmopolitanism, and toward a global provincialism (In the World Interior of Capital, 12, 169, 175). We would argue that what Sloterdijk sees as provincialism might also be understood, cynically, as a phase of negative cosmopolitanism. 28 Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, 55. 29 Blake, “We Are All Cosmopolitans Now,” 36. 30 Ibid., 52. 31 Aristotle, Politics, 1.2. 32 Ibid. 33 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.2. 34 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.10. 35 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.2. 36 For example, R. Bracht Branham reads Diogenes’s proclamations that he is “without a city, without a house, without a fatherland / A beggar, a wanderer with a single day’s bread” as fundamentally rhetorical (“Defacing the Currency,” 91). Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé goes further, suggesting that, because his cynicism rarely comprised more than negative declarations

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that were designed to upset his opponents, Diogenes’s cosmopolitan philosophy should also be treated as, at best, primitive, “par consequent, un cosmopolitisme negatif ” (Goulet-Cazé, “Un Syllogisme Stoicien,” 231). Martha Nussbaum writes that Diogenes “seems to have had little in the way of developed philosophical thought, certainly not political thought. His life was strikingly apolitical and defiant of all earthly authority” (“Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 4n11). Even the compilers at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy feel free to editorialize on this point, stating that “we might wonder if there is any positive content to [Diogenes] the Cynic’s world citizenship” (Kleingeld and Brown). Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. See, for example, Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons. Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” 81. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.2. Ibid. Ibid. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 223. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”; Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading.” Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” 203. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 69. MacArthur Foundation, “Fellows Frequently Asked Questions.” Micklethwait and Wooldridge, A Future Perfect, 229. For Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the cosmocrats are the people who “fill up the business-class lounges at international airports, provide the officer ranks for most of the world’s companies and international institutions, and, through their collective efforts, probably do more than anyone else to make the world seem smaller” (229). Said, Orientalism, 37. Forster, Howards End, 258.

Chapter One 1 Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,” 741. 2 Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung,” 58. 3 For a detailed history of anti-colonial struggle and Third World solidarity, see Prashad, The Darker Nations. 4 For a summary of the multitude of challenges to Afro-Asian solidarity, see Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era,” 15–17. Bandung Revisited (Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya) offers a helpful survey of the

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practical, political, and historical significance of the Bandung Conference in international relations, especially with respect to Asian states. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era,” 15. Although most Latin American nations had achieved formal independence from colonial rule by 1900, European and US capital interests dominated this region throughout the twentieth century in one form or another. See Westad, The Global Cold War, 78, 84, 143. As such, by the inception of the Nam in 1961, Latin American states had been included in this Third World coalition. See also Slater, “Trajectories of Development Theory,” 91, and Prashad, The Darker Nations, 28–9. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 108. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 375. Ibid., 351. Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN , 3–19. Lewis, “‘New’ Human Rights,” 130. Ibid., 102. The new national constitutions that resulted from the Mexican Revolution in 1917 and the Russian Revolution in 1918, both of which addressed social and economic rights alongside political rights, took up and expanded a nascent rhetoric of human rights in the interwar years. Nevertheless, their influence upon postwar formulations of international human rights remained limited. See Stearns, Human Rights History in the World, 116–18. Bright and Geyer, “Where in the World Is America?,” 73. Ibid. Ibid., 66. This is of course readily evinced in the way that writers, thinkers, and activists through the Western Hemisphere have historically contested the harnessing of the designation “America” to the United States. Ibid., 82–5. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 28. See also Campbell, Writing Security, 158–61. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 35–53, and Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 28–32. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 13–14. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 58. As Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller (citing Michael Hunt) further detail, such a contradictory worldview and the US foreign policy that ensues from it has been shaped by “a belief in the exceptional greatness of the nation and its promotion of liberty; racial hierarchy; and a distrust of revolution based on the assumption that the American Revolution was unique and unrepeatable.” See “Introduction: Rethinking Imperialism Today,” 4. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 233. See also Singh, Black Is a Country, 136–7.

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23 Kelly and Kaplan, “‘My Ambition Is Much Higher Than Independence,’” 134. 24 Ibid., 137. 25 Representatives from colonial nations to the Comintern earlier in the twentieth century served as important antecedents to Nam , as they delivered critiques of the Soviet ideological and political agenda that had rejected national liberation for colonized nations in favour of international solidarity. See Westad, The Global Cold War, 51–3, and Prashad, The Darker Nations, 20–2. 26 Kelly and Kaplan, “My Ambition,” 137. There had been two prior historical attempts to secure world peace and stability, the Holy Alliance of 1815 following the Napoleonic Wars and the League of Nations in 1920 after the First World War. However, these only had the effect of advancing the interests of the powers victorious in the wars leading up to them and to an expansion of violence and conflict thereafter. See Zolo, Cosmopolis, 1–9. 27 As the Cold War proceeded, this was often accomplished by way of covert operations to overthrow democratically elected, left-leaning leaders in the Third World, as well as US support of right-wing authoritarian regimes in their place. It is important to note, however, that Third World peoples were not simply pawns manipulated by the United States and the USSr during this period. Rather, as Prashad writes, “Those who act alongside the US military … are emblems of certain class fragments that have domestic reasons to use the US government for their ends.” See The Darker Nations, 143. 28 Kelly and Kaplan, “My Ambition,” 141. Also see Moyn, The Last Utopia, 30. 29 Kelly and Kaplan, “My Ambition,” 142. 30 Westad, The Global Cold War, 16, and Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 41. 31 Westad, The Global Cold War, 20–1, and Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 6, 32, 53. 32 Louis and Robinson, “Empire Preserv’d,” 157. See also Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN , 213–15, and Westad, The Global Cold War, 112–13, 126. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, Roosevelt capitulated to Churchill’s demands that self-determination be limited to European peoples. Thus, the UN Charter actually does not employ the language of self-determination, although, as I discuss below, later human rights instruments rank this as the preeminent right of peoples. And of course, when it did come, the transition to independence was not easily accomplished in most cases, as colonial powers often undertook brutal counterrevolutionary campaigns, such as those in Algiers and Vietnam. Nevertheless, the political and cultural ravages suffered by European

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powers during the war eventually “destroyed both the will and the ability of European elites to keep their colonial possessions.” See Westad, The Global Cold War, 86–9. Kelly and Kaplan, “My Ambition,” 142. This is not, however, to deny the extensive reproduction of colonial trade patterns and “imperial architecture” animated in this postwar international order, which has been documented extensively by other scholars. See for example, Kim, Ends of Empire, 25–6, 28. Westad, The Global Cold War, 21. See also Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 3–4, 12, 66. Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 10, 35, 158. See also Dawson and Schueller, “Introduction,” 7, and Williams, The Divided World, 111–15. Bright and Geyer, “Where In the World Is America?,” 87; Westad, The Global Cold War, 19; and Taylor et al., “Geography/Globalization,” 16. Westad, The Global Cold War, 136, and Go, “Modeling States and Sovereignty,” 107. Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 40. Ibid., 70–1. As in the case of the interpretation of “self-determination,” the right to petition did, nonetheless, fracture Afro-Asian solidarity, with vigorous support and opposition to the provision coming from various member nations. See Burke, Decolonization, 69–91. Burke, Decolonization, 37, 42, 48. Ibid., 48. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 102–3. This, even while Kant later denounces the “inhospitable conduct of the civilized state of our [i.e., European] continent” in the Americas and Asia, where “the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples [Europeans] show to lands and peoples they visit (which in their case is equivalent the same as to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths seems appallingly great” (106). Westad, The Global Cold War, 81, 86, and Prashad, The Darker Nations, 127–30, 199–200. Westad, The Global Cold War, 90–1. See also Painter, “The Rise of the Workfare State,” 160, and Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 29, 66. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era,” 18. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 93–8. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 123–53. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 129. Nesaduri, “Bandung and the Political Economy of North-South Relations,” 69. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era,” 9–10.

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52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 20, my emphasis. See also Prashad, The Darker Nations, 84–8. 54 Prashad, The Darker Nations, 12–13, 84–6, 170–1, 217. Pheng Cheah provides a useful theoretical account of the earlier and “indistinguishable” origins of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Europe as ideological and philosophical responses to the absolutist statism of the Treaty of Westphalia. See “Introduction Part II : The Cosmopolitical Today,” 22–31. 55 Burke, Decolonization, 959. Accordingly, as Burke explains, a key debate at the conference pertained to the definition of colonialism, in the context of the era of Soviet expansionism. Romulo argued that freedom required more than casting off foreign domination, but a “complete democratic reformation of the repressive colonial state.” See also Anthony Chase, “Mutual Renewal,” 59, 66–7. 56 Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era,” 22. 57 Nesadurai, “Bandung and the Political Economy of North-South Relations,” 75–6. 58 Although the most familiar framing of human rights and Islam in our contemporary moment is one that “sees the Great Other in the Muslim world standing eternally opposed to human rights,” Muslim nations were instrumental in the Nam , the fight for self-determination, the drafting of the UDhr and early human rights treaties. Many representatives from these countries also advocated for the indivisibility of political-civil rights and socioeconomic ones. See Chase, “Mutual Renewal,” 59, 67. 59 As powerful as Marxist critique has been at diagnosing the limits, contradictions, and abuses of capital, its influence in the United States and elsewhere on progressive and leftist politics has waned in part because of (as countless social and cultural critics have detailed) its own limits in theorizing subjectivity, identity, political aspiration, and historical change not rooted in a class analysis. 60 While the definition and periodization of neoliberalism remain topics of critical debate, I use the term here to refer to the ideology and political culture that justifies and oversees the dismantling of the social services and economic securities provided to citizens by the state. While neoliberalism continues to maintain liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy, it functions in tandem with global economic restructuring that facilitates the interests of capital across national borders and marketdriven solutions for social and political conditions. 61 Ishay, The History of Human Rights, 4. Unlike Ishay, who seeks commonality between tremendously diverse religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, I restrict my own formulation of a global human rights record to the post-1945 history and do not seek any claim to universality or historical transcendence for the rights articulated therein.

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62 Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 71–84. See Universal Human Rights, 85, 92. 63 Of these, the United States has ratified only the ICCPr and the ICErD . 64 Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror, 35–6. 65 Ibid., 29. 66 For examples, see Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World; Ishay, The History of Human Rights; and Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN . All of these historians use the exact phrase “life of their own” to describe the extra-legal performativity that human rights manifest. Likewise, Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, describes the discursive performativity of human rights as originating in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. 67 Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN , 16, 148–57. 68 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 208. 69 Burke, Decolonization, 98–100, 137. 70 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 224. 71 Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN , 303–4, 310–11. 72 Burke, Decolonization, 114. 73 Ibid., 120. 74 Westad, The Global Cold War, 106, my emphasis. 75 Ibid., 20. See also Prashad, The Darker Nations, 84–8.

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Dickens, Bleak House, 44. Ibid., 47. Robbins, “Telescopic Philanthropy,” 214. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 496. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 227. Ibid., 227. “Philanthrocapitalism” is Matthew Bishop and Michael Green’s widely deployed description of contemporary philanthropy. In Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them (2008), they define it as “harnessing the profit motive to achieve social good” (6). Mikkel Thorup critically aligns the logic of philanthrocapitalism with that of tINa (There Is No Alternative): “One can interpret philanthrocapitalism as the latest expression of the modern era antirevolutionary, pro-capitalist claims that a rebellion against capitalism will only end in misery and that there is actually no opposition between the market and the common good” (556). 8 McGoey, No Such Thing, 28.

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9 By “broader and more complex” I mean that while its basic principles are unchanged, philanthropy has extended to a consumerist orientation. It is increasingly incorporated into the act of purchasing goods, to say nothing of the packaging and selling of philanthropy itself, where what is sold may be Sean Penn’s humanitarian image, Product Red-branded GaP jeans, or a Kanye West concert for Darfur. The global scope and spectacle of contemporary philanthropy are the focus of Ilan Kapoor’s Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity. Kapoor critiques the ideological effect of three types of cause: “the global charity work of entertainment stars,” “the corporate philanthropy of billionaires and big business,” and “the humanitarian work of ‘spectacular’ NGo s” (2). My analysis focuses on the second of these types. McGoey also cites Wilde, but cautions that “occasionally, Wilde has received more accolades for his insights in this essay than seem warranted” (253n18). McGoey associates these overly charitable responses with Wilde’s views on slave rebellions and the abolitionist movement, which I do not take up. 10 Throughout this essay I use the term “organized philanthropy” to describe funding administered through private foundations. “Administered” is the operative word for distinguishing organized philanthropy from largescale philanthropy under the guidance of figures like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. In the United States, philanthropy scholars mark the transition to organized philanthropy with the 1969 Tax Reform Act (tra ). Peter Frumkin, “Private Foundations,” identifies the tra as the major catalyst for “foundations transform[ing] themselves from private institutions guided by the values of the donor into public institutions governed by grantmaking professionals” (70). Peter Hall, “The Welfare State,” invokes the tra as evidence that “the transformation of philanthropy into a quasi-governmental domain was already well underway” (363). It is also worth noting here that my evidence concerning philanthropic practice will be US-centric, in the spirit of David Hammack and Helmut Anheier’s assertion that “among all industrial societies, the United States has long granted the most scope to philanthropy. While foundations exist in many countries – most prominently in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan – the United States stands out: in no modern society are foundations more numerous, and nowhere have they become so prominent and visible” (“American Foundations,” 4). Earlier in their 2010 volume, sponsored by the Brookings Institution, they observe that, as of 2008, there were more than 112,000 grant-making foundations in the United States, with assets exceeding $627 billion (ibid., 3). 11 Žižek, Violence, 6. While Žižek has since cited him directly, for example in his 2010 “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” rSa lecture, Wilde is not referenced in Violence. This absence is conspicuous, given that Žižek’s wording

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closely resembles Wilde’s in several instances. Two notable examples are Žižek’s framing of violence as “a lure which prevents us from thinking” (4). This recalls a phrase from Wilde’s essay that Žižek emphasizes in his rSa lecture: “it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought” (“The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 227). Žižek goes on to rehearse Wilde’s pathological rendering (cited above) of philanthropy: “the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses” (21). Žižek, Violence, 22. Ibid., 2. In a 2010 talk at the London School of Economics, David Harvey calls for global poverty to be framed as a “problem of the accumulation of wealth” (n.p.). He “def[ies]” anyone to “solve the global poverty problem without dealing with the accumulation of wealth problem” (n.p.). This resonates with an Oxfam report released as the 2014 World Economic Forum was getting underway in Davos. The finding that made the most headlines was that the eighty-five richest people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest half of the world. See Wearden, “85 Richest People.” Ibid., 16. I follow Dominick LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory, in viewing Žižek’s recourse to extremes as an intellectual flaw. LaCapra focuses his critique on Žižek’s theorizations of trauma. In the epilogue, LaCapra notes that “the tendency in Žižek is to overdose on the antidote by going to the extreme limit almost every time” (153). He cites the example of Žižek “approximating the Nazi genocide to [Walter] Benjamin’s cryptic ‘divine violence’” (152). Such “approximations” betray an insufficient critical distance from the material in question, which prevents Žižek from meeting LaCapra’s historicizing mandate (adopted from Freud and Adorno) of “working through” an event (158). Ironically, LaCapra has an “acting out” moment of his own (ibid.). He repeats the problem of superficial readings that he diagnoses in Žižek’s work, articulating the misunderstanding that Žižek advocates inaction in the face of systemic crisis (ibid.). He cites the passage in Violence where Žižek avers, “‘Do you mean we should just do nothing? Just sit and wait?’ One should gather the courage to answer: ‘yES , precisely that’” (153, emphasis in original). For LaCapra, this represents a “do-nothing attentisme, perhaps construable as a waiting for the apocalypse” (ibid., emphasis in original). Except that Žižek continues: “There are situations when the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to ‘wait and see’ by means of a patient, critical analysis” (Violence, 7, emphasis mine). Perhaps LaCapra would counter that Žižek nevertheless fails to follow up with such an analysis (see LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory, 153–8).

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17 Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 227. 18 Ibid., 228. 19 Bleak House clearly renders Mrs Jellyby’s philanthropic unfreedom: she is so “full of business” that she spends all her time thinking of Africa, talking about it, and exchanging letters concerning developments there (41). 20 With the global rise in levels of economic inequality, philanthropy’s sidelining of this issue is startling. As McGoey relays, “the annual 2012 Giving USA study reported that only 7 per cent of the previous year’s overall charitable donations in the nation reached programmes defined as for ‘public-society benefit’ in contrast to the much higher spending on religious and cultural pursuits” (18). 21 Ibid., 227. 22 Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 81–2. 23 Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 158. 24 Tax relief has remained part of the argument for establishing a foundation throughout the twentieth century. As Joel Fleishman notes in The Foundation, “just as charitable gifts during the lifetime of a donor can diminish tax liability, gifts to establish a foundation upon death can significantly diminish or even eliminate estate tax liability” (39). 25 Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 82–3. 26 Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 133. 27 Ibid., 134. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is classified as a tax-exempt t 20 – a private grant-making foundation. The foundation’s charter is not publicly available, but my claim is based on Kriplen’s statement that “the language of the charter describing the purposes of the foundation was kept simple, with much of the wording taken straight from the IrS code: that the foundation would operate for ‘charitable, religious, scientific, literary, and educational purposes’” (134). For the template that the IrS provides to those planning on forming a private foundation, see http://www.irs.gov/charities/foundations/article. 28 Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 230. 29 The foundation increased the stipend to $625,000 in 2014. Between 2000 and 2013, the amount was $500,000. The outlay for each member of the inaugural class (1981) was $120,000. 30 Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 92n4. 31 See macfound.org. 32 Ibid. 33 Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 1. 34 Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, v. 35 Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 1. 36 There are other biographical accounts of MacArthur, but they are less directly tied to the symbolic management of his reputation. Two examples

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cited by Graymont are T.A. Wise’s Fortune article, “The Incorrigible John MacArthur” (1958), and the “MacArthur, John D.” entry in Who’s Who in America (1956–57). Another interesting source, cited by both Graymont and Kriplen, is William Hoffman’s biographical fiction, The Stockholder (1969). Hoffman, a one-time editor of a Bankers Life company publication, blends critical biography and biographical fiction in a manner that puts the stress squarely on the “critical” and on “fiction.” I have elected to limit myself to non-fiction, in no small part because I think that Hoffman’s Manichean portrait, with MacArthur playing the role of the selfish, stingy, vindictive, misogynist billionaire, is reliable only as an index of the ideological spectacle of market fascination, which is the subject for another paper. Also, the dialogue is truly atrocious. The crown jewel in MacArthur’s eventual empire, Bankers Life, converted from a policyholder-owned to a stockholder-owned company in the 1940s. See Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 67. Ibid., 60–1. Quoted in ibid., 65. Ibid., 60. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 45. Ibid. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 38. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 45–6. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 45. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 48. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 52. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 54. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 53. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 57. Ibid. Ibid., 80. Ibid. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, 66. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 4, 162. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 58. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 234. Kriplen, The Eccentric Billionaire, n.p. Ibid. The nickname is addressed on the foundation’s website (macfound.org) in an FaQ : “Why does the program not use the term ‘genius’ regarding its Fellows? Journalists and others sometimes use ‘genius grant’ as a

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80

81 82 83

shorthand reference for the MacArthur Fellowship. We avoid using the term ‘genius’ to describe MacArthur Fellows because it connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess. The people we seek to support express many other important qualities: ability to transcend traditional boundaries, willingness to take risks, persistence in the face of personal and conceptual obstacles, capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches.” Quoted in Freund, Narcissism and Philanthropy, 54. Burch, “Of Venture Research,” 681. Ibid., 682. Ibid. Ibid. Berman, “Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency,” 3. Reagan, “First Inaugural Address,” para. 3. Ibid. Ibid., para. 4. Ibid., para. 16. Ibid., para. 18. Quoted in Garber, “Our Genius Problem,” 71. Ibid. The foundation appears to have dropped the term “venture capital” from its official rhetoric sometime around 2006. I go on to explain that the venture capital model prevails despite this change. Perhaps the term “venture capital” carried too explicit an association with risk, which would have taken on an especially negative valence in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. See macfound.org. Freeman, “Venture Capital,” 154. See macfound.org. Barry D. Karl, a former professor of philanthropy and public policy at Harvard, claimed that the program was “basically a misuse of philanthropic funds” (Scott, “MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants Get Some Heat and a New Head,” para 27). James F. English offers a more pointed criticism that is no doubt apparent to those in literary studies regarding recipients like Harold Bloom, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, and others. English notices that fellowships “often go to the very biggest stars of American academe, whose salaries dwarf the award and whose conditions of employment already afford the very opportunity the MacArthur claims to provide” (English, The Economy of Prestige, 43). Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9–10. Ibid., 10. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 234.

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84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., 246, emphasis in original. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 269. Ellison, Invisible Man, 41. Ibid. Graymont, The MacArthur Heritage, 80. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 229.

Chapter Three 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,” 721. Ibid., 722. Gibian, “Cosmopolitanism and Traveling Culture,” 21. Cf. Lyons, “Global Melville,” 52–3. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; and C.L.R. James, American Civilization. The brilliant theoretical tour-de-force through the philosophy of history that Baucom applies to the Zong case in his book provides an astounding cultural history of credit and finance. At times, however, he seems to place too much emphasis on the economic rather than on the potential of human agency. In these instances, Baucom paradoxically collaborates with the epistemology that he strives to criticize. I do not concur with critical reviews of Specters of the Atlantic that fault the book on the basis of a misconstrued and “overtheorized” history of the Zong case and Baucom’s historiography of slavery in general (see Newcombe’s review of Baucom) – such a charge, I think, entirely misses the might of Baucom’s project. I do, however, think that Baucom’s work remains confined to the transhistorical apparatus of abstraction, speculation, and “hyperfinancialization,” which he dissects by downplaying the extent to which even such a longue-durée apparatus is always the result of very specific political agendas enabled by people who design and practise them. Any critique of financialization that ontologizes structures of the market visà-vis human agency ultimately perpetuates the “invisible hand logic” of historical dynamics. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, and Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism. Brennan, At Home in the World, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” and “The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery.” Cf. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 89–96. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 95, emphasis in original. Graeber, Debt, 165. Wertheimer, Underwriting, 8.

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28 29 30 31

Amstrong, “Slavery,” 168. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 170. Graeber, Debt, 169–70. Ibid., 171. Wertheimer, Underwriting, 11. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,” 721. Let me note at this point that in fact several insurance companies have used the philanthropic and communal appeal of the cosmopolitan. See for instance: the Cosmopolitan Mutual Insurance Co., the Cosmopolitan Mutual Health Insurance in Ghana, and the Cosmopolitan Insurance Group in the US. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” 340. Ibid., 340–1. Beck, “Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk,” 1353. To flesh out how exactly the rise of financial tools such as insurance contracts have contributed to the advent of imagined cosmopolitical communities coeval to the creation of imagined national communities described by Anderson in Imagined Communities is beyond the limits of this paper and will have to be developed elsewhere. Suffice it here to point out that, from its beginnings, both imagined national communities and their cosmopolitical complements were sparked by print-capitalism and the marketplace as an administrative unit. What differentiates the two is the degree to which both forms involved, facilitated, or required a shared sense of temporality and consciousness. The imagined cosmopolitan communities triggered by financialization did of course not produce a sense of togetherness like the one Anderson attributes to the practice of reading the morning newspaper, for instance (Imagined Communities, 35). On the contrary, the speculative confidence of financialization and the involuntary connections between people to which it gave rise was precisely not predicated on the creation of a shared public sphere, but on the amplification of private property relations and transnational capital. Imagined cosmopolitical communities of this kind, in other words, create forms of involuntary togetherness without public communality; they are fundamentally a form of negative cosmopolitanism. Beck, “Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk,” 1354. Luhmann, Vertrauen. Cf. Armstrong, “Slavery,” 174. Ibid.

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32 The legal history of cannibalism at sea is of course much more complex. Tim Armstrong explicates the history of drawing lots at sea and the relation to cannibalism insightfully in his article “Slavery, Insurance, and Sacrifice in the Black Atlantic,” and points out that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the legitimacy of drawing lots was increasingly questioned. 33 Dimock, Empire for Liberty. 34 Melville, Moby Dick, 139. 35 For instance, Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative has described the horror of slavery in terms of white cannibalism before Melville. Here Equiano describes how “merchants and planters” carefully examine the enslaved captives: “They also made us jump, and pointed to the land, signifying we were to go there. We thought by this, we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us; and, when soon after we were all put down under the deck again, there was much dread and trembling among us, and nothing but bitter cries to be heard all the night from these apprehensions, insomuch that at last the white people got some old slaves from the land to pacify us” (40). The prescience of Equiano’s narrative, which here too debunks and equates the barbarism of the slave trade as a version of white cannibalism, clearly acquires new significance when seen in the light of financialization. 36 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 138. 37 Bryant, “‘Nowhere a Stranger,’” 285, emphasis in original. 38 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 138. 39 Hannerz, Transnational Connections, 103. 40 Melville, The Confidence-Man, 231. 41 Ibid., 245. 42 The date 1 April is significant in two respects: in the first case, it signifies April Fool’s Day. More interestingly, however, it is also the first day of the financial year. The practice of ending the financial year on 31 March instead of 31 December was established by the English East India Company in Bengal, after Britain moved from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian one. Ibid., 235. 43 A remarkably similar scene can be found in Melville’s early novel White Jacket. In chapter 84 the narrator connects the perils of the sea with the logic of insurance in the setting of the ship’s barber shop. Being shaved on the high seas, he explains: “As I looked upon the practitioner and the patient at such times, I could not help thinking that, if the sailor had any insurance on his life, it would certainly be deemed forfeited should the president of the company chance to lounge by and behold him in that imminent peril” (719). 44 Banerjee, Ethnic Ventriloquism, 99.

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Melville, Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, 203. Ibid., 151. Melville, The Confidence-Man, 132. Melville, Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, 203. Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” 81. Bannerjee, Ethnic Ventriloquism. Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” 79. Robbins, Perpetual War.

Chapter Four 1 Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” 2 Gunew, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators. 3 Spivak, Other Asias, 208–9. See chapter 7 for a history of the term. Note also her comment, “We are looking here at problematizing … the identitarianism that has been a largely unintended consequence of Orientalism and postcolonial criticism” (235). 4 Spivak, Other Asias, 240. 5 Ibid., 210. 6 Sun Ge, “How Does Asia Mean?,” 9. 7 My thanks to Jessica Main who alerted me to the controversial nature of this critic. An assessment may be found at http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2011/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/. 8 Sun Ge, “How Does Asia Mean?,” 19. 9 See Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in a new translation, http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/wilkins.html (accessed May 2010). This story is cited in Bismarck, “Of all the images in the world,” 76, and Engberg, “Infinite Crossroads,” 78, and both come to it via Foucault’s introduction to The Order of Things. 10 Gilroy, After Empire, 75. 11 Gunew, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators. 12 Nikos Papasergiadis’s recent Cosmopolitan Culture invokes the figure of the zombie. 13 Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” 81. This echoes Balibar’s “racism without race” argument that deflects racist claims onto cultural differences. Bailbar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?,” 17–28. 14 Kent and Tomsky, “Negative Cosmopolitanisms,” accessed May 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20130419034507/http://www.negative cosmopolitanisms.com/. 15 Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” 157–87. 16 Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” 15–53.

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17 Pollock also points out the very different histories of vernacularization in Europe and South Asia as a way of warning against the reification of either “vernacular” or “cosmopolitan.” 18 Bhabha, “Speaking of Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation,” 25. 19 Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” For further discussion of the “minor,” “major” dynamic, see the work of Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, particularly chapter 8. 20 Gilroy, After Empire. 21 Spivak, “Imperative,” 339. The “planetary” is discussed at length in the last chapter of Spivak, Death of a Discipline. It is quite different from Mary Louise Pratt’s use of it to mean a new phase in European “territorial capitalism” (Imperial Eyes, 9). 22 Hall, “Political Belonging,” 30. 23 See also Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of mondialisation, explained by Berthold Schoene as “the creation of the world … it originates and stays rooted in the specific, unassimilable singularities of the local … mondialisation promotes cosmopolitan agency as non-directive ‘struggle’” in discrepant ways (The Cosmopolitan Novel, 24). 24 Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 21. 25 Gunew, Haunted Nations. 26 Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 148. 27 Ibid., 149. 28 Ibid., 156. 29 Ibid, 169, 158. 30 Ibid., 168. 31 Ibid., 177. 32 Gilroy, After Empire, 3. 33 Ibid, 8. 34 Gilroy, “Race and the Right to Be Human,” 24. 35 Gilroy, After Empire, 66. Ernesto Laclau has raised similar arguments when he suggests that the problems begin when a group claims to inhabit or incorporate universalism. See “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,” 360–8. 36 Gilroy, After Empire, 75. 37 See Gunew, “Estrangement as Pedagogy: The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” 38 Ibid., 79. 39 Ibid., 85. 40 In Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators, I discuss the last notion in relation to Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller’s Swabian Germans in Rumania, non-Anglo-Celts in Australia, and those outside the Anglophone-Francophone axis in Canada.

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41 I look at Eastern European categories in more detail in “Estrangement as Pedagogy: The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” 42 Cheah, “World Literature as World-Making Activity,” 30. See also his reworking of these concepts in What Is a World? Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. 43 Cheah, “World Literature as World-Making Activity,” 27. 44 If one is attempting to link abjection to subaltern cosmopolitanism then the immediate charge is that this is an oxymoron along the lines of Spivak’s mute subaltern, or the comment I received from my Australian colleague Ghassan Hage on hearing me attempt to make a case for multicultural writers, inescapably marginalized, as being subaltern cosmopolitan mediators. How can they be considered subaltern, was his point, when they have access to the cultural capital of literature? Certainly we can have the depiction of subaltern abjection, as in Rey Chow’s analysis of a John Yau story, where her conceptualization of ethnic hybridity as intrinsically abject results in a framework that robs the “protestant ethnic” of any agency whatsoever. See Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 148. 45 Miki, Broken Entries, 144–52. 46 Butler, Precarious Life. 47 Maclear, Beclouded Visions, 130. 48 Ibid., 127. 49 Ibid., 155. 50 In another section of my work on vernacular cosmopolitanism I examine Herta Müller’s work on the German minority persecuted in Ceaucescu’s Rumania. See Gunew, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” 51 It is interesting to note that Maclear’s approach in the novel is echoed by Fiona Tan in her installation Changeling, where the voice-over states, “Can I creep into someone else’s skin, behind someone else’s picture?” (Mirror Maker, 86). 52 My gratitude to Xin Huang for alerting me to the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition of Fiona Tan’s work Fiona Tan: Rise and Fall (2010), thus leading me to embark on this exploration. 53 Balibar, We, The People of Europe, 234. 54 Calvino, Invisible Cities, 28–9. 55 This took place in Norway, Japan, Sydney, and most recently London. Tan asked people to send in their family snapshots (many thousands) and then grouped and displayed them according to certain rituals. 56 Benedict Anderson speaks of classificatory systems such as the census as an important part of the arsenal of the colonial endeavour. See chapter 10, “Census, Map, Museum,” in the revised 1991 edition of Imagined Communities. 57 Tan, Scenario, 118.

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Tan, Provenance, 25. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 52. Elsaesser, “Place after Place,” 2.21. Tan, Provenance. Tan, A Lapse of Memory, http://www.fionatan.nl/video/. Elsaesser, “Place after Place,” 2.30. Tan, Time and Again, 45. Doris van Drathen in Tan, Disorient, 2.09. Tan, Time and Again, 45. Tan, Disorient, 1.22. Tan, Time and Again, 45. See http://www.fionatan.nl/works/1. Tan notes that she consulted both Said’s Orientalism and Buruma and Margalit’s Occidentalism as part of her research for this work. Tan, Disorient, 23. Tan, Disorient, 1.27. It would take a great deal of research to source the “modern” material including footage from May You Live in Interesting Times (1997) that is inserted into the section dealing with Java. I have written about Fleming in relation to another film, “Blue Skies,” that plays with some of the same elements. See Gunew, “Subaltern Empathy.” Fleming, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, 9. Ibid., 74–7. Ibid., 73. This differs from the parallel experience traced by Fiona Tan in May You Live in Interesting Times. One might consider this to be an odd example of sparagmos – ritual dismemberment. In a reversal of Tan’s lineage, Fleming’s father is Anglo-Celtic Australian whereas her mother is one of the daughters of Long Tack Sam. Ibid., 156–7. Ibid., 113. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 115–23.

Chapter Five 1 Hamid, Moth Smoke, 121. 2 For an elaboration of this type of definition in relation to South Asia see Rukmini Bhaya Nair, “Acts of Agency and Acts of God,” 539. For an introduction to definitional problems of disaster see E.L. Quarantelli, What Is a Disaster?, and for a critique of the spectacular event’s obfuscations of

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

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18 19

systemic inequalities and long-term processes of harm, see Nixon, Slow Violence. Martha Nussbaum’s influential essay, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” revived academic discussions of the term while positioning nationalism as cosmopolitanism’s provincial other. For a critique of the term’s function under economic globalization, see Brennan, Wars of Position, 205–32. For a useful genealogy of cosmopolitanism, and the critical debates that surround it, see Kent and Tomsky’s introduction to this volume. Brennan, Wars of Position, 205. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,” 741. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 535–8. Abraham, “The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories,” 51. Mian, “Fevered with Dreams of the Future,” 36. Ibid. As critics point out, the claims made by strategic experts and government officials about a national consensus on the legitimacy and necessity of the program are drastically overstated. Public opinion polls, especially those that incorporate the perspectives of marginalized communities, routinely undercut elite claims to national agreement on nuclear issues. See Abraham’s reference to an opinion poll in India, in which 56 per cent of the country had not heard of the tests. Abraham, “Introduction,” 14, and Nizamani, “Pakistan’s Atomic Publics: Survey Results.” Abraham, “The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories,” 49–65. Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian, eds., Out of the Nuclear Shadow. Anand Patwardhan, Jang Aur Aman. The apocalyptic imagination is exemplified by Arundhati Roy’s breathless rendering of the possible catastrophic devastation raised by the nuclear tests in “The End of Imagination.” Nevertheless, she rejects the charge of “Doomsday Prophet hyperbole.” See “The End of Imagination,” 97. Srirupa Roy, “The Politics of Death,” 114–18. For an account of the secrecy permeating India’s nuclear program, see Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb. Haider Nizamani, “Pakistan’s Atomic Publics: Survey Results,” 148. Of the two national Anglophone literatures, the Pakistani English novel offers the most sustained fictional response to the nuclear tests. Within Indian Anglophone literature, internationally prominent novelists Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh have both published essays on the tests. Otherwise, the topic is engaged in works by younger writers of popular fiction, like Samit Basu’s science fiction novel, Turbulence, and Sami Ahmad Khan’s political thriller, Red Jihad. Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden, 201–2. Hamid, Moth Smoke, 139.

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20 Harleen Singh has noted how Burnt Shadows and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist register the recession of nuclear fears as problematically provincialized by an American-centric news cycle. Singh, “Insurgent Metaphors,” 29, 38. 21 Singh, “Insurgent Metaphors”; Zinck “Eyeless in Guantanomo.” 22 In interviews, Shamsie notes that Burnt Shadows was at first conceived as a response to the 1998 South Asian nuclear tests, though they became “background hum rather than central chatter” during the writing process (Mohammed, “The Postergirl of Pakistan”). For further comments on the tests as the original framing events for the novel see Singh, “A Legacy of Violence,” 157–62. 23 Melas, All the Difference in the World, 58. 24 Ibid., 31–7. 25 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 48–50. 26 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 7–9. 27 Gigliotti, “Unspeakable Pasts,” 164–81; Eaglestone, “‘You Would Not Add to My Suffering,” 72–85. 28 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 29. 29 Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” 470. 30 Elements of this synopsis appear in O’Loughlin, “Burnt Shadows.” 31 On Burnt Shadows as rejoinder to US amnesia, see Singh, “Insurgent Metaphors”; on US fiction’s reinforcement of American cultural insularity after 9/11, see Shamsie, “Storytellers of Empire.” 32 On the use of this term as an overt framing of American global interests in the 1940s, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 50. 33 O’Loughlin, “Burnt Shadows.” 34 Singh, “Insurgent Metaphors,” 34. 35 For critical commentary on post-nationalism as a dominant orientation in postcolonial cultural theory, see Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial, and Jani, Decentering Rushdie. As Puri succinctly puts it, post-nationalism is a theoretical stance that “declares the nation effectively dead as a political and analytic category” (6). Jani grounds post-nationalism as an outgrowth of the political pessimism around the nation following the global economic crisis of 1973 (30). 36 De Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka, 12. 37 Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 227. 38 Ibid., 26. 39 DeLoughrey, “Radiation Ecologies,” 484; Lippit, Atomic Light. 40 Lippit, Atomic Light, 117–18. 41 Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 50. 42 Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park displays a statue of a young girl, Sadako Sasaki, poisoned with leukemia after the bomb attack. Before her death,

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

Sasaki sought to relieve her disease by crafting one thousand paper origami cranes. The crane forms an integral part in the memorial, and has since been taken up as a symbol of peace and opposition to nuclear weapons. For an account of Sasaki and the tradition of the paper cranes, see Masamoto, Children of the Paper Crane. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 50. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 100, emphasis mine. Lippit, “Photographing Nagasaki,” 25. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 299. Melas, All the Difference in the World, 173. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 194. Ibid., 228. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “composite”: “A material made from two or more physically different constituents each of which largely retains its original structure and identity.” For an extended examination of the relationship between kamikaze pilots and radical Muslim fighters see Dower, Cultures of War, 294–8. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 13. Quoted in Shamsie, Offence, 53. There are other responses to 9/11 that invoke the atomic bombing of Japan in relation to the assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. John Berger, “War against Terrorism or a Terrorist War?,” for instance, identifies a number of similarities between the attacks – both were surprises, innovative, and “planned as announcements.” In between these disasters he finds a period of American global dominance, in which the United States was “invulnerab[le] on its home ground” (50). For an extended comparison between these sites of conflict, see Dower, Cultures of War. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows, 270. Ibid., 370. Ibid. Ibid. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 66.

Chapter Six 1 2 3 4

Brown and Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, 12. Hayden, “The Environment,” 353. Ibid., 355. Kymlicka, “Citizenship,” 438.

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5 Luz-Bachmann and Nacimento, “Preface,” Human Rights, Human Dignity and Cosmopolitan Ideals, 3. 6 Ferguson, Global Shadows, 22. 7 O’Brien, “A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa.” 8 Although derogatory terms such as “militants,” “terrorists,” and “hoodlums” have often been used by government officials and journalists to describe the young insurgents, they see themselves mainly as “Freedom Fighters” rather than as “militants.” 9 Asari declared an “all out war” on both the Nigerian state and multinational oil corporations and warned foreign embassies to withdraw their citizens from the oil rich region. According to his press release, “since they are feasting on us and ravaging our land, we also want to ravage them.” See Shaxson, Poisoned Wells, 189. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Douglas et al., “Oil and Militancy,” 3. 12 Watts, “Crude Politics,” 2. 13 See Ukiwo, “The Nigerian State,” 17. 14 Obi and Aas Rustand, Oil and Insurgency; Nwajiaku-Dahou, “The Politics of Amnesty in the Niger Delta”; Ukiwo, “The Nigerian State.” 15 Watts, “Crude Politics.” 16 See Obi and Aas Rustard, Oil and Insurgency, 6–7. 17 Ukiwo, “The Nigerian State,” 10. 18 “Niger Delta: Kuku Raises the Alarm over the Resurgence of Militancy.” This Day Newspaper, 10 March 2012. 19 Ako, “The Struggle for Resource Control,” 49. 20 Ukiwo, “The Nigerian State,” 26. 21 Ahonsi, “Capacity and Governance,” 32. 22 Interview with the author, September 2010, in his Gra house in Port Harcourt, River State. (Gra stands for Government Residential Area, i.e., a well-off area.) 23 Interview with the author in Gbekebor, 15 February 2012. 24 Nwabueze, “Heavy Metal Concentrations,” 35–9. 25 Ibid., 35. 26 Interview with the author in Gbekebor, April 2012. 27 The value of the Nigerian currency on the world market has fallen since then. At the current exchange rate, N 160,000 will exchange for only US $510. 28 Respondents reported that they learned this technique of controlling fires from the oil companies where they underwent safety training as contract staff. 29 Ghazvinian, Untapped, 45.

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30 See This Day Newspaper, 29 March 2012 (http://www.thisdaylive.com), and The Nigerian Tribune, 19 May 2012 (http://www.tribune.com.ng/). 31 Shaxon, Poisoned Wells, 202. 32 Interview with the author in Gbokebor, 16 February 2012. 33 The fate of the internationally acclaimed writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis hanged by the Nigerian military in November of 1995 is a good example in this regard. Popular narratives link the fate of Saro-Wiwa and his comrades to that of local kings and powerful merchants in the Delta, such as King Jaja of Opobo, Chief Overawhen Norgbaisi, and Chief Nana of Itsekiri, who resisted colonial political and economic interests and who were brutally crushed or exiled. 34 Hart, “Informal Economy,” 157. 35 Ibid., 148. 36 Hull and James, “Popular Economies,” 2. 37 Ben Benebai, interview with the author in Amassomma, Bayelsa State, February 2011. 38 Ebiki Kportumo, interview with the author in Gbekebor, February 2011. 39 Interview with the author in Gbekebor, 17 February 2012. 40 Balouga, “The Political Economy of Oil in Nigeria,” 31. 41 See Voice of America News, 15 May 2010. http://www.voanews.com/ english/news/africa/Nigeria-China-Sign-23-Billion-Oil-RefineryDeal-93844304.html. 42 Bayart, “Un-civil Society,” 57. 43 Ibid., 58–9. 44 Brown and Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, 3. 45 Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, 1. 46 Ibid. 47 Fine, Cosmopolitanism, xii–xiv. 48 Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, 9. 49 Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 20. 50 Harrison, Introduction to Globalization and Poverty, 3. 51 Alubo, “The Imperative of Reconstructing the State in Nigeria,” 210. 52 Caraus and Alexandru, Parvu, Cosmopolitanism and the Legacies of Dissent. 53 Caraus, “Introduction: Cosmopolitanisms of Dissent,” 3. 54 Ibid., 1. 55 See for example Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa; Guyer, Marginal Gains. 56 Meagher, Identity Economic, 16. 57 Hull and James, “Popular Economies,” 9. 58 Pieterse, City Futures. 59 Kabeer, Inclusive Citizenship; Newell and Wheeler, Rights.

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60 Gaventa, “Foreword,” xv. 61 Owusu, “Livelihood Strategies,” 450–63. 62 Kabeer, Inclusive Citizenship.

Chapter Seven 1 With both local and migrant workers, the cockle industry adds considerable value to the economy. Cooke notes that the cockle industry in northwest England, around Morecambe Bay, with exports to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain, is worth £7 million per year. 2 Carter, Pai, and Butt, “Desperate Calls.” 3 Pai, Chinese, xv. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Arkell, Review of Pai, Hsiao-Hung, Chinese Whispers. 7 Xie, “Cultural Translation,” 87. 8 Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber, Deviant Globalization. 9 Bauman, Collateral Damage, 159. 10 Butler, Precarious Life, 32. 11 Pai, Chinese, xix. 12 Ibid., xv. 13 Ibid. 14 In New Slaveries, Deandrea also uses the figure of the ghost as “the latest point in a long historical and cultural imagining” that includes colonization and transatlantic slavery. 15 Robbins, “Homework,” 90. 16 Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber, Deviant Globalization, 3. 17 Ibid. 18 Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others, 14. 19 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 5. 20 Appiah, Cosmopolitan Reading, 207. 21 Black, Fictions across Borders, 47. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Pai, Chinese, xiv. 25 In a review Biggs also praises Lewycka’s novels for “the access they offer to a partly obscured world” (“Nosy-Poky,” 33). 26 Pai, Chinese, xix. 27 Ibid., 123–8. 28 Ibid., 109–18. 29 Ibid., 50–9. 30 Ibid., 188.

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31 Ibid., 62. 32 Monica Ali’s novel In the Kitchen creates a utopian moment out of agricultural labour itself when mistaken identity sends her protagonist, Gabriel, into the fields picking green onions, where he rediscovers his perception, seeing as if for the first time “the crisp boldness of the green shoots, the coy lustre of the bulbs … a hundred shades of black in the peat” (514). Gabriel’s situation, however, is quite different. He is a well-known chef, negotiating London real estate and financing for his own restaurant; the work in the fields reconnects him with the processes of harvesting the food that appears in his kitchen. 33 Pai, Chinese, 69. 34 Ibid., 70. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 73. 37 Lechner, “Interview with Marina Lewycka,” 456. 38 By allotting narration to a dog Lewycka situates her novel within a tradition of animal narrators: the horse narrator of Tolstoy’s story “Kholstomer,” the rodent narrator of Kafka’s “The Burrow,” and the dog narrator of John Berger’s King are other examples. At the most basic level, Dog’s narration gives the point of view of another sentient being. 39 Bales et al., Modern Slavery, 68. 40 Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 262. 41 In her interview with Lewycka, Lechner comments that Irina “constantly refers to the romance between Natasha and Pierre” in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (457). Lewycka replies that the references to the novel characterize an educated young woman whose experience and ideas come from reading. I would suggest there are more implications in this intertextual reference. In Tolstoy’s novel Natasha is first engaged to Prince Andrei, a very wealthy young man from the court aristocracy. She is lured away by the rakish Anatole Kuragin, and only after Andrei’s death following the battle of Borodino does she begin to fall in love with Pierre. By allotting the name of Tolstoy’s doomed protagonist to the miner’s son, Andriy, Lewycka proposes that the heroes of a globalized world might be the workers who try to hold on their humanity (“be a man”) in brutalizing circumstances. 42 Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 112. 43 Ibid., 148. 44 Ibid., 149. 45 Ibid., 61. 46 Walkowitz, Cosmoplitan Style, 131. 47 Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 33–7. 48 Ibid., 36.

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Ibid., 192. Ibid. Ibid., 191. Ibid. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 208. Ibid. Ibid., 191. Black, Fictions across Borders, 49. Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 213. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 208. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 209. Ibid. Glenny discusses the breakup of the Soviet Empire, Moldova, and Transnistria (McMafia, 79–80 and 105–6). Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 207. Ibid., 208. Writing about Lewycka’s earlier novel, A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine (2005), Fielding notes the narrative’s strategy of raising “affective confusion,” a term that could be used to describe readers’ responses to Vitaly. See Fielding, “Assimilation after Empire,” 200. Lewycka, Strawberry Fields, 209. Palumbo-Liu, Deliverance of Others, 35. Dawson, “The People You Don’t See,” 126.

Chapter Eight 1 Puri, “Legacies Left,” 8.

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28

Fog Olwig, “Cosmopolitan Traditions,” 422. Hall and Werbner, Cosmopolitanism, 351. Ibid., 346. Lionnet, “Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives?,” 25. Davis’s consultations with people in the film will be discussed later in the chapter. Davis, On the Map. Ibid. Persaud, “Complex Creole.” In his 1994 poem “Genesis,” Brathwaite claimed this sound-image to be uniquely Caribbean (117–18). Alternatively, see Edouard Glissant’s claim that “in Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity, just as Genesis legitimizes genealogy” (Caribbean Discourse, 140). Davis, On the Map. For the complete poem, see “I Celebrate the Chorus of the Creole Chant,” http://annaleedavis.com/work/chant.html. Davis, On the Map. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Fog Olwig, “Cosmopolitan Traditions,” 422. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 421. Article 45 involves the commitment of member states to help ensure “the goal of free movement of their nationals within the Community,” while Article 46 promotes the “Movement of Skilled Community Nationals” (CarICom , “Revised Treaty,” 27, emphasis mine). Davis, On the Map. Davies, Black Women, 56. Ibid. “In Praise of Créolité,” a manifesto by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, “a kind of braid of histories” becomes evocative of a “Creoleness” involving “a maelstrom of signifieds in a single signifier: a Totality” (83). While “to define would be here a matter of taxidermy,” they embrace “poetic knowledge” as “a question to be lived” (83). The “Totality” of Creoleness is thus articulated as “a kaleidoscopic totality” or “the non-totalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity” (84). Davis, On the Map.

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29 Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial. In a Latin American context, Charles Hale argues that state forms of “neoliberal multiculturalism” are now capitalizing on the “cultural rights activism” of indigenous movements and other constituents comprising a global poor majority (12). 30 Glissant, “Creolization,” 84. 31 Ibid., 88. 32 Hall and Webner, “Cosmopolitanism,” 346. 33 Kent and Tomsky, “Introduction,” 7–9. 34 Davis, On the Map. 35 Glissant, “Creolization,” 88. 36 Ibid., 88–9. 37 Crichlow, Globalization, 11. 38 Ibid. 39 Sheller, “Mobility,” 26. 40 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 2. 41 Davis, On the Map. 42 Ibid. 43 Sheller, “Air Mobilities,” 270. 44 Caribbean Community Secretariat, “Revised Treaty,” 27. 45 Caribbean Community Secretariat, “Free Movement.” 46 Davis, On the Map. 47 James, “Strangers,” 176. 48 Ibid. 49 Davis, On the Map, emphasis mine. 50 Caribbean Community Secretariat, “Establishing.” 51 The film notes that one popular response to this Terrible Tuesday incident involved the re-enactment of the event at a water break during a cricket match in Guyana. The reproduction of colonialist sentiment by Barbadian officials seems to have been implied by the skit. 52 Davis, On the Map. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Urry and Sheller, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” 219. 58 Goldberg, “The Global Reach,” 45. 59 Lionnet, “Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives?” 60 Jordens, “Caribbean Migration,” 367. 61 For example, the existence of open-air prisons and drone geographies is indicative of the mobility of homeland security. 62 Hall and Massey, “Interpreting the Crisis,” 57–67. 63 Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” 8–9.

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64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 20. Ibid. Bishop, Girvan, Shaw et al., “Caribbean Regional Integration,” 22. Ibid. Davis, On the Map. Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 5. Sugisaki, “Challenges and Opportunities,” emphasis mine. Kent and Tomsky, “Introduction,” 5. Lionnet, “Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives?,” 26. Hall, “Créolité,” 28. Hall, “Créolité”; Puri, “Legacies Left”; Edmondson, “The Caribbean.” Sheller, “Creolization,” 274. Sheller traces “a national project linked to decolonization in the 1960s–1970s” (ibid.) to “a postcolonial and postnational project grounded in the Caribbean diaspora in the 1980s–1990s” (ibid.). Fog Olwig, “Cosmopolitan Traditions,” 422. Ibid. The nation-building chorus for the song in the film may have been appropriate for the 2013 CarICom Song Competition, which asked that “lyrics … invoke a blessing and or evoke/celebrate the history, traditions, struggles of our Caribbean peoples” by “sounding a call to build Community and to uphold Community values” (Caribbean Community Secretariat Song Competition Terms of Reference). Sheller, “Creolization,” 274. Ibid., 281. Ruby, Picturing Culture, 168. Waugh, “Why Documentary,” xvi. Renov, “Toward a Poetics,” 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 32. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 88. Voelz, “Utopias,” 359. Ibid., 363. Ahmed and Stacey, “Dermographies,” 2. Urry and Sheller, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” 216. Boyce Davies and M’Bow, “Towards African Diaspora Citizenship,” 22.

Chapter Nine 1 Kent and Tomsky, “Negative Cosmopolitanisms,” https://web.archive.org/ web/20130419034507/http://www.negativecosmopolitanisms.com/. 2 See Appiah, Calhoun, Cheah, and Mignolo, for instance.

NO T E S T O PAg E S 16 3 – 74

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14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

322

Go, “Fanon’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” 210. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 169. Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism,” 245. Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” 487. For my purposes here I take these quotations by Cheah and Lu as a provisional definition of cosmopolitanism. Fine and Boon, “Introduction,” 6. For the links between nationalism and sexual politics see McClintock, Yuval-Davis, and Stoler. Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions, 23. Shachar, The Birthright Lottery, 124. Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions, 4. Ibid. See the British Nationality Act of 1981, for instance, which removed the automatic right to citizenship by birth and denied most Hong Kong-born ethnic Chinese the right of residency in the United Kingdom, or the 2004 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, which stops children born to refugee parents in Ireland from claiming citizenship. Chock 173, quoted in De Genova, “Sovereign Power,” 248. Andrijasevic, “Sex on the Move,” 391. This also helps explain the ways that sexuality, in its intersection with race, now figures so prominently in the new dynamics of exclusion by Western nation-states, as seen both in the tightening of admission requirements for pregnant migrants, and in the privileging of new forms of homonationalism. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 548. Berlant and Warner also suggest heteronormativity’s “coherence is always provisional, and its privileges take several (sometimes contradictory) forms” in that “contexts that have little visible relation to sex practices, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative … whereas forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative” (548). Stevens, Reproducing the State, xv. Edelman, No Future, 2. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 555. Stevens, Reproducing the State, 14. Halberstam, “Queer Temporality,” 5. Ibid. Stevens, Reproducing the State, 14. Calhoun, “Class Consciousness,” 880. Admittedly many proponents of cosmopolitanism “attempt to disassociate it from universal reason, arguing that cosmopolitanism is now a variety of actually existing practical stances that are provisional and can lead

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27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

to strategic alliances and networks that cross territorial and political borders” (Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” 491). Likewise, cosmopolitanism is a “not known entity existing in the world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Kant” (Pollock et al., “Cosmpolitanisms,” 577), but the universalist model of world citizenship is still foundational to current studies on cosmopolitan experience and belonging. It continues to provide the basis for those cosmopolitan theories that posit mobility and migrancy as positively destabilizing identity by detaching it from place, as well as to those that posit cosmopolitanism as a celebration of a multiplicity of roots and attachments. Laurier, “Unholy Circumstances,” n.p. Bradshaw, review of Maria Full of Grace, n.p. French, review of In America, n.p. Although the film is quick to point out that Mateo contacted hIv from “bad blood” at the hospital, his queerness is overdetermined by his age, nationality, gender, and location. The connection between aIDS and the gay community in New York has been so thoroughly documented in popular culture that any character in Mateo’s position would be read as queer. Besides, he is a single man who has refused the imperative to reproduce that Edelman outlines. Further, his death coincides with a baby’s birth, which is not only an indication that there is “no future” in Mateo’s position, but that his death is necessary in order for the next generation to thrive. French, review of In America, n.p. Laurier, “Unholy Circumstances,” n.p. Davis, “The Intimacies of Globalization,” 63. Ibid. Ibid. Edelman, No Future, 29. Calhoun, “Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism,” 444. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 549; for an expanded discussion of this term, see also Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1–21. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 554. Davis, “The Intimacies of Globalization,” 37. Gedalof, “Taking (a) Place,” 94. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 554. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 557. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 569. Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 578. Go, “Fanon’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” 210. Stevens, “The Politics of lGBtQ Scholarship,” 225.

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Chapter Ten 1 Anderson, “Banishment,” a 1. 2 Sanchez, “The Global E-rotic,” 868. 3 City of Portland, “Chapter 14B .30 prostitution-free zones.” Evidence suggests that sex workers are disproportionately targeted and penalized as compared to patrons. Given the gendered nature of sex work, this translates into the banning of women more often than men. See especially Sanchez, “Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices.” 4 Sanchez, “The Global E-rotic,” 896. 5 For general examples, see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Fine, Cosmopolitanism; de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, Law and Globalization from Below; Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. 6 Though both men and women engage in prostitution, the female pronoun is used to denote the feminization of prostitution labour irrespective of biological sex. The sex worker is principally feminized in her/his reduction to corporeality, insofar as sexual labour consists of activities that are commensurate with the body, a conception engendered in dominant sociocultural understandings of sexual activity. See Tadiar, Things Fall Away. 7 Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 245. 8 I use the term “abject,” here, from Butler’s work on performativity and gender. She writes, “[The] exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed … requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet subjects, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject” (Bodies That Matter, 3). 9 See East Portland News, “Street Sex.” 10 Neighbourhood Association member John Campbell spearheaded what he called the “Neighbourhood Garbage Patrol”: “We wore t-shirts and walked the streets with garbage bags” to combat street crime, he told a group of neighbours in outer East Portland. 11 Black letter law is the well-established, firmly entrenched, commonly known, and rarely disputed law codified in written legal documents (see Miller, Oral History on Trial). This includes much of the common law of real property – for example, the fundamental rule of trespass, that persons may not enter on the land belonging to others without the permission of the owner or authority under a court warrant (see Platt, Land Use and Society).

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12 Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism,” 1072. 13 Pratt, Working Feminism, 121. 14 de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, Law and Globalization from Below, 14. For the abject cosmopolitan, see Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism”; for the subaltern cosmopolitanism, see de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito; for the idea of embedded cosmopolitanism, see Erskine, “Embedded Cosmopolitanism”; for the dialogical, see Mendieta, “From Imperial to Dialogical Cosmopolitanism.” 15 Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law, 65. 16 Blomley, “Making Space for the Law,” 161. 17 Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence,” 122. 18 Quoted in ibid., 124. 19 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 45. 20 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 58. 21 Abbott, Greater Portland, 19. 22 Sanchez, “Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices,” 123. 23 Ibid. 24 Among the most important was the 1989 Ninth Circuit Court ruling that overturned a city ordinance prohibiting full nudity in commercial spaces. The decision prompted local bar owners to feature “all nude” dancing, and in subsequent years it spawned large-venue strip clubs and the conversion of pubs to strip pubs. See Sanchez, “Boundaries of Legitimacy.” 25 Ibid., 556. 26 Over the past three decades, neighbourhood associations, composed primarily of homeowners, community activists, and business people, have sprung up in Portland, designed to foster citizen participation in planning programs intended to enhance neighbourhood livability. In recent years, the meaning of neighbourhood livability has shifted to a primary focus on crime prevention, rendering neighbourhood associations “legal entities” governed by “citizen-written bylaws.” See Sanchez, “Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices.” 27 Nicholas Blomley (1997) has made a similar argument about gentrification in Vancouver, arguing that the poor are imagined as a threat to property, not only because of their assumed participation in property crime, but also because, by their presence, they destabilize property values, both economically and culturally. 28 For descriptions of these theouries of social control, see Merry, “Spatial Governmentality” and Foucault, “Governmentality.” 29 Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law,” 322. 30 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 133. 31 Ibid.

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32 Under the logic that combines citizenship, law, and property, the latter is equated almost exclusively with private ownership, product of the violent enclosure movements of early capitalism (see Coleman, Property, Territory, Globalization). 33 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3. See also ibid., 188; Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence,” 123; and Razack, “Abandonment and the Dance of Race and Bureaucracy in Spaces of Exception,” 91. 34 Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence,” 124. 35 See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7; and also Wright, Disposable Women, 89. 36 Collard, “Tracing Knowledge and the Law,” 12. 37 Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice,” 125. 38 Razack, “Abandonment and the Dance of Race and Bureaucracy in Spaces of Exception,” 91. 39 Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 245. 40 Blomley, “Making Space for the Law,” 162. 41 For example, the bawdy house laws that make it illegal to engage in prostitution in an indoor location. 42 For example, anti-prostitution laws. 43 For example, “starlight” tours where police officers pick up a sex worker, take her condoms and empty her purse, and drop her off on the other side of the city. See Lowman, “Missing Women Commission of Inquiry Transcripts: October 13, 2011.” Dr Kate Shannon testified at Vancouver’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry that past police harassment was the strongest predictor of violence for street sex trade workers, associated with a twofold increase in the risk of rape. Women who have experienced police brutality, starlight tours, or unlawful detainment are much more likely to get into johns’ cars without consulting bad date lists and go to remote areas of the city for fear of reprisal and arrest. See Shannon, “Missing Women Commission of Inquiry Transcripts: October 17, 2011.” 44 Collard, “Tracing Knowledge and the Law.” 45 Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice.” 46 In “Abandonment and the Dance of Rape and Bureaucracy in Spaces of Exception,” Sherene Razack tells the story of Pamela George, a member of the Saulteaux Nation and mother of two who occasionally worked as a prostitute in Regina, Saskatchewan. In 1995, George was found beaten to death in an isolated area outside the city. During her trial, the judge sparked a public furor when he instructed the jury to bear in mind her work as a prostitute during their deliberations. The naturalness of the degenerate space in which George’s body was found, exacerbated by the naturalness of perceived Aboriginal degeneracy, Razack argues, were directly imbricated in the finding of manslaughter (rather than murder) for George’s attackers. A similar logic was mobilized during investigations

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into the ongoing disappearances of sex workers from Vancouver’s downtown eastside. See Collard, “Tracing Knowledge and the Law.” Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence,” 123. In “The Global E-rotic,” Sanchez notes that, though those caught under the prostitution-free zone ordinance often only engage in sex work sporadically, their identity as a prostitute is made permanent, concretized, under the gaze of the state, extending well beyond the one-year ban. Sanchez, “The Global E-rotic.” Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City, 153. Ahmed, On Being Included, 164.

Chapter Eleven 1 Japanese words and phrases are italicized throughout, except in cases of names, locations, and words commonly used in the West, such as “yakuza.” Asian names will appear surname-first, unless a work being cited is a Western publication (including translations) that credits its author(s) surname-last. Where possible, Japanese films are referenced by their American titles, with original Japanese titles noted parenthetically. 2 Shipper, Fighting for Foreigners, 157; Friman, “Gaijinhanzai,” 973; Komai, Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan, 104–5. The National Police Agency and the Keisatsu Hakusho, the annual police white paper, compiled the data in question. According to Shipper, their findings are dubious at best, suggesting that some unsolved crimes are arbitrarily tacked onto the files of foreigners who have overstayed their visas; further, their findings are discredited by the fact that foreigners are not statistically more likely to commit a crime, but are more likely to be suspected and arrested. Law enforcement points to statistics showing a rise in foreignerperpetrated crimes, but that data also indicates that the rise is only in petty crime, while more serious offences (such as murder) have decreased among foreigners but are rising among native Japanese. See Shipper, Fighting for Foreigners, 158–66. 3 Shikama, “Japan as a Host Country,” 185. 4 There is extensive recent literature on this subject, including Shipper, Fighting for Foreigners; Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan; Tsuda and Cornelius, “Japan: Government Policy, Immigrant Reality.” On the growing expansion of immigration policies to encompass welfare and public services (and not merely labour concerns), see Papademetriou and Hamilton, Reinventing Japan, 32; Weiner, “Opposing Visions.” 5 Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film, 10. This greater sensitivity among Japanese filmmakers to the experiences of immigrants can be seen in a range of contemporary works, too numerous to name here. Among the

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various nationalities living in Japan, however, the portrayal of zainichi Koreans (who are permanently settled residents in Japan) have been the most significant and are visible in films like Go (Isao, 2001), Blood and Bones (Chi to Hone; Sai, 2004), and Pacchigi! (Izutsu, 2004). Williams, “Takashi Miike’s Cinema of Outrage,” 54. Maher, “Metroethnicity, Language, and the Principle of Cool,” 84. “Soft power” refers to Joseph S. Nye Jr’s term for describing the ability to coerce nations to action through influence and attraction rather than conventional “hard” tactics like military threat or monetary persuasion. Schilling, The Yakuza Movie Book. Yakuza films are also known as ninkyōeiga (“chivalry films”) in Japan. Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 106. Ibid. Weiner, “The Invention of Identity,” 9. Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, xxx. Goodman and Peach et al., The Experience of Japan’s New Immigrant and Overseas Communities, 1. See Reubens, “Low-Level Work,” 749–57, and Muller, Immigrants and the American City. See also Shipper, who views the legislative history of Japanese immigration policy as being caught between systems that broadly reflect the immigrant-friendly policies of Western nations and those of Asian nations, which “are designed to deal with workers – not immigrants” (Fighting for Foreigners, 191). Ibid., 193. See Douglass, “The Transnationalization of Urbanization in Japan,” and “The Singularities of International Migration of Women to Japan,” 89–97. See Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, 18; Tsuda and Cornelius, “Japan: Government Policy, Immigrant Reality,” 456–7; Lie, “The ‘Problem’ of Foreign Workers in Japan” and Multiethnic Japan. The majority of illegal immigrants in Japan are visa overstayers, admitted through “side-door” mechanisms, such as the granting of “student” and “entertainer” visas. Others arrive through “back doors” controlled by yakuza organizations whose exorbitant commissions (for forging documents, brokering travel arrangements, etc.) are often taken from the wages of the men smuggled in as cheap labour or of the women trafficked into sexual slavery. See Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, 273–4, 238–43. Not surprisingly, Japan since the 1980s has seen a rise in foreign gangs both working with and competing against the yakuza. Tsuda and Cornelius, “Japan,” 450. Nikkejin represent a complicated dimension to the issue of immigration because they are ethnically Japanese (and thereby fulfil a particular

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imagined criteria for admittance into the country) but are also culturally and linguistically foreign. Even whilst allowing the Japanese state to perpetuate an illusion of ethnic homogeneity by granting priority entry to nikkeijin, their status poses a challenge to simplistic binaries between insider and outsider. See Ōnuma, Tanitsu Minzoku Shakai no Shinwa o Koete; Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad and A Discontented Diaspora. McCormack, “Introduction,” 3. Sellek, “Nikkeijin,” 205. On the perception of immigrants as a threat to a nation’s stability and the solvency of its welfare programs, see Rudolph, “Security and the Political Economy of International Migration,” and Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan. Komai, Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan, 102–3. Yamazaki and Fukuma, “Eiga no Bōryoku, Bōryoku no Eiga,” 151. For examples of such literature, see Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan, and Goodman and Peach et al., Global Japan. Another significant film in this regard is Kamikaze Taxi, which is about the unlikely bond between a nikkeijin taxi driver and a young yakuza enforcer who is on the run after robbing his boss. Their eventual alliance against the film’s villain, a corrupt and jingoistic politician, becomes the metaphorical focal point of the film’s critiques of Japanese racism dating back to its period of imperialism in the twentieth century. See Tosaki, Kamikaze Taxi. Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital, 161. Hitchcock, “Third Culture Kids.” Sese, “Miike Takashi ga Kakaemotsu Daiyon no Meidai,” 58. Shiota, “Eiga to iu Tsukurimono,” 59. Ko, Japanese Cinema and Otherness, 59. DOA also has two narratively unconnected sequels, both of which star the same principal actors. In Dead or Alive 2 (Deddo oa Araibu 2: Tōbōsha, 2000), the lead characters are reimagined as childhood friends who unite in crime; Dead or Alive: Final (2002) is an action set in a dystopian future, with allusions to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999). For this literature, see Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents and A Sociology of Globalization. Holston and Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” 303. Tanobe, “Dead or Alive,” 76. Natsuhara, Yakuza mo Horeta Ninkyō-eiga, 173–4. The term “yakuza” itself has a long history, originally used derogatorily in reference to ex-convicts, the mentally insane, or other “undesirables” throughout the Tokugawa era. Now, it refers exclusively to members of

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organized crime syndicates. However, other terms, while more or less synonymous, reflect a range of attitudes and social agendas towards crime in Japanese society. Bōryoku-dan is the preferred term among Japanese law enforcement and mainstream news agencies. Actual yakuza members are known to employ more romantic terminology like ninkyō-dantai (“chivalrous group”). Another term, gokudō (literally “extreme path”), is ambiguous in its usage, signifying in contemporary vernacular something akin to “lowlife” (a gokudō-sha), but also originally a Buddhist term with Edo-era connotations of someone who protects the weak. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 3. Raz, Yakuza no Bunkajinruigaku, 36; Satō, Currents in Japanese Cinema, 50. In addition to Kaplan and Dubro’s comprehensive coverage, see Hill, Miyazaki, and Rankin. For an outline of societal benefits the yakuza provide (and hence the reasons their existence is ultimately tolerated in Japan), see Herbert, “The Yakuza and the Law,” 148–9. Satō, “Ninkyō ni Tsuite,” 73. For this literature, see Havens, Fire across the Sea. McDonald, “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction,” 170. Ibid., 173. Goodman and Peach et al., Global Japan, 2. Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital, 6. Watanabe, “Herō-zō no Tenkan,” 10. Katō, “Soshiki to Bōryoku to ‘Shimin’ no Ecurichūru,” 94. McDonald, “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction,” 174. Standish, Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema, 167. McDonald, “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction,” 174. Barrett, Archetypes in Japanese Film, 76. Within the narrower world of the film industry, some argue that the popularity of the community-themed yakuza films was partially in response to the increasingly auteur-centric, and therefore individual-focused, nature of the New Wave. See Nishiwaki, “Roman to Bōryoku no Daikōsha to shite no Yakuza Eiga,” 16–17. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. McDonald, “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction,” 189. Ibid., 185. For further literature on this topic, see Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan. In particular, yakuza organizations are structured according to vertical social relations, exemplified by the oyabun-kobun (“parent-child”) hierarchy that, according to works of nihonjinron, leads to a consciousness of

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rank that is central to Japanese social organization. See Nakane, Japanese Society, 30; Standish, Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema, 167. See Adelstein, “Goodbye to the Yakuza.” Herbert, “The Yakuza and the Law,” 150. Bourdieu, Distinction, 65–6, and Herbert, “The Yakuza and the Law,” 146. A subset of yakuza films produced after its initial era reflects the spread of yakuza activity into other areas of East Asia. Examples include Narazumono (Ishii, 1964), Tokyo Gang vs. Hong Kong Gang (Tōkyō Gyangu tai Honkon Gyangu; Ishii, 1964), and Sympathy for the Underdog (Bakutō Gaijin Butai; Fukasaku, 1971). See Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 233–43. Because its lower-class makeup was often constituted by zainichi Koreans as well as indigenous Japanese, the yakuza were able to establish strong black market networks between Japan and Korea throughout the 1960s. Kaplan and Dubro even argue that these shadow networks played a significant role in stabilizing political relations between the two countries, and that the success of this initial foray into transnational network-building is what bolstered the yakuza’s confidence in expanding their influence further out in the world. See ibid., 228. The full, official name of the 1991 anti-yakuza law is “Bōryoku-danin ni yoru futō na kōi nado no bōshi ni kansuru hōritsu,” or “Laws pertaining to the prevention of illegal activities by violent groups” (translation mine). These concessions, Gurowitz notes, have in particular mobilized human rights groups to pressure the Japanese state into adopting a variety of civil rights in accordance with international standards. See also Chung, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, 15. Perhaps this is also fuelled by a casual Orientalism that views the yakuza as a unique and exceptional phenomenon (even though organized crime is endemic to most societies), instead of as a societal vice that must be regulated; the latter pragmatism is reflected in the actual legislation, not by the crusading anti-crime rhetoric that sometimes accompanies it (see Herbert and Rankin). The tendency to exaggerate the yakuza’s uniqueness often stems from Western writers’ tendencies to invoke comparisons with the American mafia (seen in Kaplan and Dubro). This has the inadvertent effect of establishing the mafia as a normative standard against which the yakuza’s esoteric qualities are presented. Suzuki, “Gekoku-jyōge no Nihon-eiga,” 13. Ibid., 15. These young audiences were also frequenting the theatres at a time when the installation of television sets was more common among households than among singles; see Satō, “Ninkyō ni Tsuite,” 52. Fukuma, “Yakuza-eiga no Jidai,” 37; Katō, “Soshiki to Bōryoku to ‘Shimin’ no Ecurichūru,” 97; Satō, “Ninkyō ni Tsuite,” 52–3. Ōshima, “Jingi naki Tatakai Ron,” 131.

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74 Ibid., 137 (translation mine). 75 Richter, “No More Golf or Pizza for the Yakuza.” The anti-yakuza laws also involved crackdowns on the entertainment industry. Kitano Takeshi, reportedly no stranger to yakuza types due to his lower-class upbringing, has similarly complained of these laws. In his biography (as “Beat” Takeshi), he notes the impossibility of differentiating ordinary citizens from potential gangsters during encounters with fans (see “Beat” Takeshi, Daraka Watashi wa Kirawareru [That’s why I’m disliked], 159–60). The policy, which could very well put his career in inadvertent jeopardy, rests on the assumption that the yakuza are not an existing, integrated factor of social life and are therefore easy to identify and isolate. Pressure on the entertainment industry has produced some scandals, notably the ouster of Shimada Shinsuke, a television comedian and entertainer who was forced into retirement in 2011 after admitting ties to yakuza organizations. 76 Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 252–73; also Katō, “Soshiki to Bōryoku to ‘Shimin’ no Ecurichūru,” 95; Friman, “Gaijinhanzai,” 974; Gozuma, Shinjuku, Kabuki-chō. 77 Herbert, “The Yakuza and the Law,” 148. 78 Asakura, “Yakuza to Eiga o Meguru Kyozō,” 82–3. 79 Hook and Weiner, The Internationalization of Japan, referenced in Gurowitz, “Mobilizing International Norms,” 442. 80 Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital, 7.

Chapter Twelve 1 Steiner, The Lights That Failed. 2 See the discussion in Vertovec and Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, 8; see also Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome; and Caroline Humphrey, “Cosmopolitanism and kosmopolitizm,” 138–52. 3 Leonard Woolf, “International Morality,” 153–70; see also Simms and Trim, eds., Humanitarian Intervention. 4 Pietsch, Empire of Scholars; Rabinow, ed., Cézanne to Picasso. 5 See Daniel Laqua, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured. 6 On Kant’s conflicting loyalties, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, 173–94. 7 See, for instance, the work on imperial academies, e.g., Werrett, “The Schumacher Affair,” 104–25; Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment; Withers, Placing the Enlightenment. 8 See, for instance, the discussion of Herder and the anti-imperial counterculture of folk cosmopolitanism in Casanova, The World Republic of Letters; and earlier, Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, especially chapter 6, which revises the view of Herder as a critic of the

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Enlightenment that Isaiah Berlin had left behind. In Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. See Cassirer, Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt, for Goethe’s humanist conception of life as an alternative to modern reactionary vitalism. Cf. Friedrich Gundolf, Goethe. On Goethe, see, for example, Vera Nechaeva, “Pis’ma Goethe” [Goethe’s Letters], published in Krasnyi Arkhiv, 307. Tolstoy is discussed in nearly every volume of Krasnyi Arkhiv (1922–1940), edited by V.V. Adoratskyi et al. Cf. Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur. See also Richard M. Meyer, Die Weltliteratur im 20. Jh (1913), 2nd edition. Hench, Books as Weapons; Thomsen, Mapping World Literature; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 434. For Friedrich Schleiermacher, German translation theory was invariably connected with affirmations of Prussian superiority, however. See his Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens, published during the Napoleonic wars by the Berlin Academy of Sciences (1813). Schleiermacher’s intellectual project is explained in Venuti, The Translator´s Invisibility. See, for instance, the essay by Brandes, “Weltliteratur.” More recently, see Damrosch, What Is World Literature? Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann, ed., Anhang an Goethes Werke: Abtheilung für Gespräche, vol. 3 (1811–1818). Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 224. See http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html, accessed 1 July 2013. See also www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/iprm/pdf/ch5.pdf. Mann, Goethe und Tolstoi. See also Kantor, “Lev Tolstoy kak predshestvennik bol’shevisma” [Leo Tolstoy as a forerunner of Bolshevism], 1–15. See, for instance, Tolstoy’s response to a letter from Dietrich publishers in Leipzig concerning the importance of Goethe’s work for his life. He wrote on 27 May 1909 in very general terms but not very warmly about the influence of the German poet. Gusev, Dva goda s Lvym Tolstym, 282. Vladimir Lenin, “Lev Tolstoi kak zerkalo russkoi revolutsii” [Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution]. Yedlin, Maxim Gorky, 52. Dinerstejn, “Der russische Buchmarkt von 1850 bis zur Oktoberrevolution,” 128–36. See also Ivan Sytin, Zhizn dlia knigi. See his edition Polnoe sobranie sočinenij L.N. Tolstogo v 24 tomach. Hofmeyer, Gandhi’s Printing Press. Basinsky, Tolstoi.

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29 Tolstoy, “Letter to the editors of Russkie vedomosti i Novoe vremia,” 225–6. 30 Cited from the publisher’s information brochure Die Insel-Bücherei 1912– 1937, 13. 31 Wilhelm Wundt, “Der Geist der Nationen im Krieg und im Frieden,” 115–45. 32 Backhaus, Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland. 33 Kriegs-Almanach. 34 Die Insel-Bücherei 1912–1937, 12. 35 Sarkowski, Der Insel Verlag 1899–1999, 188. 36 “Convention between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War, July 27, 1929,” Chapter 4, Article 16. 37 Cf. Bodmer, Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. 38 “Activité des sécours intellectuels du Comité internationale de la CroixRouge,” 863–77, and “Sécours intellectuels aux prisonniers de guerre,” 894–7. 39 Révue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge, 125. 40 Cf. Agamben, “We Refugees,” 114–19. 41 “Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague Iv ); October 18, 1907.” 42 “Convention between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War, July 27, 1929.” 43 “Polozhenie o voennoplennykh Soveta narodnykh komissarov SSSr No. 1798-800” [Declaration concerning prisoners of war by the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars of the USSr ], 1 June 1941, in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 10 (1991): 50–3. Reference in Boris Khavkin, “Nemetskie voennoplennye v SSSr i sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii. Postanovka problem. Istochniki I literature” [German prisoners of war in the USSr and Soviet prisoners of war in Germany. Framing the problem. Sources and literature], 8. 44 Criminal Code of the USSr (1926), 86. Cited in Khavkin, “Polozhenie voennoplennykh,” 9. 45 Rossiyskaya Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka, Fond Rubakina. 46 B.I. Nicolaevsky Papers, box 496, folder 3, Briefe von M.N. Pavlovski (31 October 1962; 8 and 26 November 1962), with copies from the German embassy of Akten Ru (Martel), l . 849/l . 244.000.244.046, document of 13 October 1916 on “Organisation einer sozijlistischen [sic] antimilitäristischen Propaganda unter den russischen Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland und Österreich” under the codename “Martel,” which Romberg sponsors with 250,000 francs unterstützt. Hoover Institution Archives. In his letter of 26 November 1962, Pavlovsky also asserts that Rubakin had been in contact with the revolutionary brother of Polish general Jozef Pilsudski,

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whom Kessler had been entrusted with liberating from German prison after the war. Letters and postcards exchanged between Harry Kessler and Nikolai Rubakin, 10 December 1919–30 January 1920, in  Russian State Library [rGB ], fond 358, N.A. Rubakin, box 317. Nicolas Roubakine, “Les secrets du département de la police zariste,” in Novoe russkoe slovo, 25.1. and 1.3. Rubakin, Rossiya v tsivrakh. Rubakin, “Tajna uspeshnoi propagandy,” S .767–76. Roubakine, Introduction, S .121. Rubakin, “Tajna uspeshnoi propagandy,” S .767–76. Rubakin, Introduction À La Psychologie Bibliologique. Nagornaia, Drugoi voennyi opyt, 147. Höpp, Muslime in der Mark, chapter 7 on cemeteries, 131–7. Seiler-Chan, “Der Islam in Berlin und anderwaerts im Deutschen Reiche,” 55; cited in Höpp, Muslime, 132. International Archive of the Red Cross, Geneva, letter of 8 April 1946 in G.2.14, concerning threats of mass suicide among a group of Caucasian refugees interned in Switzerland. Martin Gussone, “Die Moschee im Wünsdorfer Halbmondlager zwischen Gihad-Propagada und Orientalismus,” in Höpp, Muslime in der Mark. A.N. Savin, Voina imperiy i mir Islama. Frobenius und Friedrich von Freytag-Loringhoven, Deutschlands Gegner im Weltkriege. Naumann, “Das Schicksal der Naturvölker im Zivilisationskriege,” 321; for a more recent analysis, see Höpp, ed., Fremde Erfahrungen. Asiaten und Afrikaner in Deutschland, Österreich und in der Schweiz bis 1945, 185–203. International Archive of the Red Cross, Geneva, F (D ) (IC ), F (D ) laZ , F (C ) Vichy, F (-D ), Frontstalag. Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order. Cf. Kanig, “Establishing a Beachhead with Print.” I rely on Boris Khavkin’s article for these references: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Jochen Loeser, Daniel Proektor, Sergej Slutsch, eds., Deutsch-russische Zeitenwende. Krieg und Frieden 1941–1995 (Baden-Baden, 1995). Khavkin also refers to the memoirs of former German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, e.g., Otto Rühle, Genesung in Jelabuga. Autobigraphischer Bericht (Berlin, 1961); M. Emendörfer, M. Rückkehr an die Front. Erlebnisse eines deutschen Antifaschisten (Berlin, 1972); W. v. Seydlitz, Stalingrad – Konflikt und Konsequenz (Oldenburg, 1977); H.G. Konsalik, Der Arzt von Stalingrad (München, 1981); W. Eildermann, Die Antifaschule. Erinnerungen an eine Frontschule der Roten Armee (Berlin, 1985); Graf H.

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66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73

v. Einsiedel, Tagebuch der Versuchung 1942–1950 (Frankfurt/M – Berlin – Wien, 1985). Streit, Keine Kameraden; Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI . Böll and Kopelew, Warum haben wir aufeinander geschossen? New York Public Library, Council of Books in Wartime, typescript of internal correspondence, 6 May 1942–27 May 1943, citation from circular of 27 May 1943. Hench, Books as Weapons, 123–4. Ibid., 320. Books by German authors that were provided to the interned focused on German war guilt, such as Karl Jaspers’s The Question of War Guilt, Thomas Mann’s Warning, Europe, and Schlabrendorff ’s Officers against Hitler. These included Julian Huxley’s Rasse in Europa (1939), works on National Socialism and Christianity, on German war guilt, on Palestine and the Jewish Question, and on the British Empire. Robin, The Barbed Wire College. Comité consultatif pour la lecture des prisonniers et internés de guerre, Le Livre du Prisonnier (Geneva, 1951).

Chapter Thirteen 1 2 3 4

Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism,” 77. Ibid., 77–8. Harvey, Brief, 33. Leigh Clare La Berge has recently argued that “at the moment, finance might be the interdisciplinary object par excellence” – hence the exploding critical literature on the subject. See La Berge, “Rules,” 94. In addition to La Berge’s groundbreaking work, interventions by Arrighi, Baucom, Berardi, Harvey, Jameson, Lazzarato, Martin, Poovey, and the anonymous collective Uncertain Commons have helped shape my thinking in this essay. 5 Harvey puts the matter this way: “A revolutionary transformation of historicogeographical knowledges suited to the times can be accomplished through the dynamic unification of ‘dead’ spatiality with ‘live’ narrative (the conversion of concepts of space and time into a more unified field of thought defined by space-time), and through the unification of historical and geographical perspectives. If capitalism produces its own distinctive geography – replete with competing geopolitical power plays for competitive advantage – within an increasingly cosmopolitan system of production for the world market, then the dynamics of that process, including its unintended consequences, must be at the forefront of both theoretical and political concerns … In remaking our geographies, we can

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9 10

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remake our social and political world. The relations are both reciprocal and dialectical” (“Cosmopolitanism,” 299, 302). For an expansive examination of Thatcher and Thatcherism, see the collection by Jackson and Saunders, Making Thatcher’s Britain; for considerations of Thatcher and/ as neoliberalism, see Jackson’s essay in this collection as well as Harvey, Brief, especially 55–63. Simpson, “Public,” 131–64. I mean “conjuncture” here in the sense given by Stuart Hall: “those related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different tempos, whose condensation, in any particular moment, is what defines a conjuncture.” Hall, “Moving Right,” 14. My concept of “feral cosmopolitics” draws inspiration from Harvey’s searing attack on “feral capitalism”: “we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral … A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day … Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the ‘animal spirits’ of the entrepreneur they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere … Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature” (“Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets”). See Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” for a different yet resonant argument about the damaged relations and dynamics at issue in my concept of “distressed publicity.” Lee Horsley notes, in his illuminating overview of twentieth-century crime fiction, that “the idea of the late twentieth century as a ‘wound culture’ has gained wide currency” (117). Katy Shaw describes Peace’s quartet as a “wound-scape” (David Peace, 46) – a term resonant with my own “wound-world” but, to me, less compelling because not explicit about the global coordinates at issue. Peace, “Red Riding.” Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 158. Red Riding complicates its genealogy by encoding a vigorous critique of crime fiction as a genre (a point I elaborate below) – yet ironically enough complication-via-critique constitutes one way to join the genealogy, as Horsley intimates when he notes that many authors of socio-critical crime fiction “have seen themselves as adapting the genre in subversive ways, defining the tradition that preceded them as antithetical to their own ideological position” (158). I refer here to Fredric Jameson’s influential concept of cognitive mapping, theorized in his landmark essay of the same name as in his celebrated book on postmodernism, and to Jonathan Flatley’s brilliant reframing of Jameson’s concept in his recent book Affective Mapping. Because I take

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12

13 14 15 16 17

18

19

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disorientation in Red Riding to signal – and to reproduce – the impossibility of cognitive mapping and the anguish of affective mapping in the contemporary moment, I disagree with Katy Shaw’s claim that “frequent injections into the [quartet’s] narratives of street names and addresses encourage the reader to form a geographical awareness of this space” (David Peace, 20). The arresting phrase “occult history,” invoked by Peace himself to describe his fiction in a 2006 interview with Matthew Hart, subsequently supplies the subtitle for Hart’s excellent essay on GB 84, Peace’s 2004 novel about the 1984–85 UK miners’ strike – and then pops up in other critical commentaries on Peace’s work. See Peace, “An Interview with David Peace,” 566. Shaw’s contributions have galvanized recent critical study on Peace: her monograph delivers a wealth of searching insight into Red Riding, while her edited collection brings together a number of provocative essays on the quartet. Of them, the ones by Maguire, Keyes, and Lockwood resonate most closely with the argument I develop here – the first in its conjunctive approach, the second in its attention to the contemporary politics of urban space, and the third in its use of recent critical theory about immaterial production (an affinity more palpable still in Lockwood’s companion essay, on Nineteen Seventy-Seven, in the Adiseshiah/Hildyard collection). Likewise resonant – although not focused on Red Riding – is Hart’s essay on GB 84, which offers a careful analysis of Thatcherite neoliberalism. Other commentators (including Charles, Richard Brown, and King and Cummins) raise many of the issues I do – but in ways less cogent for the sort of materialist analysis I venture. Shaw, David Peace, 12. Ibid., 65. Žižek, Violence, 9–15. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Four, 265. Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism,” 81. The connections at issue only strengthen when contextualized in view of the turn by the British government to the ImF for assistance in combatting so-called stagflation in 1975–76 – whereby the UK took its historical place in the cartography of structural adjustment, a cartography replete with entangled dynamics of paramilitary repression and privatizing deregulation. See Harvey, Brief, 58; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 263; Saunders, “What Crisis?,” 37. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Four, 107. Notwithstanding Stuart Hall’s caution, in his 1979 essay on the rise of Thatcher, against confusing what he terms “authoritarian populism” with fascism proper (15) – a caution echoing the critique, in Policing the Crisis, of “simple slogans of ‘fascism’” (320) – the police force in Red Riding certainly invites (and merits) the fascist charge. Peace, Nineteen Eighty-Three, 225.

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 226. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 227–8. Ibid., 228. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Four, 82. Ibid., 45–6. Ibid., 22. Harvey, “From Managerialism,” 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7, 8. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 137–82. Katy Shaw offers a relevant view when she claims that “the social engineering of ‘urban regeneration’ programmes that seek to replace these old landscapes is arguably the real crime at the heart of the quartet, as underhand coppers and developers adopt the coy euphemisms of ‘business opportunities’ and ‘agreements’ to justify their underground operations” (David Peace, 14) – although she does not consider the implications of this insight for the quartet’s geopolitical horizon. More expansive – and more resonant for the analysis I am advancing – is Jarred Keyes’s provocative account of urban restructuring in Red Riding. In striking contrast to the grim wasteland depicted in the quartet, contemporary Leeds epitomizes what Harvey calls “the city of the future” – “a city of pure command and control functions, an informational city, a post-industrial city in which the export of services (financial, informational, knowledge-producing) becomes the economic basis for urban survival” (“From Managerialism,” 10). Peace, Nineteen Eighty-Three, 135. Marx identifies the mm' phase, in which “money begets money,” in chapter 4 of Capital I , “The General Formula for Capital.” For a capacious account of the cyclical history of mm'-style accumulation, see Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century; for an arresting analysis of the serial interimplication of money with mass murder, see La Berge’s “The Men Who Make the Killings.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33–6. Seltzer, Serial Killers, 109. Peace, Nineteen Eighty-Three, 254. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Four, 38. Ibid., 37–8. Peace, Nineteen Eighty-Three, 227. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, 204. Peace, Nineteen Eighty, 2. The phrase “pictures at an atrocity exhibition” recollects the title of J.G. Ballard’s 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition – clearly a resonant intertext for the whole of the citizens band broadcast

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41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

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specifically as for the quartet more generally. Both Shaw (David Peace, 57–8) and Lockwood (“When the Two Sevens Clash,” 54) offer illuminating accounts of the influence of Ballard on Peace; likewise, both advance smart readings of the CB transmissions, with Shaw’s argument about counter-history especially suggestive (David Peace, 57–9). Coleman, “Dictionaries,” 367; Starkey, Local Radio, 161–2. Peace, Nineteen Eighty, 170. The novels of the quartet relentlessly and explicitly depict, over and over again, violence against women. This fact will reflect Peace’s commitment, mentioned above, to the adequate reckoning of crime as social reality. Still, the unsettling question – does such depiction risk reproducing the violence it aims to critique? – will remain, and reverberate. Alec Charles calls the “e” “an indefinite pronoun representing a multiple subjectivity blending killer and victim” (“Pictures,” 66). Starkey makes a comparable claim about CB radio, arguing that “in today’s language, [it] was an early form of social networking, lacking the relative permanency of web pages or images stored on servers, but sharing many other characteristics with the less geographically-constrained Web 2.0” (Local Radio, 162). Baucom, Specters, 160. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 150. What will it mean to extrapolate from the Zong? The question drives Baucom’s project; the politics of singularity and typicality, and the dialectical exchange between the two, preoccupy him, to often anguished effect. Peace, I would argue, has a comparable concern for problematics of singularity and typicality – a claim that necessarily foregrounds and compounds those problematics. Baucom, Specters, 142. Peace, Nineteen Eighty-Three, 86, 128, 204. Berardi, The Uprising, 134, 139. Peace, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, 139–47. On the matter of linguistic accumulation, consider – in addition to Berardi’s insight, invoked above – Christian Marazzi’s observation that “the New Economy as convention is language itself, language as means of production and circulation of goods” (Capital and Language, 48). Charles, “Pictures,” 61. Lockwood, “When,” 58. Shaw, David Peace, 60. Keyes, “No Redemption,” 33. Shaw, David Peace, 50. Lazzarato, Indebted Man, 29.

NO T E S T O PAg E S 2 5 4 – 9

60 Relevant here is the place of contemporary Leeds as the absent present scene of engagement and reception for novels set in that city between 1974 and 1983 but written between 1999 and 2002. For as I indicate in note 30 above, Leeds at the millennium – and today – epitomizes the effects of neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial turn. Beter Bramham and John Spink summarize the transformation (one showing that the urban face of feral cosmpolitics can appear to be bright and shiny): Leeds from around 1980 onwards developed an integrated approach to the transition from modernity to postmodernity. It coped with the economic losses of deindustrialization by diversifying into new areas of commerce and services. It used its Victorian heritage to good effect aesthetically in the transformation of its pedestrianised central retail spaces. It seized upon its under-utilised land resource along the waterside corridor to transform the image of formerly run-down and low-value real estate into a set of flagship and landmark buildings, marking and framing the entrance to the city. It established a reputation for 24 hour activity and cosmopolitan living to revitalise and repopulate its residential core. It managed to reverse retail decline and decentralisation to create an attractive shopping environment of regional scale in a humane cityscape. Above all, it succeeded in reinventing itself to remarkably good effect in a way that few of its regional rivals have achieved. In urban life such success is often reinforced cumulatively by new investment, and the dynamism of postmodern Leeds, once generated, shows no sign of slowing – the real indicatory of a successful postmodern city. (Bramham and Spink, “Leeds,” 22) Yet the process, they note, has, in keeping with the neoliberal template, only intensified socioeconomic disparity, with “the growing gulf between affluence and squalor” causing “polarization and fragmentation of the city” to increase (ibid., 23–4). 61 Shaw, David Peace, 46. 62 Brown, “Armageddon,” 88. 63 Keyes makes a related point, noting that “privatisation was a key battleground in the 1983 British general election … [which] provided the Thatcher government with an electoral mandate for its privatization programme” (“No Redemption,” 26–7). 64 Shaw reads the use of present tense more narrowly, as a coping mechanism for characters in the quartet (David Peace, 27) – an interpretation that seems limiting to me. My argument resonates instead with Keyes’s attention to the concern, in these novels, with “the ‘end’ of history understood as temporal change” (36) – though I take Peace to be critiquing, in his account of the passage into the neoliberal era, the idea that history and

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65 66 67 68

69

70

temporality somehow stop. For a riveting account of the political import of the chronic in contemporary life, see Cazdyn, The Already Dead. For a revealing account of “apocalyptic expectations” and “eschatological politics” as Thatcher’s preferred idiom – her chronic – see Saunders, “What Crisis?,” 30. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257. Crary, 24/7, 8, 17. Peace, “Red Riding.” Negri, “The Political Monster,” 208. Negri understands the monster rather than the spectre as the figure – the ontology – that frightens capital today. “We must,” he argues, “go deeper and reclaim the monster, and by doing so go radically beyond the eugenic rationality of classical tradition … he who tries to resist against the development of the capitalist relations of production is only a monster … it’s a monster he who refuses violence and expresses insubordination, hates the commodity and explodes in living labor … It’s the fact that the monster is positioned internally to Power that makes the latter fragile … and terrified” (196, 198, 202). Baucom, Specters, 226. Flatley opens Affecting Mapping with a related perspective: “some melancholias are the opposite of depressing, functioning as the very mechanism through which one may be interested in the world” (1). Baucom, Specters, 218.

Chapter Fourteen 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” 1–20. Brennan, At Home in the World. Strich, Goethe and World Literature. Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic 1890–1934, 11. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 461. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 117. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 73–4. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 231. Kirill Medvedev, “Beyond the Poetics of Privatization,” 77–9. Pranav Jani, Decentering Rushdie. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 352–72. Herder, Philosophical Writings, “Fragments on Recent German Literature,” “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People,” and “Treatise on the Origin of Language.” Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 115. Ibid., 35.

NO T E S T O PAg E S 2 6 0 – 7 2

15 See the innovative work on these contacts in Popescu, South African Literature beyond the Cold War; and Djagalov, “Premature Postcolonialists.” 16 For their respective references to Vico, see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 109– 10; Marx-Engels Collected Works vol. 41, 355; Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, 145; Leon Trotsky’s famous treatment of Vico can be found in the opening pages of his History of the Russian Revolution. 17 Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit. 18 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 1–21; Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 230; Moretti, Distant Reading. 19 Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, 244. 20 Ibid., 222. See Johan Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, 33–4. 21 For an elegant short description of this mentality, see Theodor Shanin’s compelling study of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth. On the Eastern-European origins of the avant-gardes, see Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” 61–81. 22 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 136. 23 César Vallejo, Autopsy on Surrealism. 24 Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 3. 25 Ehrenburg, Life of the Automobile. 26 Vogeler, Baku (1929). 27 Life of the Automobile, 24. 28 Ibid., 25. 29 Ibid., 20. 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Ibid., 24. 32 Ibid., 29. 33 Ibid., 109. 34 Diethe and Cox, “Translator’s Introduction,” vii.

Afterword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ingram, Radical Cosmopolitics. Nail, “Migrant Cosmopolitanism.” Hansen, “Citizenship as Horizon,” 229. Nancy, The Gound of the Image, 60–1. Balibar, Strangers as Enemies. Ibid., 10. Nyers, Securitizations of Citizenship and “Forms of Irregular Citizenship”; Guillaume and Huysmans, Citizenship and Security. 8 Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 8.

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Ibid., 3. Robbins, “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” Isin and Nyers, “Globalizing Citizenship Studies.” Arendt, Imperialism, 295. Isin, Citizens without Frontiers.

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CONTRIBUTORS

TIMOTHY BRENNAN is Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at

the University of Minnesota and a professor in the Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and English. His most recent book is Borrowed Light I : Vico, Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford University Press, 2014). Borrowed Light II : Imperial Form is forthcoming.

juLIANE COLLARD is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her focus is in feminist geography, with a particular interest in intersections of gender, race, and health. She is currently working on a project around assisted reproduction and questions of (ab)normality in the US. MIKE DILLON is an instructor at California State University, Fuller-

ton. His received his PhD in critical studies from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

SNEjA guNEw is professor emerita of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of British Columbia. She has written on multiculturalism, women’s writing, and postcolonial theory. She has edited and co-edited four anthologies of Australian women’s and multicultural writings, and is the editor of Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (Routledge, 1990) and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (Routledge, 1991). Her books include Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (Melbourne University Press, 1994), outlining a theoretical framework for analyzing ethnic minority writings in Australia; and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of

Multiculturalisms (Routledge, 2004). Her third book is Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators (Anthem Press, 2017). DINA guSEjNOVA is a lecturer in modern history at the University of

Sheffield. She has a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. After a Harper-Schmidt fellowship at the University of Chicago (2009– 11), she took up a Leverhulme fellowship at University College London and subsequently taught at Queen Mary University of London. Her work in intellectual history has centred on the relationship between republicanism, ideas of Europe, and global thought. Her first book, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–57 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores connections between ideas of Europe and imperial memory in elite and transnational intellectual contexts. Her other articles have appeared in the journals Cultural History (2016); Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte (2014); and Journal of European Studies (2006).

EDDY KENT is associate professor of Victorian literature and culture in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (University of Toronto Press, 2014), as well as essays on William Morris, neo-Victorian fiction, postcolonial liberalism, and wasting time. HEATHER LATIMER is a lecturer at the University of British Colum-

bia in the Coordinated Arts Program and at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. Her research focuses on contemporary fiction and film in relation to gender, sexuality, and race, especially in relation to reproductive technologies and politics. She is the author of Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).

PAMELA McCALLuM is a professor in the Department of English,

University of Calgary. She is the author of Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures: The Art of Jane Ash Poitras (University of Calgary Press, 2011), and co-editor (with Wendy Faith) of Linked Histories: Postcolonial Studies in a Globalized World (University of Calgary Press, 2005). She has recently published articles on the representation of human trafficking (Mosaic, 2015); Biyi Bandele and Virginia Woolf (Ethnic

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Literatures and Transnationalism, 2015); and Zadie Smith (Literature for Our Time, 2012). Her research interests are in the representation of globalization and literary theory. From 2001 to 2011, she was editor of the journal ARIEL : A Review in International English Literature. gEORDIE MILLER is the McCain Postdoctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literary Theory at Mount Allison University. His doctoral work situated the MacArthur “genius grants” within and against the cultural logic of neoliberalism. This research interest is broadening to encompass philanthropic realism and anti-socialist representation in contemporary American fiction. DENNIS MISCHKE received his PhD in American studies from the

Ruhr-University in Bochum (Germany) with a thesis entitled “The Cosmopolitics of Trust: Herman Melville and the Long Global Century.” He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Stuttgart. PETER NYERS is an associate professor of the politics of citizenship

and intercultural relations in the Department of Political Science, McMaster University. He is the author of Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (Routledge, 2006), and the editor or co-editor of several books on the politics of citizenship, migration, and security, most recently the Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (2014).

LIAM O’LOugHLIN is a visiting lecturer at the University of Pitts-

burgh and his current research project examines the politics of disaster aesthetics in the South Asian English novel. His writing has been published in Comparative American Studies, Interventions, and ARIEL .

CRYSTAL PARIKH is an associate professor at New York University in

the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015), and the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009) as well as Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 

C ON T R I Bu T O R S

387

MARK SIMPSON is an associate professor in the Department of Eng-

lish and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His work takes up mobility’s modern regimes. The author of Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), he is co-editor of ESC and a founding collaborator, with Imre Szeman and Michael O’Driscoll, in the multi-disciplinary research partnership After Oil.

MELISSA STEPHENS completed her PhD at the University of Alberta

and is a professor at Vancouver Island University. Her research engages with literature and documentary film, critical race studies, feminism, and social movement building. She is at work on a book manuscript focusing on creative reportage produced by Caribbean women as a critique of neoliberalism.

TERRI TOMSKY is an assistant professor in the Department of Eng-

lish and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research examines memory politics in postcolonial and post-socialist literatures. Her current book project theorizes the interplay of cosmopolitanism and abjection within the context of global terrorism, and focuses in particular on the figure of the enemy combatant. PAuL ugOR is currently an assistant professor in the Department of

English at Illinois State University. His research interests are in African literatures and cultures, postcolonial studies, cultural theory, and new media cultures in the Global South. His most recent publication is entitled Nollywood: Popular Video Films and New Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria (2016).

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I N DE X

Afghan-Soviet War, 97, 100–1 Africa: and Asia, 36, 38; and colonialism, 36, 44, 154; economy of, 110, 122, 127–8; and literature, 96, 273, 275; migrants from, 143; and philanthropy, 65, 301n19; prisoners of war from, 236, 237–8. See also African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; Asia; Bandung Conference; Niger Delta; Nigeria; petroleum industry; slavery; slave trade; Third World African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 41. See also human rights Ali, Monica, 317n32 America. See United States American studies, 29, 169 Americas, 143, 156, 169–70, 180, 296n43. See also Latin America anime, 201, 206 anti-Semitism, 8, 77 apartheid, 36 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 9, 15, 134 Arendt, Hannah, 31, 288 Aristotle, 11–12, 135 Asari-Dukubo, Alhaji Mujahid, 110, 112, 314n9

Asia, 120, 215, 296n43, 331n65; and Africa, 36, 38, 296n40; concept of, 18, 41, 75–6, 82, 87, 90, 166; literature of, 222, 273; migrants from, 204. See also Africa; Bandung Conference; China; Japan; South Asia; Third World Asian-African Conference. See Bandung Conference Aslam, Nadeem, 94, 97 Athens, 11, 13–14 Bandung Conference, 16–17, 30, 35–8, 41. See also Cold War; human rights; Non-Aligned Movement; postcolonialism; self-determination; Third World Bankers Life and Casualty Company, 48, 51–2, 301n36, 302n37. See also MacArthur, John D. Barbados, 151, 157, 167; migrants in, 150, 159–61. See also Caribbean; Caribbean Community and Common Market; Caribbean Single Market and Economy; Creole; “Terrible Tuesday”; Trinidad and Tobago

Battle of the Peoples (Leipzig), 222, 226 Battles without Honor and Humanity (Fukasaku, 1974), 211, 214 Beck, Ulrich, 3, 64–6, 125 Beclouded Visions (Maclear), 83 “Benito Cereno” (Melville), 59, 70–2 Benjamin, Walter, 25, 58, 63, 255, 300n16; on messianism, 266–8; on montage, 272, 276, 282 Berlin Wall, 7, 126, 263 Black Atlantic, 60, 63. See also Africa; slavery; slave trade; Zong massacre Bleak House (Dickens), 43 Blind Man’s Garden, The (Aslam), 94 Bloch, Ernst, 255, 266–7, 275–6 Bodmer, Martin, 230 borders, 284; crossing of, 18, 65, 89, 131, 134, 151, 178, 277–8; and property, 188, 193, 197–8; of states, 80, 102, 150, 160, 162, 168, 170, 177, 203, 212; and trade, 32, 66, 126, 297n60. See also capitalism; immigrants; immigration; migrants; mobility; nation-state; neoliberalism; security; surveillance Brathwaite, Kamau, 152, 319n10. See also “Genesis” Brennan, Timothy, 8, 13, 92, 256; on market ideology, 61, 73, 78, 243–4, 249 Britain: citizenship of, 322n13; critique of, 13, 237, 241; imperial, 4, 32, 224, 306n42; literature, 20, 24, 228; migrant labour in, 130–1, 136, 138, 142, 316n1; neoliberal, 25, 163, 245, 249, 336n5. See also Chinese Whispers; prisoners of war; Red Riding Quartet; Strawberry Fields “bunkering,” 20, 118. See also Niger Delta; petroleum industry

390

Burch, George, 53. See also MacArthur Fellowship Program Burnt Shadows (Shamsie), 19, 92, 94–7, 103–4, 312n20, 312n22 Burutu government, 113, 122. See also Niger Delta; Nigeria Bush, George H.W., 7 Butler, Judith, 83, 132, 147, 190, 194, 324n8. See also constitutive outside; othering cannibalism, 59, 67–8, 71, 306n32, 306n35. See also cosmopolitanism capital: abuses of, 297n59, 297n60; accumulation of, 46, 49, 245, 251, 260, 339n32; and cosmopolitanism, 13–14, 61; cultural, 159, 309n44; and insurance, 64; mobility of, 126–7, 305n27; social, 131–2. See also capitalism; finance capital; neoliberalism capitalism: anti-, 208, 281–2, 298n7, 342n68; and cosmopolitanism, 3, 8, 15–18, 127, 283; expansion of, 6, 43–4, 52, 277, 279, 281, 336n5; “feral,” 337n8; financial, 62, 68, 70, 243; global, 209, 223, 262; and imperialism, 59–60, 194, 280; market, 53, 265; and mobility, 203; neoliberal, 158–9, 162, 171, 297n60; and oil, 109, 113; and philanthropy, 46–7, 57, 284; and property, 305n27, 326n32; and slavery, 156; and trade, 38; venture, 54–5, 303n76. See also capital; class; colonialism; commerce; development; finance capital; negative cosmopolitanism; neoliberalism; philanthrocapitalism; philanthropy; speculation; world citizenship

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Caribbean: as cosmopolitan community, 151–5; Diaspora, 155–6, 321n75; history of, 149; identity, 165–7, 170, 319n10, 321n78; mobility in, 21, 150, 157–61, 168–9; as neoliberal space, 162–4, 169–70; prisoners of war from, 238. See also Barbados; Brathwaite, Kamau; Caribbean Community and Common Market (CarICom ); Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSmE ); Creole; Guyana; migration; slavery; Trinidad and Tobago; xenophobia Caribbean Community and Common Market (CarICom ), 21, 150, 159–60, 167–8, 319n23, 321n78. See also Caribbean; Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSmE ) Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSmE ), 21, 150, 169; and free movement, 153, 157–61, 163–6, 168. See also Caribbean; Caribbean Community and Common Market (CarICom ); neoliberalism Carnegie Foundation, 217, 235, 299n10. See also charitable foundations; philanthropy Case of Exploding Mangoes, A (Hanif ), 97 Changeling (Tan), 309n51 charitable foundations, 17, 45, 47–8, 55, 57, 299n10, 301n24. See also Carnegie Foundation; Ford Foundation; MacArthur Foundation; philanthrocapitalism; philanthropy China: economic reform of, 13, 21; and identity, 85, 88–90; and migration, 6, 203–4, 205, 207; as trading nation, 120, 123; workers from, 20, 131, 136, 137–8, 140–2, 322n13.

See also Asia; Chinese Whispers; Fleming, Anne Marie; Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, The; May You Live in Interesting Times; Strawberry Fields Chinese Whispers (Pai), 131–2, 137, 140, 147–8 Christianity, 76, 224, 235, 267–8 citizenship, 22; from below, 129, 286; cultural, 78, 214; environmental, 108, 125, 289; insurgent, 20; state, 11, 35, 80, 175–6, 181, 188–9, 191–9, 289, 322n13, 326n32. See also Britain; democracy; globalization; law; liberalism; negative cosmopolitanism; property; United States; world citizenship civic hermeneutics, 268–73. See also Voloshinov, Valentin civil society, 5–6, 35; 80, 147, 191, 209 class: and capitalism, 57, 337n8; and cosmopolitanism, 8–9, 16, 43, 45, 125, 190, 225, 293n50; divisions, 13, 193, 213–14, 280; and mobility, 154, 160, 162, 164, 166; politics, 34, 111, 297n59; subaltern, 15, 150, 158–9. See also gender; race climate change, 4, 125. See also environment Cold War, 218; end of, 8, 12; geopolitics of, 16, 33–5, 54, 97, 295n27; and human rights, 31–2, 40, 42. See also Non-Aligned Movement; Soviet Union; United States colonialism, 15, 77, 95, 273, 295n32; anti-, 34, 36–7, 167, 222, 295n25, 297n55, 315n33; and capitalism, 18, 44, 280; and cosmopolitanism, 16, 17, 73, 162, 203; and insurance, 66–7, 71; and law, 22, 188–97, 199, 289; legacies of, 9, 85, 149–50, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 196, 294n6; and

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liberalism, 171; and “underdevelopment,” 37–8; violence of, 203, 274. See also Africa; Asia; Bandung Conference; Caribbean; empire; imperialism; postcolonialism; racism; settler colony; slavery Comedia (Dante), 271 commerce: and cosmopolitanism, 5–7, 73, 126, 164, 281; culture and, 279; global, 18, 134, 341n60; media as, 252. See also capitalism; finance capital; globalization; Kant, Immanuel; Life of the Automobile; trade communications: and cosmopolitanism, 4, 65–6, 125, 158; digital, 3; and globalization, 277, 292n27; technology, 259. See also media communism, 31, 34, 273, 281–2; “liberal,” 45–6 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 6, 222, Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 58–9, 68–73 constitutive outside, 190, 194–5, 197–8, 324n8. See also Butler, Judith; othering; otherness Corsbie, Ken, 166–7 cosmocrats, 19, 293n50 cosmopolitanism, 3–4, 7–15, 322n26; “from below,” 19, 92, 107, 127, 129, 151, 155, 289; as cannibalism, 68–71; compromised, 24, 241; “demotic,” 81; “disaster,” 19, 92–3, 95, 289; eco-, 10, 79; “enforced,” 14, 24, 64–5; “feral,” 25, 245, 248–9, 255, 258, 260–1, 337n8, 341n60; futurity of, 21, 173, 176–7, 182, 244; idealism of, 13, 173; “incipient,” 245, 287–9; market logic of, 59; neo-, 74–5, 79, 81; and reproductive politics, 21–2, 172–3, 175, 177, 181, 182;

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studies in, 7–9, 12, 14, 322n26; subaltern, 9, 309n44. See also capitalism; class; colonialism; commerce; communications; cosmocrats; cosmopolitics; Cynical philosophy; development; Diogenes of Sinope; Enlightenment; ethnicity; Europe; gender; globalization; hegemony; heterosexism; human rights; imperialism; insurance industry; Kant, Immanuel; language; law; liberalism; literature; memory; militarism; mobility; modernity; nationalism; negative cosmopolitanism; neoliberalism; optimism; postcolonialism; property; vernacular “cosmopolitics,” 4, 283, 285–8; feral, 25, 243, 245, 249, 258, 260–2, 337n8; positive, 176. See also cosmopolitanism Council on Books in Wartime, 240 credit, 59, 61–2, 66, 68, 304n6; crunch, 26. See also capitalism; Credit Default Swaps (CDS ); debt; finance capital; financial crisis; insurance industry; speculation; trust Credit Default Swaps (CDS ), 70 Creole, 21, 150–6, 158, 162, 164–5, 167–70. See also Caribbean; creolization; language creolization, 150–1, 153, 155–6, 161–2, 165–8, 171. See also Caribbean; Creole; language crime fiction, 24–5, 246–8, 260–1, 337n8, 337n10. See also Red Riding Quartet Cynical philosophy, 4, 11–12, 14, 15, 17, 196, 292n36. See also Diogenes of Sinope

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Dante, 271 Davis, Annalee, 21, 150, 152–4, 156, 168; on creole identity, 158, 167, 169–70; on the CSmE , 159–61. See also “I Celebrate the Chorus of the Creole Chant”; On the Map Davos, 3, 8, 300n14 Dawes Act, 194 Dead Europe (Tsiolkas), 77 Dead or Alive (Miike, 1999), 206, 329n34 debt, 62, 160, 244–5, 259. See also capitalism; credit; neoliberalism Declaration on the Right to Development, 41. See also human rights decolonization, 16, 32, 38, 97, 150 Defoe, Daniel, 228 “Dell Theory,” 6, 291n11 democracy: and citizenship, 80, 209; decolonizing, 32, 36, 111, 297n55; global, 283; and immigration, 200; (neo)liberal, 13, 126, 171, 209, 213, 268, 288 Derrida, Jacques, 80, 83, 258. See also hostipitality; hauntology development: capitalist, 223; and cosmopolitanism, 7, 60; ideologies of, 88, 156–8, 162–3, 165, 167, 250, 251; of Nigeria, 112, 121, 123, 128; sustainable, 108; Third World, 30, 35, 37, 41. See also Declaration on the Right to Development; “underdevelopment” Dickens, Charles, 43–4. See also Bleak House Diogenes Laeritius, 13 Diogenes of Sinope, 4, 11–15, 292n36. See also Cynical philosophy disenfranchisement: economic, 26, 122, 124, 155; political, 40, 150, 158, 164, 166, 284; resistance to, 20, 128. See also migrants; refugees

Disorient (Tan), 74, 88 Dutch East India Company, 6 East West Divan (Goethe). See West-Österlicher Divan Economic Recovery Tax Act (Erta ), 54 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 25–6, 276–82. See also Life of the Automobile Eliasberg, Alexander, 229 Ellison, Ralph, 56 empire: end of, 34; legacies of, 4, 26; resistance to, 38, 274; spread of, 5, 43, 167, 270. See also Britain; colonialism; imperialism; Russia; Soviet Union; Third World; United States Engels, Friedrich, 6, 13, 15, 44, 221–3. See also Communist Manifesto; Marx, Karl England. See Britain English East India Company, 6, 306n42 Enlightenment, 67, 153, 190–1, 255; cosmopolitan, 8, 26, 155, 217–20, 283; ideals of, 12, 241. See also colonialism; Europe; imperialism; Kant, Immanuel entrepreneurialism, 53–4, 115, 245, 251–2, 337n8, 341n60. See also capitalism; neoliberalism environment: and citizenship, 125, 289; degradation of, 4, 20, 114, 134; movement, 38, 108–9, 287; and philanthropy, 45. See also citizenship; climate change; cosmopolitanism; petroleum industry; precarity ethnicity: and cosmopolitanism, 107, 125; diversity, 138, 158, 167; and identity, 21, 90, 155, 176, 183, 218, 309n44; politics of, 34, 165, 201,

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204–7, 213, 328n21; in prisoner of war camps, 24, 236. See also citizenship; identitarianism; kinship; race; xenophobia Europe: cosmopolitanism of, 238, 297n54, 308n17; Enlightenment, 63, 190–1, 292n27; idea of, 18, 75, 77, 82, 86, 90, 218, 220; expansion of, 3, 33; imperialism of, 4, 32, 34, 68, 96, 194–5, 236, 274, 295n32; margins of, 81, 146, 241, 265; migration within, 139, 143; nationalism, 26; postwar, 34, 294n6. See also European Union; imperialism; modernism; modernity European Union, 131, 139 exceptionalism: American, 32, 54, 72, 294n21; Japanese, 210, 212; in memory, 95–6 Facing Forward (Tan), 85 fascism, 31, 266, 338n18 finance capital, 17, 26, 48, 115, 134, 244, 255; instruments of, 61–4, 68, 70, 72, 304n6, 305n27; and literature, 59–60, 259, 278; sector, 115, 146, 213, 215, 248, 251, 336n4, 339n30; and violence, 243, 252, 256. See also capitalism; credit; Credit Default Swaps (CDS ); financial crisis; insurance; “Magnetar Trade”; neoliberalism; speculation financial crisis, 70, 72, 303n76 First Philosophy of Spirit (Hegel), 273 First World War, 218, 232–3, 235–8, 240, 295n26; propaganda during, 226–30. See also Geneva Conventions; Hague Agreements; prisoner of war camps; Second World War

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Fleming, Anne Marie, 18, 75, 81, 89–90, 310n79. See also Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, The Folk Tales (Tolstoy), 229 Ford, Henry, 48, 279 Ford Foundation, 48 Forster, E.M., 26 France, 4, 32, 77, 237, 268, 316n1 free trade. See trade French Revolution, 277 Frobenius, Leo, 237–9, 241. See also prisoners of war; world literature futurism, 264, 282; reproductive, 173, 176, 180–1, 184. See also cosmopolitanism; Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Gbekebor, Nigeria, 113–5, 118, 120, 121–2 gender, 11, 235; and cosmopolitanism, 21, 43, 45, 107, 125, 175–7, 190; and reproduction, 172, 175–7, 180, 182, 196, 323n30; and sex work, 324n3, 324n8. See also class; heterosexism; race; racism; sex workers “Genesis” (Brathwaite), 152, 319n10 Geneva Conventions, 230–2. See also Hague Conventions; prisoner of war camps; prisoners of war “genius” grants. See MacArthur Fellowship Program gentrification: of the Caribbean, 150, 154, 157; of cities, 192–3, 325n27; and creolization, 165–6. See also neighbourhood associations George, Pamela, 326n46 Germany: Nazi, 23–4, 217, 229–30, 232–4, 240; prisoners of war from, 238–41, 336n70, 336n71; prisoners of war in, 236–7, 334n46; Weimar, 220; world literature in, 224, 226–9, 333n16

I N DE X

Gilroy, Paul, 76–7, 79–81 globalization: and citizenship, 108; and communications, 9; and cosmopolitanism, 3–4, 8, 26, 73, 154, 292n27; “deviant,” 132, 134, 136, 146–7; economic, 6, 13, 125–7, 129, 138, 277; limits of, 18, 81, 90, 202; and mobility, 76, 158, 162, 166, 170, 206; resistance of, 169, 171, 287; triumphant, 263. See also communications; internationalism; Japan; neoliberalism; organized crime Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24, 220–7, 271; influence of, 230, 235, 238–9, 241, 263, 333n22. See also Sorcerer’s Apprentice; Weimar Goethe Society; West-Östlicher Divan; world literature Gorky, Maxim, 224–5, 264 Gulag, 95, 239 Guyana, 151–2, 165, 167, 170, 320n51; brain drain from, 157; migrant workers from, 159. See also Caribbean; “Terrible Tuesday” Hague Agreements, 231–2, 236. See also Geneva Conventions; prisoner of war camps; prisoners of war Hamid, Mohsin, 91, 94, 312n20. See also Moth Smoke; Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Hanif, Mohammad, 97. See also Case of Exploding Mangoes, A hauntology, 258, 262 Hegel, G.W.F., 265, 270, 273–4, 276, 282. See also First Philosophy of Spirit; Lectures on the History of Philosophy hegemony: American, 8, 16, 32, 54, 97; colonial, 71; and cosmopolitanism, 73; cultural, 217, 233;

Gramscian, 163. See also liberalism; neoliberalism; optimism Herder, Johann Gottfried, 219–22, 271, 274, 332n8 heteronormativity, 21, 176, 183, 322n17. See also heterosexism heterosexism, 283; and cosmopolitanism, 182–3; and reproduction, 173, 180, 184. See also gender; heteronormativity; nationalism; race; racism Hiroshima, 83, 99, 312n42. See also Beclouded Visions; Nagasaki; nuclear weapons Hobbes, Thomas, 191 Hogarth Press, 229 Holocaust, 83–4, 95–6, 102, 218, 238 hospitality, 5, 80, 172, 202, 283, 285. See also Kant, Immanuel; “Perpetual Peace” hostipitality, 80, 82 Howards End (Forster), 26 humanism, 9, 173–5, 184, 220, 223 humanitarian, 43, 46. See also humanitarianism; philanthropy; Wilde, Oscar humanitarianism, 45, 218, 299n10. See also philanthropy human rights: as American, 29–32; and cosmopolitanism, 3, 10, 15–17, 29–30, 107, 109; denial of, 126; future of, 39–42, 298n66; as political, 22, 297n61; and state sovereignty, 79–80, 175–6, 288, 295n32, 331n68; and the Third World, 35–9, 294n12, 297n58. See also African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; Bandung Conference; Declaration on the Right to Development; Indigenous peoples; international bill of rights; International Convention

I N DE X

395

for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; Non-Aligned Movement; self-determination; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights human trafficking, 15, 45, 125. See also labour; sex trade “I Celebrate the Chorus of the Creole Chant” (Davis), 152 identitarianism, 83, 85, 307n3. See also ethnicity identity politics, 121, 150, 157, 162, 168, 170–1 imagined community, 32, 64 immigrants: depictions of, 178, 201, 204–7, 211, 216, 327n5; illegal, 23, 136, 180, 213, 215; opposition to, 133, 200, 203; undocumented, 102. See also immigration; migrants immigration: and crime, 201; illegal, 23, 145, 205, 207; officials, 159–61, 178; opposition to, 200; policy, 202–4, 213, 216. See also democracy; Japan; immigrants; migrants; United States imperialism, 4–5; American, 32–3, 263; anti-, 167; and cosmopolitanism, 5, 15, 26, 190, 195; neo-, 220, 224; and race, 175, 329n28; Western, 34, 38, 41, 68, 71, 77, 222. See also Britain; capitalism; colonialism; empire; Europe; United States In America (Sheridan, 2002), 173, 176, 177–83 India, 134, 143; and nuclear weapons, 93, 311n10, 311n17; partition of, 19, 97; prisoners of war of, 230, 236–7.

396

See also “nuclear nationalism”; nuclear weapons; Pakistan; South Asia Indigenous peoples, 74, 108–9, 126, 154, 169, 320n29. See also Native Americans Insel Publishing House, 226–9 Institute of World Literature, 224 insurance industry, 18, 48–52: and cosmopolitanism, 66–70, 305n22, 305n27; financialization of, 59–64, 72; and slavery, 60. See also “Benito Cereno”; capital; colonialism; Confidence-Man, The; finance capital; MacArthur, John D.; literature; Melville, Herman; philanthropy; trust; Zong massacre Insurgent Mexico (Reed), 275 intellectual property, 221, 223–5. See also Paris and Berne Conventions; world literature Internal Revenue Service (IrS ), 47, 301n27 international bill of rights, 30–1, 40. See also human rights; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICrED ), 36 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPr ), 30, 36, 39, 42, 298n63. See also human rights; international bill of rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I N DE X

International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCr ), 30–1, 36, 39, 42. See also human rights; international bill of rights; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights Internationalism, 24, 205, 211, 217–20, 225–6, 243, 277. See also communism; liberalism; world literature International Monetary Fund (ImF ), 38, 164, 338n17. See also World Bank International Red Cross. See Red Cross In the Kitchen (Ali), 317n32 Invisible Man (Ellison), 56 Iron Curtain, 217, 224, 226 Islam, 38, 76–7, 97, 100, 297. See also Muslims; Non-Aligned Movement Japan: and the atomic bomb, 19, 97, 99–100, 102, 313n55; civil rights in, 331n68; emigrants from, 84; ideas of, 209–12; and globalization, 6, 280; and immigration, 23, 200–7, 213–6, 327n5, 328n16, 328n19, 328n21, 329n28; organized crime in, 200, 208, 212, 327n2, 329n39, 330n61, 331n66. See also exceptionalism; Hiroshima; literature; media; Nagasaki; nihonjinron; nikkejin; sex trade; yakuza; yakuza film Jonathan, Goodluck, 121–2. See also Niger Delta; Nigeria journalism, 131–3, 218, 245. See also communications; media Judaism, 76–7

Kamikaze pilots, 100–1 Kamikaze Taxi (Mirada, 1995), 203, 329n28. See also yakuza film Kant, Immanuel, 220; on cosmopolitanism, 4–9, 12, 30, 31, 36, 79–80, 109, 189–90, 221, 231, 238, 277, 322n26; on global commerce, 125–6, 164, 282; on hospitality, 202–3, 283, 296n43. See also hospitality; “Perpetual Peace”; world citizenship Karachi, Pakistan, 97, 100 Khaldun, Ibn, 237, 270, 273 kinship, 22, 44, 173–7, 180–2. See also citizenship; ethnicity; identitarianism; race Kippenberg, Anton, 226–9 Kirby, William T., 47–8, 53 Klein, Naomi, 92 labour, 19–20; contract, 139–40, 145; division of, 160; indentured, 60; laws, 136, 146, 327n4; migrant, 15–16, 21, 126, 131–5, 138, 141, 143–4, 147–8, 156–7, 161, 164–6, 169–71, 204, 283, 317n32; mobility, 150–1, 153, 158–9, 162–3; of prisoners of war, 231–2; prostitution as, 213, 324n6; and the state, 37, 168; strikes, 208; trafficking, 144–5, 146, 213, 328n19. See also Britain; migrants; precarity; sex work; sex workers language: barriers of, 11, 20, 82, 130; and cosmopolitanism, 5, 43, 45, 190, 234; Creole, 155–6; in literature, 256, 258, 269–75, 280; and migrants, 131, 139–40, 142; and world literature, 221–2, 227–8 Lapse of Memory, A (Tan), 87 Latin America, 41, 204, 215, 294n6, 320n29

I N DE X

397

law: and citizenship, 197–9, 287; and commerce, 61; cosmopolitanism of, 22–3, 30, 109, 125, 202, 288–9; international, 231–2; natural, 107, 269–70; positive, 190–5, 197; and property, 188–90, 324n11, 326n32; rule of, 7, 31, 40, 129, 208, 248. See also colonialism; constitutive outside; Geneva Conventions; Hague Agreements; labour; modernity; Paris and Berne Conventions; race; security League of Nations, 30, 217, 295n26; concept of, 36 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Hegel), 270 Letter Opener, The (Maclear), 83 Lewycka, Marina, 131–3, 138–46, 148, 316n25, 317n28, 317n21, 318n79. See also Strawberry Fields liberalism: and citizenship, 39; and cosmopolitanism, 8, 173, 219, 239, 262, 283; hegemony of, 31, 38; ideals of, 16, 35, 171, 208, 222–3, 288, 297n60; internationalism of, 218, 233; and rights, 37–8, 42, 109, 231. See also capitalism; democracy; colonialism; Locke, John; neoliberalism; property; slavery Life of the Automobile (Ehrenburg), 25, 276, 279, 282 literature: civic, 270; comparative, 277, 311n17; and cosmopolitanism, 15; on disasters, 19, 92; and insurance, 59, 62; Japanese, 212–13; in prisoner of war camps, 230, 232, 234, 238–9; as site of engagement, 133, 135, 281, 309n44. See also Africa; Asia; Britain; civic hermeneutics; finance capital; Germany; language; nationalism; otherness; postcolonialism; realism; Soviet

398

Union; speculation; United States; world literature Locke, John, 191, 194. See also liberalism; property MacArthur, Alfred, 50 MacArthur Fellowship Program, 17, 46–8, 53, 55–6, 302n62, 303n80. See also MacArthur Foundation MacArthur Foundation, 46–8, 53–6. See also MacArthur Fellowship Program; MacArthur, John D. MacArthur, John D., 17, 43, 46–53, 57, 301n36, 302n37. See also Bankers Life and Casualty Company; MacArthur Fellowship Program; MacArthur Foundation; Marquette Life Insurance Company MacArthur, Roderick, 53–4 Maclear, Kyo, 18, 75, 81–4, 89–90, 309n51. See also Beclouded Visions; Letter Opener, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, The (Fleming), 18, 89 “Magnetar Trade,” 70 Maria Full of Grace (Marston 2004), 173, 176–7, 179–83 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 282 Marquette Life Insurance Company, 49, 51 Marut, Ret. See Traven, B. Marxism, 266–7, 269, 271–7, 297n59. See also communism; Communist Manifesto; Marx, Karl Marx, Karl, 6, 15, 44, 146, 221–3, 279. See also Communist Manifesto; Engels, Friedrich; Marxism May You Live in Interesting Times (Tan), 85, 87, 310n73, 310n77 media: access, 263; global, 82, 86, 202; Japanese, 201; mass, 25, 65, 245, 252; narratives of, 94, 97,

I N DE X

253; press, 53, 55, 246, 252, 254; social, 254–5; workers in, 159. See also commerce; communications; journalism Melville, Herman, 18, 58–60, 68–70, 72–3, 306n35, 306n43. See also “Benito Cereno”; Confidence-Man, The; White Jacket memory, 234; cosmopolitan, 238; of Nagasaki, 99, 102–3; studies, 95–6; theatre of, 84, 87; “trans-,” 83. See also Lapse of Memory, A Mignolo, Walter, 29, 60, 64, 92 migrants: depictions of, 138–44, 148, 154, 176, 178, 180, 183; economic, 124; invisibility of, 73, 131–2, 136; labour of, 15–16, 20, 130–3, 156–9, 161, 165, 316n1; restrictions on, 164–6, 170, 283, 322n16; undocumented, 21, 150–1, 286. See also Africa; Asia; Barbados; borders; Britain; Chinese Whispers; Guyana; immigrants; immigration; language; migration; mobility; organized crime; precarity; refugees; Strawberry Fields migration: control of, 162, 171, 175; depictions of, 173, 174–7, 179–80, 182, 203; experience of, 21, 153, 155, 159, 163, 165–6, 168; illegal, 22; transnational, 3. See also borders; Caribbean; immigrants; immigration; migrants; mobility; refugees Miike Takashi, 201, 206–7, 214, 216. See also Dead or Alive; yakuza film militarism, 16, 96, 98, 100–4. See also nation-state; United States Minshall, Peter, 151 mobility: and cosmopolitanism, 21, 26, 65, 82, 281; injustice, 157, 159–60; of migrants, 90, 205, 215; regimes, 150, 153–4, 158, 161–2,

164, 168, 170–1. See also capital; capitalism; Caribbean; class; globalization; immigration; labour; migrants; refugees modernism, 81, 264, 270, 273–4, 276 modernity: capitalist, 262; Caribbean, 158; and cosmopolitanism, 60–1, 68, 125; European, 37, 66, 68, 77, 255–6, 276; global, 149, 161; law and, 196; and race, 175 montage, 167, 216, 265–6, 268, 275–6, 282 Morecambe Bay tragedy, 130–1, 316n1 Moth Smoke (Hamid), 91, 94 mujahedeen, 98, 100–1 multiculturalism, 23, 222; debates over, 75, 207; fantasies of, 182, 205; neoliberal, 320n29 multinational corporations (mNC s), 20, 111, 114, 121, 127, 156 Muslims, 81, 153, 204, 236–8, 297n58. See also Islam Nagasaki, 83, 92–3, 97–103. See also Beclouded Visions; Burnt Shadows; Hiroshima; Maclear, Kyo; Shamsie, Kamila nationalism: and cosmopolitanism, 26, 174, 283, 297n54, 311n3; and identity, 64–5, 159, 164, 205, 212, 216; “internationalist,” 38; in literature, 271; post-, 26, 312n35; and reproduction, 173, 175–6, 182; violence of, 98. See also ethnicity; Europe; nation-state; “nuclear nationalism”; race; sexual politics National Life Insurance Company, 50 nation-state: boundaries of, 33, 73, 170; decline of, 277, 287; and human rights, 107; and identity, 107; militarism of, 93, 97–8;

I N DE X

399

postcolonial, 16; and the UN , 31. See also borders; citizenship; globalization; human rights; labour; postcolonialism; race; security; sovereignty Native Americans, 166, 194. See also Indigenous peoples natural resources, 5, 108–9, 111–12, 121. See also petroleum industry negative cosmopolitanism, 4, 12, 14–17, 20, 26, 29, 263, 283, 289, 292n27; and citizenship, 286 and financial capitalism, 72, 134, 305n27; and human rights, 41–2; and migration, 131, 147; and neoliberalism, 245; and philanthropy, 48, 56, 72. See also cosmopolitanism; cosmopolitics neighbourhood associations, 189, 193, 324n10, 325n26. See also gentrification neoliberalism, 7, 297n60, 341n64; cosmopolitanism as, 73, 92 243–6, 260; and finance capitalism, 4, 108, 255–6, 259, 261, 341n60; global, 126–7, 248–9, 287; hegemony of, 39, 320n29; and mobility, 21, 149– 51; and philanthropy, 45; policy, 24, 54, 338n12; violence of, 25, 250. See also Britain; capitalism; Caribbean; globalization; liberalism; multiculturalism; negative cosmopolitanism; privatization New Left, 41 New York City, 97, 102, 176–9, 277, 323n30 nihonjinron, 210–12, 330n61 Niger Delta, 20, 108–13, 117, 120–2, 124, 128, 289. See also Nigeria; petroleum industry Nigeria, 108–111, 113, 115, 118–24, 128–9. See also Gbekebor;

400

Jonathan, Goodluck; Niger Delta; Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation; petroleum industry; Shell Petroleum Development Corporation Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC ), 120, 123 nikkeijin, 204, 213, 328n21 9/11, 19, 92, 94, 97, 102–3, 169, 178, 313n55 Non-Aligned Movement (Nam ), 17, 30, 37–8, 294n6, 295n25, 297n58. See also Bandung Conference; human rights; postcolonialism; Third World; United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGo s), 19, 35, 217, 226, 235, 229n9 North America. See Americas Norton, William Warder, 56–7, 240 “nuclear nationalism,” 91, 93–4. See also India; Pakistan nuclear weapons, 91–4, 99, 101, 102 311n10, 311n17, 312n42. See also Burnt Shadows; Hiroshima; India; Nagasaki; “nuclear nationalism”; Pakistan Nussbaum, Martha, 7, 12, 15, 133, 135, 292n36, 311n3 Obubra, Nigeria, 114, 121 oil industry. See petroleum industry On the Map (Davis), 150–2, 154, 158–60, 162–4, 166–70 optimism, 10, 12, 15, 17, 205; “hegemonic,” 182. See also cosmopolitanism organized crime, 23; globalization of, 134; and Japan, 212, 216, 329n39, 331n69; and migrants, 132, 200–1, 205, 215. See also human trafficking; Japan; sex trade; United States; yakuza

I N DE X

Ōshima Nagisa, 214 othering, 152, 190, 194–5, 199, 212. See also constitutive outside; law otherness, 21; communities of, 22; in film, 176, 202, 205, 214; in literature, 135–6, 144, 147. See also constitutive outside; othering Pai, Hsiao-Hung, 131–3, 135–8, 140, 143, 147–8. See also Chinese Whispers Pakistan, 91, 93–4, 97–8, 100–1, 103, 311n17. See also Afghan-Soviet War; Burnt Shadows; Karachi; “nuclear nationalism”; nuclear weapons; South Asia Paris and Berne Conventions, 223 patriotism, 218, 222, 227, 311n3 Peace, David, 24–5, 244–62, 277, 337n8, 338n12, 339n40, 340n42, 340n48, 341n64. See also Red Riding Quartet “Perpetual Peace” (Kant), 5–7, 30–1, 202; concept of, 10, 12, 73, 277 petroleum industry: artisanal, 20, 109–10, 114–20; environmental impact of, 114; in Nigeria, 26, 108–9, 110–13; politics of, 120–5, 128, 289, 314n9. See also “bunkering”; capitalism; Gbekebor; Jonathan, Goodluck; Niger Delta; Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation; Shell Petroleum Development Corporation phenomenology, 87, 183, 234, 266, 273. See also Hegel, G.W.F.; Semon, Richard philanthrocapitalism, 45, 298n7 philanthropy, 15, 16, 301n20; and capitalism, 44–6, 47, 56, 71–2, 284, 298n7, 299n9, 299n11; insurance as, 67; limits of, 17, 57;

organized, 47, 56, 299n10. See also Africa; Bleak House; capitalism; charitable foundations; Invisible Man; MacArthur Fellowships; MacArthur, John D.; negative cosmopolitanism; neoliberalism; philantrocapitalism; race; “Soul of Man under Socialism, The”; United Sates popular culture, 201, 203, 206, 323n30 Portland, Oregon, 22, 187–9, 192–3, 195, 197–8. See also sex trade; sex workers Posrednik, 226 postcolonialism: and cosmopolitanism, 26; and human rights, 40–1; literature, 272, 307n3; and states, 16, 30, 37, 93, 110–11, 127; studies/theory, 74, 77, 88, 95–6, 101. See also Africa; Asia; Bandung Conference; Cold War; colonialism; creolization; imperialism; nation-state; Non-Aligned Movement; Third World postmodernism, 8, 85, 337n11, 341n60 Precarious Life (Butler), 132 precarity, 13: ecological, 10; labour, 20, 26; of migrants, 132, 147, 154, 159, 166, 169, 176, 215, 286. See also neoliberalism press. See journalism; media prisoner of war camps, 24, 218, 229–32, 235–240 prisoners of war, 227, 230–2, 234–7, 240 privatization, 24, 92, 249, 338n17, 341n63 propaganda, 24, 217–18, 226–7, 229–31, 234–6, 238–9. See also First World War; prisoner of war

I N DE X

401

camps; Second World War; world literature property: and capitalism, 46–8, 62, 326n32; and citizenship, 22, 188–92, 199, 325n27; and cosmopolitanism, 6, 221, 225, 305n27; and culture, 182; ideals of, 35, 195; and prisoners of war, 231; and space, 193–4, 196–8, 324n11; and violence, 198–9. See also borders; capitalism; insurance; intellectual property; law; liberalism prostitution. See sex work Provenance (Tan), 86 public-private partnership, 251 queer, 179–80, 323n30; theory, 22, 176, 183–4. See also In America race: categories of, 159, 165, 166, 214, 232, 307n13; and human rights, 39, 80–1; and law, 190, 195; nations and, 11, 34, 322n16; and philanthropy, 43, 45; reproduction of, 175–6, 180; and value, 160; and writing, 82. See also class; cosmopolitianism; ethnicity; gender; imperialism; modernity; racism; slavery; United States; xenophobia racism: and colonialism, 16, 38, 150, 158; and culture, 238, 241, 307n13; “internal,” 203–4, 329n28; and reproduction, 175; and security, 162, 171; and slavery, 62, 70. See also race Reagan, Ronald, 53–4 real estate, 51, 248, 250–1, 317n32, 341n60. See also neoliberalism; speculation realism, 211, 214, 264–5: homiletic, 25–6, 266–8, 275–6, 278, 282;

402

socialist, 225, 241, 272–3, 268–9, 279. See also literature; world literature Red Cross, 230, 232, 235–8. See also prisoner of war camps Red Riding Quartet (Peace), 24, 244–62, 337n10, 337n11, 338n12, 339n30. See also crime fiction Reed, John, 275 refugees, 73, 100, 139, 158, 236, 283, 286; policy on, 175. See also migrants religion, 5, 43, 45, 78, 107, 125 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid), 312n20 republic of letters, 218, 219, 264. See also world literature Rhetoric (Aristotle), 12 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 228 Romulo, Carlos, 38, 297n55 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 240 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 34, 295n32 Roubakine, Nicolas. See Rubakin, Nikolai Rubakin, Nikolai, 233–6, 239, 334n46 Russia, 215, 218, 224–5, 233–4, 236–7, 264, 274. See also Russian Revolution; Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 220, 225, 280, 294n12 Sackville-West, Vita, 229 sangokujin, 205 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 315n33 Second World War: aftermath of, 31, 34, 97, 204; atomic bombing in, 99, 102; propaganda during, 229–30, 235–40; and the United States, 33, 35. See also Hiroshima; Nagasaki; prisoner of war camps; world literature

I N DE X

secularism, 78, 223 security: homeland, 102, 150, 154, 162–4, 168–9, 171, 320n61; international, 7; and law, 192, 286; right to, 40–1; state, 289. See also nation-state; racism self-determination: and human rights, 36–8, 40–2, 295n32, 296n40, 297n58; indigenous, 108–9; local, 121; national, 30, 32, 34. See also Bandung Conference; Declaration on the Right to Development; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; nation-state; Non-Aligned Movement; Third World; United Nations Semon, Richard, 234 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 settler colony, 74, 77, 151, 289. See also colonialism sex trade, 134, 136, 140, 142, 146; in Japan, 208, 328n19; work in, 167, 189, 192–3. See also human trafficking; organized crime; sex work; sex workers sexual politics, 22, 173, 175, 183 sex work, 192–3, 289, 324n3, 327n48. See also sex trade; sex workers sex workers, 23, 142, 189–90, 193, 195–8, 324n3, 326n46. See also sex trade; sex work; “starlight tours” Shamsie, Kamila, 19, 91–6, 98–101, 103, 312n22. See also Burnt Shadows Shell Petroleum Development Corporation, 118, 121. See also Niger Delta; Nigeria; petroleum industry Shinjuku Incident (Yee 2009), 203 Shoah. See Holocaust

slavery, 306n35, 316n14; in the Caribbean, 153–7, 165; and colonialism, 74, 149; and insurance, 60, 63, 67, 70; and liberalism, 191; and markets, 62; sexual, 328n19. See also “Benito Cereno”; capitalism; Caribbean; insurance industry; racism; slave trade slave trade, 59, 61, 65, 72. See also Black Atlantic; insurance industry; slavery; Zong massacre Sloterdijk, Peter, 9–10, 292n27 socialism, 48, 57, 223, 225. See also “Soul of Man under Socialism, The”; Tolstoy, Leo; Wilde, Oscar socialist realism. See realism “soft power,” 31, 224, 328n8 Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Goethe), 222 “Soul of Man under Socialism, The” (Wilde), 17, 44 South America. See Americas South Asia, 91, 93, 96, 308n17, 312n22. See also India; Pakistan sovereignty: and individual rights, 79, 107–8, 197–8; and international order, 34–5, 150, 159, 219; of shareholder value, 49; of states, 31–2, 36–8. See also human rights; nation-state Soviet Union (USSr ); bloc, 13; breakup of, 139, 146; and the Cold War, 33, 35, 38, 295n25, 297n55; foreigners in, 23; and prisoners of war, 217, 223, 232, 236, 238–41; and world literature, 24, 220, 224, 233–5, 273. See also Afghan-Soviet War; Gorky, Maxim; Gulag; Rubakin, Nikolai; realism; Russia; Russian Revolution speculation: financial, 18, 59–60, 62, 66, 68, 72, 262, 304n6; in literature, 59, 258–61; real estate, 248, 251;

I N DE X

403

and value, 255. See also capitalism; credit; finance capital; insurance industry Spivak, Gayatri, 18, 75, 79, 82, 309n44 “starlight tours,” 326n43 State Life Insurance Company, 51 Stocism, 4, 12, 14, 323n26 Strawberry Fields/Two Caravans (Lewycka), 131–2, 138–140, 147–8 subprime mortgage crisis. See financial crisis surveillance, 26, 166, 170, 196 Swallowtail Butterfly (Iwai, 1996), 205 Switzerland, 77, 233–7 Sytin, Ivan, 224–5, 233 Tacitus, 228, 270–1 Tan, Fiona, 18, 75, 76, 81, 85–8, 90, 309n51, 310n71. See also Changeling; Disorient; Facing Forward; Lapse of Memory, A; May You Live in Interesting Times; Provenance; Vox Populi “Terrible Tuesday,” 160, 162 Tetsuro, Watsuji, 76 Thatcher, Margaret, 245, 247–8, 256, 338n18; government of, 25, 259–60, 337n8, 341n63 Third International, 274–5 Third World, 36–8, 40–1, 276, 279, 294n6, 295n27; solidarity of, 17, 30. See also Bandung Conference; colonialism; development; Life of the Automobile; Non-Aligned Movement; “underdevelopment”; Universal Declaration of Human Rights Tolstoy, Leo, 139, 223–6, 235, 241, 264, 272, 317n38, 317n41, 333n22; publications of, 220, 228–9, 233,

404

333n12. See also Folk Tales; War and Peace trade: colonial, 60, 296n34; free, 7, 32–3, 73, 171; international, 6, 18, 35, 127, 134, 163, 208; and politics, 38. See also “Benito Cereno”; Black Atlantic; borders; capitalism; commerce; insurance industry; neoliberalism; sex trade; slave trade; trust; World Trade Organization trauma, 127, 243, 252, 258; comparison of 95, 100–2; historical, 83; theorization of, 300n16 Traven, B., 272, 275 Trinidad and Tobago, 151, 160, 167 trust, 58, 61, 66–72. See also “Benito Cereno”; Confidence-Man, The; insurance industry; slave trade; trade Tsiolkas, Christos, 77 “underdevelopment,” 37, 113. See also colonialism United Nations (UN ), 36–8; charter of, 30, 295n32; human rights and, 16, 31, 40–2; workers, 19. See also Commission on Human Rights; Declaration on the Right to Development; human rights; International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; “united nations world”; Universal Declaration of Human Rights “united nations world,” 34, 35, 37, 39. See also human rights; Third World

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United States: as “America,” 294n15; citizenship of, 22, 35, 42, 194; and human rights, 31–2, 298n63, 298n66; as global leader/policeman, 7, 33–6, 37, 94, 97, 126, 313n55; foreign policy of, 16, 31–4, 38, 97, 103, 278, 294n21; “good life” of, 16, 33, 35, 37, 39, 42; literature of, 62, 71, 240; immigration to, 22, 102, 177–8, 181; imperialism of, 32, 263, 294n6, 295n27; individualism of, 53, 211; Iraq war, 88; militarism of, 99; neoliberalism in, 31, 54, 149, 168, 171, 297n59; opposition to, 208; organized crime in, 215, 331n69; organized philanthropy in, 299n10; prisoners of war in, 240–1; and race, 51, 57, 166–7. See also American studies; exceptionalism; hegemony; In America; 9/11; Second World War; War on Terror Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDhr ), 16, 30, 38–42, 297n58. See also Commission on Human Rights; Declaration on the Right to Development; human rights; International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; Non-Aligned Movement; United Nations universalism, 8, 75, 106, 283: cultural, 227, 238; limits of, 90, 308n35; “situated,” 287 Vancouver, BC , 80, 89, 325n27, 326n43, 326n46

vernacular, 220, 271, 288, 308n17; cosmopolitanism, 9, 19, 74–6, 78–9, 82, 90 Vico, Giambatista, 25, 269, 271, 273 voKS, 224 Voloshinov, Valentin, 271 Vox Populi (Tan), 85 War Almanac (Insel), 227 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 139, 228, 317n41 War on Terror, 19, 35, 92, 96–7, 283, 313n55 Warri, Nigeria, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120 Wasted Vigil, The (Aslam), 97 Weimar Goethe Society, 227, 229. See also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Kippenberg, Anton West-Österlicher Divan (Goethe), 227, 271 White Jacket (Melville), 306n43 Wilde, Oscar, 17, 44–7, 52, 56–7, 299n9, 299n11. See also “Soul of Man under Socialism, The” Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 34 Woolf, Virginia and Leonard, 228–9 World Bank, 38, 79 world citizenship, 3, 9–11; and capitalism, 44–5; ideal of, 19, 92, 172, 282, 322n26; Kantian, 30, 109; limits to, 127–8, 155–6, 292n36. See also citizenship; cosmopolitanism; Kant, Immanuel world literature (Weltliteratur), 82, 219–230, 263; civic outlook of, 268, 271–2; in education and propaganda, 24, 218, 238–9. See also Bodmer, Martin; civic hermeneutics; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von;

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405

Gorky, Maxim; Herder, Johann Gottfried; Insel Publishing House; Institute of World Literature; Kippenberg, Anton; Posrednik; realism; Sytin, Ivan; Tolstoy, Leo; Zweig, Stefan World Trade Organization (wto ), 94 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War Wundt, Wilhelm, 227, 234, 238 xenophobia, 97, 150, 159, 165, 170 yakuza: history of, 203, 207–9; policies against, 212, 214–15. See also Japan; organized crime; yakuza film

406

yakuza-eiga. See yakuza film yakuza film, 23, 201–2, 205–6, 209– 11, 213–14, 216. See also Battles without Honor and Humanity; Dead or Alive; Japan; Kamikaze Taxi; Miike Takashi; Shinjuku Incident; yakuza ymCa, 217, 230, 232, 235–6. See also prisoner of war camps Yorkshire Ripper, 246, 253 Yoshida Doctrine, 209 Žižek, Slavoj, 17, 45, 46, 248, 252, 255, 299n11, 300n16 Zong massacre, 18, 58–62, 64–7, 255, 304n6, 340n48. See also insurance industry; slave trade Zweig, Stefan, 228

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