minor cosmopolitan - Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise

Cosmopolitanism is a theory about how to live together. The earliest formulation of cosmopolitanism in the West could be dated to as early as the fourth century BCE in ancient Greece by Diogenes, who famously said that he was a "citizen of the world - kosmopolitês," an idea later picked up by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who proposed a philosophy of a world of "perpetual peace." When cosmopolitanism first emerged as a political idea for modernity in the European Enlightenment, the project embraced the liberal promises of a globalizing economy, yet remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalism, slavery and colonialism. It centered on the male, bourgeois, and white liberal subject, irrespective of the ongoing disenfranchisement, dehumanization, and extermination of its Others.



At the dawn of the 21st century, and in the wake of rapid globalization however, academics, politicians and other pundits enthusiastically declared cosmopolitanism to be no longer just a philosophical ideal, but a real, existing fact. Across the globe, they argued, people were increasingly thinking and feeling beyond the nation, considering themselves citizens of the world. Meanwhile, the global ecological crisis worsens, fascism with different outfits returns in many places of the world, the repression of women, sexual, racial, class and other minorities on a global scale persists; the so called "refugee crisis" inundates the mediascape and political spectacle. Not much of those cosmopolitan promises have left it seems. Perhaps precisely because of this, however, it seems to be an absolute necessity for scholars, activists, and artists today to face the complexities and promises cosmopolitanism has raised although not adequately answered. What has happened to the cosmopolitan promise, and who betrayed it?



"Minor cosmopolitanisms" wishes to challenge the underlying premises of 'major' cosmopolitanism without letting go of the un fulfilled emancipatory potential of the concept at large. It wants to rethink cosmopolitanisms in the plural, and trace multiple origins and trajectories of cosmopolitan thought from across the globe. Regarding cosmopolitanisms as emerging through diverse locally, historically and politically specific practices, minor cosmopolitanisms are predicated on difference without abandoning the quest for a shared vision of conviviality and justice. It seeks to answer: how to live at once with our difference and shared struggle? How to think our complicity with even those we most resist? Who sustains the world's flourishing despite all this?

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

7 - 13 Preface (Zairong Xiang)17 - 19 The Passport (Arjun Appadurai)20 - 32 Empty Objects (Sundar Sarrukai)33 - 39 Notes on the Representation of Time and Space (Marina Camargo)41 - 43 El palito de la jaula del pájaro de la abuela (Mario Bellatin)47 - 57 Porosity and Planetarity (James Miller)58 - 70 When You Died, the City Died with You (Liad Hussein Kantorowicz)71 - 76 I Don't Feel Postcolonial When I Wake up Every Morning in Delhi (No One Here Does) (Sarnath Banerjee)77 - 92 Other Europes, Past and Future (Lucy Gasser)92 - 99 On Other Poleis (Sikho Siyotula)101 - 110 The minor cosmopolitan weekend Remembered (Camila Gonzatto, Nik Neves)113 - 127 Film, Women's Work & Labour Organizing (Saima Akhtar, Rosa Barotsi, Clio Nicastro)128 - 140 Feminist Internationalism (Mary Jirmanus Saba)141 - 157 Times are Changing, Minds are also Changing (Vivian Price)161 - 184 Surrealism's Peripheries (feat. Synchronic Constellation - Le Moulin Society and its Time curated by Huang Ya-Li et al.) ( Tom Holert, Huang Ya-Li)185 - 208 Ambiguous Utopias (James Burton)209 - 219 Rest Home (Hinemoana Baker)223 - 227 Of Voices, Noises & Colonial Traces (Irene Hilden, Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat)228 - 237 Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (Liu Chuang)238 - 249 Bio-Archiving (Dong Bingfeng)250 - 260 Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Cosmopolitricks (Julian Henriques, Zairong Xiang)261 - 274 CONSTELLATIONS (Anouk Madörin, Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, Mariya Nikolova, Jens Temmen, Anna von Rath, Heinrich Wilke)275 - 283 About the authors284 - 285 Acknowledgements