Introduction: Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion

Abstract

The contemporary Asia-Pacific is a region characterized by contested identities and emergent subjectivities. As in other parts of the world, over the past two decades, ‘the acceleration of global economic restructuring … new transnational media, increasing flows of migrants, and proliferations of civil wars and humanitarian crises in the wake of the cold war’ have ‘set the stage for the revitalization of cosmopolitanism’ (Calhoun 2002, pp. 885–886). The migrant figures as the quintessential image of the new cosmopolitan, and this is reflected in the immense scholarly interest in diasporas and cultural hybridity. Cosmopolitanism can have diverse meanings — as political discourse and cultural practices — ‘Yet it recognizes something important: worldly productive sites of crossing; complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments’ (Clifford 1998, p. 362). The authors in this book take up questions of subjectification and selfhood in the context of ‘sites of crossing’, exploring the consequences for processes of identification in parts of the world beyond the West. These sites exemplify the ‘sticky materiality’ (Tsing 2005) of the ‘friction’ of local/global encounters. Such encounters can be revealed in the context of globalization, the ‘designs to manage the world’ and the realm of ‘planetary conviviality’ and human compassion in which cosmopolitanism is given expression as political discourse (Mignolo 2000, p. 721).