Abstract
The paper deals with the interest nowadays played by the concept of cosmopolitanism in contemporary schools of critical thought through different and interconnected perspectives. The article reads some deconstructive, culturalist and postcolonial rewritings of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism, with a focus on the network of ‘refuge-cities’ functioning on global cooperation, as offered by Jacques Derrida; with the cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ indicated by the sociologist Stuart Hall; with the ‘plurality’ of cosmopolitanisms claimed by Gayatry C. Spivak to be taught in formal education. The paper’s attention then follows what Achille Mbembe claims as the political urge to the institution of a ‘cosmo-nationality’, and the necessity of a ‘planetary thinking’ conceived for the advent of ‘cosmotechnics’ as it is advocated by the influential scholar Yuk Hui. The main idea of the paper develops in the section devoted to ‘cosmo-po/ethics’, which played the focus of the critical attention of the International Conference organized on the emergence of its theme, in 2010, at the University of Durham, in Britain, to then migrate into some radical contributions to the debate; here those signed by the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, who uses its address to the ethics of black feminist thought, and those ‘proudly’ performed by the poet Sanjlia Patel in her ‘Migritude’. At the heart of the article’s interest lies the conviction that, nowadays, philosophy, critical thinking and aesthetics constitute the arenas where it is possible to think and practice the invention of forms of cosmopolitanism that might contribute to a different respect for the ‘other’, where to shape the rights for the planetary mobility experienced by all people on earth, and to produce the cosmic thinking necessary to the surge of technology which is still unresolved, unconfronted and uncontrolled by modernity, finally, experiencing and experimenting the vision of the ethics of liberation and justice for all living creatures in the cosmos.
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Notes
The original title of Derrida’s speech is Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore an effort (Derrida, 1997). This text remains ‘influential’ in many ways; twenty years after its publication, for instance, it inspired the public event organized by the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, in 2017, devoted to Cosmopolis #1: Collective intelligence, a new biennial platform, curated by Kathryn Weir, and consisting of a series of projections, installations and creations, discussions, conferences, lectures, debates, and performances. In her review, Marta Jecu acknowledges Derrida’s deconstruction as the inspiring force in the organization of the artistic collective experiment; she writes, “Jacques Derrida’s two wonderful articles, included in “On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness,” offer a theoretical framework for our discussion. He understands the notion of cosmopolis as the ‘city of refuge and hospitality’. The cities of refuge are for him also spaces for reflection and would bring about ‘a certain idea of cosmopolitanism’ that “has not yet arrived, perhaps. If it has (indeed) arrived [...] then, one has perhaps not yet recognized it.” Derrida asks for a commitment by the cities and the thinkers and practitioners (which he calls men and women capable to speak out in a public domain) “of various disciplines to exercise this new way to conceive the city.” Derrida talks about the necessity of elaboration of a new cosmo−politics of “autonomous cities of refuge,” each as independent from the other and from the state as possible, but, nevertheless, allied to each other according to forms of solidarity yet to be invented. This invention is our task, the theoretical or critical reflection it involves are indissociable from the practical initiatives we have, already out of a sense of urgency, initiated and implemented. This sense of urgency makes itself felt in the actions, interventions, words and attitudes of the collective members included in ‘Cosmopolis #1’, but also in the fact that their visions and essays are taking place without yet being widely recognized. Jacques Derrida’s article seems to stem from our actuality, in which the efforts of these artists and activist go towards finding micro−solutions for thinking urbanism from the cosmopolitan perspective of global rights, inclusion, humanism, and circulation … It seems that the concrete and utopian interventions played out on the ‘Cosmopolis’ platforms carry well into Derrida’s impetus for change: “We are dreaming of another concepts, of another set of rights for the city, of another politics of the city” (Jecu, 2015). The second exhibition associated with the Cosmopolis platform, “Cosmopolis #1.5” was presented, in September 2018, in China, in collaboration with the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (see “Cosmopolis#1.5” e−flux, 2017).
(My translation. The digital text presents no indication of pages). In 2021, during the Series sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. and The Office of The Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in North Caroline, Achille Mbembe was invited to respond to the lecture given by Felwine Sarr, the Senegalese Anne−Marie Bryn Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, devoted to “Cosmopolitics of hospitality / Cosmopolitique de l’hospitalité.” The presentation of their dialogue recites that “Hospitality, in receiving of a newcomer who is initially a stranger, has often been considered an obligation at the heart of basic interactions in human societies. Emmanuel Kant, by asserting that “every stranger has the right to not be treated as the enemy,” has turned the idea of hospitality into an ethical question. The question that Felwine Sarr explores, which is part of the project of creating a shared world, is how to shift from the ethical obligation of hospitality to a right to hospitality. It is a question of transitioning from hospitality as a favor to hospitality as a right, by establishing a pragmatic principle that would be part of a cosmopolitics of hospitality as a response to the impasses of migration policies of a world that inexorably experiences its cosmopolitan condition” (Sarr, 2021).
The poem “Phonemics” by Jack Spicer was part of the project−installation “Written on air/Written of water” organized by the artist Clark Lunberry expressively for the Durham Conference, which, as we will relate later, observed the migration of the concept of ‘cosmopoliticism’ into the investigation of new forms of contemporary writing. Lunberry introduces the event as follows: “Thousands of miles (and the Atlantic Ocean) separate Florida from England. However, for this Writing on Air installation, created for a poetry conference at the University of Durham, such separations were imaginatively mediated by the mediations of language. This bridging was realized by using words from a 45−minute telephone conversation, conducted between the two cities, during which the view from the conference room windows was painstakingly described by British students, their recorded voices later adapted and applied for the installation. On central windows, words describing the room’s view were printed onto images of water. The lines of language shaping into waves. On side windows, the words followed the streets and rivers of Durham and Jacksonville, twins and turning upon the transparent maps of each city. Through the windows, from the telephone, there was a seeing out−of−sync with itself, but a seeing nonetheless, even if time−delayed, time−tempered, with lines of sight promising, offering, to come into contact. For this installation pointed, though the warp and torque of time, toward an echo of connection where so much depends upon a ‘sampling’, a ‘drainpipe’ a ‘chimney’, a ‘bee on the lavender’” (Lunberry, 2010; the quote comes from the website, with no page indication).
We would like to remember that Stuart Hall too reckoned the advent of a different cosmopolitanism as a question related to the future, but in terms of critical ‘uncovering’; his sentence recites,“There are other cosmopolitan worlds still to uncover” (Hall, 2008, p. 350).
The following quotations come from the official WordPress−site of the event and does not present page indications (See Cosmopoetics, 2010).
See also Erica Kaufman, 2016. It is relevant to notice that the ‘educational drive’ is often emphasized in dealing with ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘cosmopoethics’.
Denise Ferreira da Silva was one of the guests invited by the Centre Pompidou at “Cosmopolis#1.5” on November 15.
Da Silva lately is proposing the philosophical notion of corpus infinitum (da Silva 2021).
The e−flux text does not present indications of page (da Silva, 2019).
For an extensive reading of the ‘poethics’ of the artist, see Carotenuto, 2018. In this article, I also deal with Patel’s wonderful poem “Drum Rider” devoted to the Zanzibar singer Bi KiDude: “I have/ never seen a woman ride a drum before/ like a goddess rides a tiger/ like creation rides the cosmos” (Patel, 2012).
The performance and the text Migritude are structured in four sections: the first one, ‘Migritude’, reproduces the stage—script and incorporates complementary visuals motifs; ‘Shadow Book’ is “an extended debrief […] a ‘behind’ the scenes [...] and vignettes [that] illuminate [...] by offering context”; the section that follows, entitled ‘The making and other poems’ collects poems that “laid the groundwork for Migritude”; the fourth and final section, ‘The Journey’, consists of an interwoven personal and historical timeline of events, as well as two interviews. Migritude’s creative ‘journey’ is of ‘epic’ nature, in that it acts out the shared history of East Africa and South Asia bringing the audiences back to the period Patel describes as an era of “flourishing Indian Ocean Trade between inland African Kingdoms, [the] East Africa[n] Coast, [the] Arabian Peninsula, India, and SE Asia” (Patel, 2010, p. 129). In this regard, Odhiambo and Siundu emphasize that “We are thus provoked to consider what are the obligations that black and brown Kenyans have to one another, not only as citizens of the contemporary Kenyan nation−state, but as peoples whose cultures have a deeper and more dynamic history with one another. The word and the title ‘journey’ are, on their part, significant and promising not to be restrained by a cartographer’s vision because of the interconnections and intertextualities that define both the subject of study [...] and the practices of scholarship itself […] ‘The Journey’ comes at the very end of the performance and of the text, unsettling the concept of linear time as it places a guiding tool like the timeline as an endpoint; yet Patel marks it as a beginning through the usage of the Sanskrit proverb; her audiences and readers are thus forced into a referential circularity as they cycle between ‘Migritude’, ‘Shadow Book’, ‘The Making’, and ‘The Journey’” (Odhiambo and Siundu, 2004, p. 4).
Following Patel’s cosmopolitan life, between 2005 and 2008, her performance toured across the world, from San Francisco (USA), where the artist used to live, to Zanzibar, Austria, Kenya, Italy, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
In Neelofer Qadir’s analysis, ‘Negritude’ and ‘Migritude’ intersect in order to open up history: “In this way, Patel not only grafts an ideological connection between the two but opens up temporal and spatial dimensions of interconnectedness between a period of anti−colonial independence movements and the neo−colonial/ imperial structures in which we continue to be embedded” (Qadir, 2018). In general terms, as A. Mbembe and S. Nuttall suggest, one practice to counter the singular way Africa is signified, is to “draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one−way causal models [...] to account for the multiplicity of pathways and trajectories of change” (Mbembe−Nuttall, 2004, p. 349). Indeed, the Indian Ocean is instructive due to its focus on littorals and their cosmopolitanisms that pre-date European conceptualization of such diversity; Dilip Menon argues that “one of the practices of colonial domination was to abbreviate the sense of time, and thus history, of a place and a people in order to render it in the dominant narrative of the coloniser. Indian Ocean deep time provides counter temporalities and thus counter histories to the EuroAmerican colonial telos” (Menon, 2020).
In his analysis of Patel’s deconstruction of ‘time’, Qadir proposes the notions of ‘transmutation’ and ‘transtemporality’: “In this essay, I trace the deep time of the Indian Ocean through and against which Shailja Patel fabulates the notion of migritude and, in particular, what its valences are for solidarities between black and brown Kenyans and other south−south relationships. Attentive to the multiple voices she invites into the text and the material objects that she imbues with those voices; I show how Patel animates histories otherwise obscured toward a larger political project of reckoning with Empire’s violences. The essay in three movements meditates on (1) the transmutation of Migritude across generic forms; (2) in the book text, the grafting of Patel’s familial history onto (macro) History, which ruptures the telos of modernity by exposing its violences; and (3) the consciousness raising that occurs as Patel accounts for the sexual violence British soldiers perpetrated upon Kenyan women and children from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Migritude’s decolonial lessons move trans−temporally toward the past to repair relationships between women in the Global South, and into our present and its conditional futures to imagine new solidarities and alliances in the heartlands of the dispossessed” (Qadir, 2018).
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Carotenuto, S. Cosmopolitanism and cosmo-poethics: the cultural migrations of a ‘concept’. Neohelicon 50, 173–190 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00678-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00678-2