Abstract
This chapter discusses three concepts—cosmopolitanism, conviviality and creolisation—that, although emanating from diverse historical and academic contexts, are clearly interrelated and, arguably, interdependent. Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality, New York: Perennial Library, 1973) envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of “autonomous individuals and primary groups” which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy (After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004) refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity. Rather than replacing one concept with the other, this chapter explores the interconnections between them. The urgency of today’s global predicament is a recurring reason to bring them in dialogue. From the perspective of Communication for Development, the as yet little explored axis between conviviality and creolisation is potentially the most interesting one.
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Notes
- 1.
The articulation of bottom-up, participatory, locally sensitive approaches, as opposed to the mainstream top-down modernisation (diffusion of innovation) paradigm, was largely inspired by post-development scholars like Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, Majid Rahnema and James Ferguson. For a comprehensive overview, see The Post Development reader (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997).
- 2.
Hybridisation is here arguably synonymous with creolisation. The main argument against the terms ‘hybridity’ and ‘hybridisation’ is their biological connotations and the underlying assumption that the hybrid is a crossing of two entities that are defined as essential, as opposed to their hybrid offspring. Creolisation presupposes a process of inter-mingling without beginning or end, whose outcome—and this is a crucial point for Glissant—is as per definition unpredictable (Glissant 1997a, pp. 18–19).
- 3.
I am in the following historical overview largely citing Nowicka and Heil’s comprehensive recapitulation.
- 4.
Whether the explosion of social media in the last decade has actually enhanced the idea of a shared world, a global public sphere, or whether it has rather contributed to further fragmentation, through the dismantling of existing public spheres, is another discussion that I leave aside here. Let us just notice that, as with globalisation at large, it is a dual and ambiguous process.
- 5.
The term afropolitanism was introduced by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall in their exploration of Johannesburg—the elusive metropolis (2004). It has caught as a label for a new generation of intellectuals with African origin, but it has also attained different and contested meanings. In a recent article, Lisa Ann Richey and Lene Bull Christiansen argue that there is an essential connection between “the rise of Afropolitanism and the celebratization of North-South relations” (Richey and Bull Christiansen 2018).
- 6.
Although it may never have occurred to Beck, his depiction of cosmopolitanism as an unpredictable and unmanageable feature of an increasingly complex and interconnected world bears striking resemblance to Glissant’s conception of creolisation and what he in more poetical words describes as the emergence of the Tout-Monde (1997b).
- 7.
Available in full and abridged version in French and English at the website of ‘the convivialists’, http://www.lesconvivialistes.org
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Hemer, O. (2020). Communicating Cosmopolitanism, Conviviality and Creolisation. In: Tacchi, J., Tufte, T. (eds) Communicating for Change. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42513-5_11
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