irginia Woolf famously announced her cosmopolitan aspirations as a rejection of exclusionary patriarchal patriotism by declaring in Three Guineas (1938), "as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world" (229). In this statement Woolf echoed the classical etymology of cosmopolitanism coined by the Cynic Diogenes, according to whom a cosmopolitan is defined as "a citizen of the world" (Martha Nussbaum, Cosmopolitan Tradition 1-2). But how does the classical philosophical notion of cosmopolitanism evolve in late-Victorian writers found the notion of cosmopolitanism especially alluring because they inhabited a world where “advances in transport, media, and communication technologies compressed geographical space and accelerated the international circulation of ideas” (Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere 2–3). Building on the Victorian legacy of cosmopolitanism, modernist cosmopolitanism evolves into a challenge to narrow nationalist sentiments (as articulated by Woolf above), continuing the advocacy for fostering transnational connections. Jessica Berman notes, “Modernist writers use their narratives to create ‘cosmopolitan communities,’ overlapping webs of relation that narrate the story of affiliation as multiple, ever in process, and not bound by the limits of national belonging” (“Modernist Cosmopolitanism” 431). Although literary cosmopolitanism at this time largely subverts the limits of exclusionary patriotism, in some instances, it may also be characterized by underlying racial, gender, or class biases. For instance, Woolf’s call for cosmopolitanism in Three Guineas largely pertains to well-educated upper or middle-class English women and does not include individuals hailing from other class identities or having different citizenship statuses. Whereas Woolf’s model of cosmopolitanism does not speak to specific instances of precarity, postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s model of vernacular cosmopolitanism maps how marginalized communities like refugees and asylum seekers who embody “a precarious sense of survival” generate their own distinct cosmopolitan trajectory through experiences of displacement and liminality which ultimately destabilize bourgeois notions of nationhood (“Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” 196).
This essay cluster aims to trace how the idea of cosmopolitanism evolves in late-Victorian and early modernist global anglophone literature and culture at a time of extreme socio-political strife when the ideas of nation-state, citizenship status, national borders, and inter-national camaraderie have become deeply contested in a context of widespread imperialism. In light of the emerging transnational turn in literary studies and recent interventions in theories of cosmopolitanism made by Martha Nussbaum, Walter Mignolo, Kwame Anthony Appiah and others, the cluster is particularly interested in incisive pieces which interrogate and reevaluate the local-global dynamic engendered by literary and artistic iterations of cosmopolitanism. Topics may include but are not limited to:
- How do the iterations of cosmopolitanism —primarily a Western philosophical concept— become plural when considering non-Western literature and culture
- How does cosmopolitanism relate to the country/city binary? Is cosmopolitanism primarily located in the metropole? Or, can an allegedly rural and insular place also generate its distinct form of cosmopolitanism?
- Nationalist sentiments and the shaping of literary and artistic cosmopolitanism
- How are experiences of cosmopolitanism distinctly shaped by privileges and/or liminalities of gender/race/class identities
- Cosmopolitanism and the binary of modernity/coloniality
- The relationship between cosmopolitanism and global commodity culture
- Is there a role for the nonhuman in cosmopolitanism, which is largely coined as an anthropocentric concept?
- What are the potential perils and pitfalls of the form of cosmopolitanism articulated in late Victorian and early modernist literature and art?
Essays for this cluster should be between 2,500 and 3,500 words. They should be grounded in philosophical and political theories of cosmopolitanism and show how late-Victorian and early modernist literature developed multiple iterations of cosmopolitanism with relation to various socio-historical forces. Please send a brief scholarly bio (100 words) and abstract (250-300 words) in a single pdf to schattop@unc.edu by 31 August 2024. Final essays will be due on 15 January 2025 and will be approved through peer review.
Created 31 July 2024