Gender and Cosmopolitanism in Europe: A Feminist Perspective

Gender and Cosmopolitanism in Europe combines a feminist critique of contemporary and prominent approaches to cosmopolitanism with an in-depth analysis of historical cosmopolitanism and the manner in which gendered symbolic boundaries of national political communities in two European countries are drawn. Exploring the work of prominent scholars of new cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany, including Held, Habermas, Beck and Bhabha, it delivers a timely intervention into current debates on globalisation, Europeanisation and social processes of transformation in and beyond specific national societies.

A rigorous examination of the emancipatory potential of current debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in Europe, this book will be of interest to sociologist and political scientists working on questions of identity, inclusion, citizenship, globalisation, cosmopolitanism and gender.
Contents: Introduction: gendered cosmopolitanism: the scope of this book; Who belongs? Who is the Other?; Recognition, social equality and the current EU anti-discrimination policy; Kulturnation and the homogenised notion of community belonging: Jürgen Habermas's and Ulrich Beck's approaches to 'European' cosmopolitanism; Global trade, the city and commercial cosmopolitanism: David Held's and Homi K. Bhabha's approaches to new cosmopolitanism; About dead-ends, one-way streets and critical crossroads; Transversal conversations on the scope of new cosmopolitanism beyond the Eurocentric framework; Bibliography; Index.

Democracy, cosmopolitanism and national identity in a ‘globalising’ world

Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.

Cosmopolitanism and the relevance of ‘zombie concepts’: the case of anomic suicide amongst Alevi Kurd youth

Against Beck’s claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim’s theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second-generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a ‘new rainbow underclass’, as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation.

Cosmopolitanism and confrontation : realizing consumer responsibility in a globalized marketplace

Ce mémoire explore des façons de conceptualiser la responsabilité dans des cas où des individus contribuent de façon peu significative à des torts collectifs éloignés. Pour contextualiser la discussion, la relation entre des actes de consommation et la perpétuation des « sweatshops » dans l’industrie des textiles et des chaussures est utilisée. Une approche basée sur les droits humains est déployée pour définir le tort qui est présent dans les usines de textiles et une conceptualisation de la connection est proposée selon la notion de la structure sociale. Guidé par la notion de « unstructured collective harms » proposée par Christopher Kutz, et en comparaison avec des notions de responsabilité qui mettent la responsabilité nationale en premier plan, les conclusions qui sont offertes ici sont centrées sur l’importance de la confrontation du consommateur pour remédier aux effets du problème d’action collective qui est au coeur de la création des torts collectifs lointains. Finalement, l’importance du cosmopolitanisme comme une façon de stabiliser des théories de responsabilité à travers les frontières est mis en évidence.

Terrorism, cosmopolitanism and globalization: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This paper examines two “9/11 novels,” Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Written by writers of different backgrounds but with similarly cosmopolitan career paths, both novels attempt to achieve a transnational perspective on the climate of fear created by the 9/11 attacks. Both novels unveil a history of violence which links colonial legacy and new imperial formations resulting from neoliberal capitalism, ultimately highlighting difficulties in forging an encompassing cosmopolitan perspective at a time of international insecurity.

The horizontal spread of a vertical malady: cosmopolitanism and history in Pernambuco’s recent cinematic sensation

Brazil’s recent cinematic sensation, O som ao redor/Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012), displays an effective integration of form and content, as exemplified by its vertical figuration that crystallizes the devastating effects of property development and global capitalism. This chapter will attempt to unravel a two-way drive within this vertical motif: a movement off the ground, resulting in global cosmopolitanism; and another into the ground, in search of the social history and film history at its base. As I hope to demonstrate, despite the characters’ late postmodernist disconnect from local context and history, O som ao redor offers a perspicacious insight into regional and national history that contributes an original and exciting addition to Brazilian and world cinema.