Lecture by Timothy Brennan: "Cosmopolitanism Is Not Internationalism"
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, Building 260, Room 252. Sponsored by "Toward a Literature of the Common Good," a project in the DLCL Research Unit.
Abstract:
The topic of cosmopolitanism is filled with invitations to talk at cross-purposes. We imagine we are talking about one thing when it is really another. Most of us either are, or pretend to be, for the ideals of cosmopolitanism: broad-minded interest in different cultures, a feeling of responsibility to humans of all types, a commitment to negotiation and understanding, and a rejection of chauvinism. But one looks in vain in most commentary for a more complicated understanding of the concept’s checkered history, or its divided sentiments. There is little sense of the contradictions running through the concept – which is not only a concept, after all, but a policy and even, in some circles, a requirement. By giving an overview of positions in the field, I would like to show the ways in which there is no cosmopolitanism in general, that it is always local, that it is incompatible with internationalism, and that it is often uncomfortably modeled on the prevailing rhetoric of business. Its inherent opposition to nationalism, although in many ways welcome, ignores the vitality of the nation-form for protecting rights. How do we leave the plane of right-thinking attitudes possible in the virtual reality of the media, the classroom, and the arts in order to explore the actual lives and structures of power governing our relationship to others?
Timothy Brennan is Professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. His essays on literature, cultural politics, American intellectuals, and colonialism have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and the London Review of Books. His most recent book is Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008). Other recent books include Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006); and At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard 1997).