Browsing by Subject "Cosmopolitanism"
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Item An angle of vision : southern cosmopolitanism 1935-1974(2011-12) Mass, Noah; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lesser, Wayne; Kevorkian, Martin; Hoelscher, StevenAs they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Item Between cosmopolitanism and nationalism : print, national identity, and the literary public sphere in the 1920s Petersburg and Buenos Aires(2010-05) Potoplyak, Marina; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-; Garza, Thomas J.; Levine, Madeline G.; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M.; Shumway, NicolasIn Russia and Argentina modernism arrived well before the advent of socioeconomic modernization, and found societies with restricted civil liberties, only nascent middle classes, and virtually non-existent public spheres. Despite these factors, within a span of some fifty years, Petersburg and Buenos Aires turned into vibrant literary capitals rivaling London, New York, and Paris as centers of literary modernism. This dissertation offers a new understanding of the period by exposing the critical role of publishers and cultural patrons in this extraordinary cultural advancement. I argue that they were able to reformulate their countries’ historically ambivalent positions vis-à-vis Western European civilization by working closely with avant-garde literary groups and viii promoting their literary works that combined sometimes contending, sometimes complementary cosmopolitanism and nationalism. My analysis of the interrelated processes of the development of print culture, national identity, and the literary public sphere in Russia and Argentina is informed by Benedict Anderson’s thinking about nationalism and print culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s treatment of publishers as key participants in cultural production, and the concept of the public sphere as seen by Jürgen Habermas. Close reading of select literary works of the 1920s shows that Russian and Argentine “peripheral” experiences, once transformed into artistic creation, became consonant with cultural practices of international modernism precisely because they combined both cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies. Each of the writers considered—Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Veniamin Kaverin, and Konstantin Fedin—was able to formulate highly original and yet unmistakably national response to modernity. Following the writers’ trajectories from early literary experiments to the works of the late 1920s, when they renounced their youthful deviations and joined the literary (and sometimes even political) establishment, I show how these literary texts renegotiated the issues of national identity by reworking diverse and often “foreign” literary traditions into authentically Russian and Argentine prose.Item Cosmopolitan America: Affect, Attention, and the Nation in Post-Cold War Literature(2014-04-18) Yost, Brian ArmstrongMy dissertation makes two key interventions in the fields of cosmopolitanism and contemporary American literature. First, I define cosmopolitanism as a way of organizing sociality in terms of affect, through how individuals pay attention to the world. Interactions with people and texts evoke affects and socialization trains individuals how to respond to them through the formation of feelings for particular forms of community. Rather than a set of actually existing conditions or some common identity, cosmopolitanism, as a potential outcome for ongoing processes of socialization, is one means of politicizing affect within political institutions like the nation, which remain grounded in material conditions and particular identities. Cosmopolitanism is not some state of affairs that our actions or intentions bring into being; it remains abstract and outside the present in the form of appeals to a nostalgic past or utopian future. For example, nationalist literature deploys the idea of cosmopolitanism as a reality or possibility to reconsolidate the political effects of affect around the nation-state. Second, I argue that recent literature about America reconceptualizes the nation?s cultural and political value through appeals to cosmopolitanism as if it were a set of conditions or common identity that readers can use to construct a positive self-identity. This rhetorical move justifies a simultaneous vision of expanding cultural, political, and economic influence that accompanies American texts? visions of America as the center of cosmopolitan humanitarian or ethical interventions. Literary appeals to America as the center of cosmopolitan solidarity manage the formation of the nation within global space by encouraging readers to feel positively for their global presence. The dissertation presents detailed readings of texts concerned with the identity of America rather than those emerging from it as the object of its inquiry to show how global literature situates the affective experience of America within a cosmopolitan sociability stratified across a number of solidarities including race, class, gender, and nationality. Analyzing texts by David Foster Wallace, Hari Kunzru, Joe Sacco, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Dave Eggers, I elaborate on critical and philosophical deployments of cosmopolitanism as justifications for the management of communication, human rights, and aesthetic production alongside literary analogs that situate critical struggles to realize cosmopolitanism within America.Item Embracing the other : Christian cosmopolitanism in Tolstoy and O'Connor(2010-05) Leachman, Julianna Lee; Kuzmic, Tatiana; Livers, KeithIn this paper, I am suggesting that instead of using a traditional definition of cosmopolitanism, such as “thinking and feeling beyond the nation” (Cheah and Robbins) or “pluralism” plus “fallibilism” (Appiah), we consider instead Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s term “embrace” as the framework for expanding our understanding of cosmopolitanism. This term is linked to standard interpretations of cosmopolitanism through its emphasis on hybridity and openness, but it differs in its undeniably religious implications. By applying Volf’s theoretical framework to concrete literary examples – namely, Lev Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich and Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf” – it becomes clear that Ivan Il'ich’s and Mrs. May’s identity-shaping (religious) encounters with the “Other” are an opening up – or hybridizing – of their identities. This paper concludes that in Volf’s view, and Tolstoy’s and O’Connor’s as well, religious affinity is an impetus and not a hindrance to cosmopolitanism.Item Faits divers : national culture and modernism in Third World literary magazines(2010-08) Micklethwait, Christopher Dwight; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Rossman, Charles; Ali, Samer; Salgado, Cesar; Wilks, Jennifer; Wolitz, SethCommitments to cosmopolitanism and indigenism complicate the Modernist literature of the Third World. This study investigates the rhetorical and aesthetic responses of Third World "little magazines"--short-running, self-financed cultural magazines--to these two notions. These little magazine evolved with the daily newspaper as a tool favored by avant-garde movements for critiquing the social structures that produced it and for codifying their aesthetic and political principles. Comparing the Stridentist little magazine Horizonte (1926-1927) to D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1925), I argue that the Mexican Revolution created a climate of nationalism that reoriented the Stridentist movement away from a version of cosmopolitanism influenced by European modernist movements and toward a deeper interest in the Mexican folk and indigenous culture. Following form there, I consider the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este mundo (1949) in comparison to two Haitian magazines: La Revue Indigène (1927-1928) and Les Griots (1938-1940). Here I find that, while Carpentier stages a relatively global critique of primitivism as a false cosmopolitanism, the magazines La Revue Indigène and Les Griots reflect a turn from such a cosmopolitanism that values the primitive for its own sake toward a cultural nationalism invested in the real and imagined recuperation of Haiti's African origins through the study of folklore, Vodou, the Kreyòl language and poetic images of Africa. Finally, I compare Futurist F. T. Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain (1909) to the Egyptian literary magazine Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī (1945-1948) in order to demonstrate the distance between Egyptian modernity in the European imagination and the self-conceived notions of Egyptian modernity. In Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī, I find that these writers value cosmopolitanism, arguing that it is in fact indigenous to Egyptian culture itself and constructing their notion of Egyptian modernity around the maintenance of continuity with this indigenous cosmopolitanism. My examinations of these magazines suggests that, though the European avant-gardes and Third World literary Modernists may wield the little magazine similarly against hegemonic cultures, their purposes are divided over the roles cosmopolitanism and indigeneity play in the formation of national culture.Item The fox trot in a nation of cosmopolitans : music and race in early twentieth-century Guatemala(2013-08) Amado Pineda, Andres Roberto; Moore, Robin D., 1964-; O'Meara, Caroline; Candelaria, Lorenzo; Burnett, Virginia G; Keeler, WardIn this dissertation I explore musical importations in early twentieth-century Guatemala, particularly the fox trot, and their relationship to notions of cosmopolitanism, race, and national identity. Although Guatemalans may boast that the son is their national music—a genre often associated with local indigenous traditions—examination of the national marimba repertoire reveals that its most predominant styles derive from foreign music and dances that circulated transnationally in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Such a realization raises questions about the role of indigeneity in national discourse. I argue that Ladinos (non-indigenous or mixed Guatemalans) imported the fox trot and other musical forms to construct a national identity predicated on racialized notions of modernity and cosmopolitanism. The fox trot, a dance derived from African-American ragtime traditions, enjoyed worldwide popularity for nearly two decades due in part to its ability to mediate constructs of whiteness and blackness that fit presentist ideas of modernity: blackness represented a primitive alterity while whiteness evoked a modern and civilized society. Analyses of racial discourse among Ladinos and its implications for the national instrument (chapter 2), the stylistic features of Guatemalan national repertoire (chapter 3), and the subjects that locally-composed fox trots reference through titles, cover art, and musical styles (chapters 4 and 5) demonstrate that many elements of the fox trot, along with their connotations of modernity and race, resonated with the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Ladinos. Their preference for international as opposed to local forms suggest a fundamental ambivalence towards indigeneity and its centrality to national culture.Item Platonic Cosmopolitanism(2011-10-21) Betti, Daniel VincentWhat is the content of a meaningful cosmopolitan theory? Contemporary cosmopolitanism offers numerous global theories of liberalism, democracy, republicanism, and postmodernism, but is there anything of the ?cosmos? or ?polis? within them? I argue these theories, though global, are not cosmopolitan. Ancient Greek philosophy holds a more meaningful, substantive conception of cosmopolitanism. From Homer to the Stoics and Cynics, ancient Greece was a hotbed for thinking beyond the confines of local tradition and convention. These schools of thought ventured to find universal understandings of humanity and political order. Conceiving of the world as a beautiful order, a cosmos, they sought a beautiful order for the association of human beings. Within that tradition is the unacknowledged legacy of Platonic cosmopolitanism. Rarely do political philosophers find cosmopolitan themes in the dialogues of Plato. Correcting this omission, I argue that Plato?s dialogues, from the early through the late, comprise a cosmopolitan journey: an attempt to construct a polis according to an understanding of the cosmos. The early dialogues address questions of piety, justice, and righteous obedience. More than that, they inquire into why a good man, Socrates, is persecuted in his city for nothing more than being a dutiful servant of the gods and his city. The middle dialogues construct a true cosmopolis, a political association in harmony with the natural laws of the world. Furthermore, they explain why those who know how to construct such a polis live best in such arrangements. In the late dialogues, Plato revises his political plans to accord with a more developed understanding of cosmic and human nature. Platonic cosmopolitanism constructs a true polis according to the beautiful order of the cosmos. Such a feat of philosophy is remarkable in the Greek tradition, and inspires contemporaries to rethink their own conception of what is truly cosmopolitan versus merely global.Item Re-reading the American renaissance in New England and in Mexico City(2010-05) Anderson, Jill, 1979-; Barrish, Phillip; Carton, Evan; Dominguéz-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Joysmith, Claire; Murphy, GretchenRe-Reading the American Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City is a bi-national literary history of the confluence of concerns unevenly shared by new world liberal intellectuals in New England and in Mexico City. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the complex history that informs the multi-faceted public and private spheres of the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century. I introduce translations of nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals from the interior of Mexico who were preoccupied with many of the same ideas and problems characteristic of US American literary nationalism: the nation in moral crisis, the post-/neo-colonial onus of originality in the new world, the hypocrisies of race-based romantic nationalism, and the inherent contradictions of economic and political liberalisms. These inter-textual juxtapositions shift the analysis of US American liberal nationalism from a nation-based narrative of success or failure to the study of the complex, unequally distributed failures of liberalism across the region. Each chapter offers a new contextualization of the US American renaissance that demonstrates the period to be a complex palimpsest of provincial prejudices, liberal nationalisms, and cosmopolitan strategies. In Chapter Two I read the trans-american jeremiads of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau and Carlos María de Bustamante, Mariano Otero, and Luís de la Rosa in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chapter Three focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Ignacio Ramírez's incommensurate preoccupations with the origins of language and their inter-related post/neo-colonial bids for national recognition on a Eurocentric geopolitical stage. The travel accounts of William Cullen Bryant’s trip to Mexico City in 1872 and Guillermo Prieto’s overnight stay in Bryant’s Long Island home in 1877 set the scene in Chapter Four to explore the bi-national tensions inherent in their oddly inter-related romantic nationalisms. Furthermore, the insights of this bi-national literary history invite us to recognize the contours of our own geopolitical positions, and in recognizing them, to re-orient nationalist epistemologies and literary histories as deeply conversant with contemporaneous traditions otherwise considered peripheral and/or foreign.