Lecture Series 2017 "Minor Cosmopolitan Theory"

Stefanie Boulila (Georg-August University Göttingen)

The Erotics of Cosmopolitanism: 'Latin American Passion' in European Popular Culture 

In hegemonic conceptualisations, cosmopolitanism is the epitome of ‘living with difference’ (Ahmed 2000; Binnie et al. 2006). For Sara Ahmed (2000) cosmopolitanism connects to multiculturalism not only in terms of how it allows the nation or the city to incorporate racialised difference but also in terms of its ambiguity. In this talk I aim at theorising cosmopolitanism in Europe as an ambiguous discourse that, similarly to multiculturalism, allows conversations about race without actually naming it (Lentin and Titley 2011). I do so by examining the separation between ‘good’ difference that can be commodified and incorporated and ‘difference’ that is deemed dangerous for the multicultural nation or the cosmopolitan city. Throughout the history of European colonialism, the simultaneous incorporation and rejection of Others has a longstanding tradition (McClintock 1995; Savigliano 1995; Goldberg 2002). In my talk I explore discourses around ‘Latin American passion’ in European popular culture and illustrated how the racialised quality of the Latina/o body operates as a desirable and yet highly ambiguous commodity. Focusing on the figuration of the hyper-sexual Latina and narratives of machismo in popular culture, I argue that Latinidad is mediated as an exoticised commodity object for the European cosmopolitan and post-feminist consumer. As a ‘break’ from the burden of ‘egalitarian’, ‘progressive’ Europeanness, racialised Latinidad invites cosmopolitans to indulge in a more archaic and ‘sexy’ past.    

Thursday, April 20th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)

Gurminder Bhambra (University of Warwick)

Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: A Contradiction in Terms?

Most discussions of cosmopolitanism start with its intellectual genealogy being a European one, associating ‘being cosmopolitan’ (as a practice) with being in the West. More recent discussions of cosmopolitanism, such as by Habermas and Beck, have sought explicitly to tie the concept to the emergence and development of the project of European Union. Rarely do such understandings, however, also take into account European domination over much of the world which occurred contemporaneously as one of the conditions of cosmopolitanism. Nor is there much acknowledgement that there have been cosmopolitan practices and the development of cosmopolitan ideas in other parts of the world outside of European contact, sometimes developed in relation to European contact, and not subordinate to it. In this talk, I address the possibilities for a ‘postcolonial cosmopolitanism’ and discuss what work we would need to do to ensure this.

Thursday, April 27th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)

Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University)

Beyond the Local/Global Dichotomy: Decolonial Cosmopolitanism as a Tool for Re-existence

The enlightenment model of cosmopolitanism and the subsequent evolvement of the normalized binary opposition of local and global are unable to reflect the complexity of contemporary world. Today’s reemergence of traditionalist and antiglobal discourses can be seen as a revolt from within modernity, as a resurgence of exclusionary locality which rejects both the transnational cosmopolitan and the discarded (by the global coloniality) precarious other. In the rhetoric of modernity/coloniality the local is habitually presented as the preliminary stage for the global and often associated with negatively marked tradition. Moreover there have always existed people who have never been allowed into the shiny cosmopolitanism of the Western globe-trotters. For such inhabitants of exteriority borders as boundaries have remained intact and even multiplied in the last several decades. This does not mean that they are not cosmopolitan, though survival and coalitional resistance cosmopolitanism is different from the Kantian model. What makes it different and how does it correlate with (critical) sensibilities of the global North? How is decolonial cosmopolitan model expressed through aesthetic and poetological principles? Can it potentially serve as a positive ground for building the world anew and turning negative resistance into positive re-existence? These questions are addressed in the lecture. 

Thursday, May 11th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)

Alexandra Ganser (University of Vienna)

Territorialities of Flight: The Refugee Narrative in Edwidge Danticat and Madeleine Thien

In contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, the terms flight and territorialization are tightly connected to concepts introduced by French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, most notably in A Thousand Plateaus. By what they call “lines of flight”—unpredictable, unruly routes defying spatial control—, they refer to the break-up of a hegemonic spatial semantics through the mobility associated with the figure of the nomad. The concept is closely connected with that of “deterritorialization“ as a strategy to contravene normative spatial structures—“striated” space—, and to produce “smooth space,” space that escapes structuration and control. For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization has a positive value: “write, form a rhizome [i.e., networks of unstructured offshoots and trajectories across smooth spaces], increase your territory by deterritorialization” (1987/1980: 11). In this light, my title is deliberately oxymoronic, as it associates lines of flight with the territorialization process rather than deterritorialization. Postcolonial criticism, most notably Gayatri Spivak, has held Deleuze’s philosophy accountable for reaffirming a European universal (male) subject. Even these critics, however, have not debated the Deleuzian conception of lines of flight and deterritorialization. These concepts appear not just as starkly normative but also as grossly romantic if applied to refugee subjectivities—subjectivities deprived of agency and involuntarily deterritorialized in toto—physically, culturally, and in terms of identity. In my lecture, I am asking how literature and its readers can perform the work of a conceptual corrective to such fashionable theories. I am taking up the prevalence of flight to Western societies, which are today exhorted once more to shelter the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse“ of so many shores, “the homeless“ and “tempest-tossed,“ to recall Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus“ (1883) and examine the territorialities of flight articulated in the short story “Children of the Sea“ by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat (1991) and the novel Dogs at the Perimeter by the Chinese-Malaysian Canadian Madeleine Thien (2011). Danticat’s story focuses on the Haitian “boat people“ that attempted to reach Florida shores in the 1980s and 1990s, while Thien examines the Red Khmer genocide in Cambodia and its consequences for the children that came to Canada as refugees. Both are informed by what Achille Mbembe has called the necropolitics of genocide and demographic control rather than by the immigrant narrative, which usually takes off with the migrants’ arrival and focuses on immigrant life in a new environment. This necropolitics, as Mbembe claims, dictates who may live and who must die, who finds shelter and who is left to drown; accordingly, both texts offer insights into such precarious, deterritorialized subjectivities and perform a grueling critique of the necropolitical structures that continue to produce transoceanic diasporas.

Thursday, May 18th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor) 

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Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Flensburg University)

Queer Ethics of Reading: The Archive of Slavery between Entanglement and Counterpoint

In extension of, but also in distinction from, Edward Said’s famous conception of contrapuntal reading strategies that emphasise the influence of the colonies on metropolitan lifestyles, I propose that the emergence of modern Britishness was shaped globally already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century before the high time of imperialism and should be related more strongly to the debate on the abolition of slavery. I suggest to read literary texts as part of an entangled (rather than contrapuntal) literary history of British writing. My contribution to the lecture series “minor cosmopolitan theory” therefore begins with a methodological reflection on the ethical challenges of reading, particularly when dealing with the archive of slavery today. Contrasting the more overtly politicised queer impulse of embracing negative feelings, which critics such as Ann Cvetkovich propose, with what Stephen Best calls a depsychologising form of “surface reading”, I advocate a return to Sedgwickian queer reparative reading strategies that might function as a link between these supposedly contradictory methodological approaches. Following this theoretical reflection, I revisit Said’s landmark reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) to discuss how familial feeling becomes increasingly permeable for subjects like Fanny Price and Robert Wedderburn, the radical orator and author of The Horrors of Slavery (1824), from the margins of the colonies and Britain’s class-bound society simultaneously. This focus on their entanglement also resists a clear-cut spatial binary of the colonial periphery versus the cosmopolitan centre and links questions of class and the new imperial and gendered ordering of Britain’s affective make-up in the course of the nineteenth century.

Thursday, June 8th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)

Natasha A. Kelly

Afro-Culture: On being Human and other Myths

Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality, equal economic relations, and a just political system that reaches beyond national borders. The concept is often related to geographical locations, rather than to peoples’ histories within these locations. For example, Berlin is often defined as Germanys’ most cosmopolitan city due to its high rate of diversity. But to what extent does this philosophy actually apply to the histories of its people? How can we understand the concept of cosmopolitanism without understanding the ‘concept of being’? Along what W. E. B. Du Bois’ coins ‘the color-line’ (1903), I trace the journey of Black Germans out of what Frantz Fanon (1952) calls the ‘zone of nonbeing’, where the history of becoming human began for colonized, enslaved, and marginalized peoples, into a ‘zone of being’, from where cosmopolitan cities such as Berlin can eventually be (re-)imagined. As cultural critic Mark Dery (1993) proposes, I examine how a community whose past has deliberately been erased, and whose presence is subsequently absent can design a possible future, in which according to Kwame Anthony Appiah (1997) individuals from varying locations enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing backgrounds, beliefs and histories. In contrast to the Hegelian philosophy of existence, I introduce the concept of Afro-Culture as an intersectional matrix of knowledge that consists of historical, realistic, and futuristic elements, and concentrate on the past, present, and future of Black bodies in Germany from a Black German post-feminist perspective. Concurrently, my lecture can be understood as a critique of European modernity as well as a socio-political guidance of transnational solidarity and social change.

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Thursday, June 22nd 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)

Paul Bandia (Concordia University, Montreal)

Postcoloniality, Translation and Minor Literatures

This lecture aims at highlighting current trends in postcolonial translation theory dealing with issues related to intercultural writing, multilingualism and literary heteroglossia in minority literatures.  The latter includes literatures from the postcolony, the diaspora and contexts of migration. The discussion focuses on the conceptualization of translation as a paradigm or scientific construct in defining the contours and positioning of minor literatures within current discourse on globalization and cosmopolitanism.

Thursday, June 29th 2017; 18-20 // Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 2.15 (second floor)