Abstract
Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writings and Culture begins from the premise that cosmopolitanism was a feature of the early American discourse of nation formation. Cillerai shows that eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism can best be understood by situating the phenomenon within the context of eighteenth-century colonialism and the cultures that it produced and influenced. This introductory chapter shows how the book reassesses the terms in which we understand cosmopolitanism and its relationship with local and transatlantic environments. Cillerai gives an overview of the ways in which cosmopolitanism in the Early American context provides an alternative way to analyze how writers from different segments of colonial society identified themselves and America within the transatlantic context.
“To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal; the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one must make the best of it.”
Henry James, “Occasional Paris,” 1877
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- 1.
Amanda Anderson gives a succinct description of this aspect of the history of cosmopolitanism when she writes: “Cosmopolitanism has repeatedly emerged at times when the world has suddenly seemed to expand in unassimilable ways; it is at these moments that universalism needs the rhetoric of worldliness that cosmopolitanism provides” (A. Anderson 1998, 272; see also A. Anderson 2001, 3–33).
- 2.
Cosmopolitanism has a lengthy history beginning with Greek and Roman thinkers in the Cynic and Stoic traditions. Ancient philosophers such as Zeno, Marcus Cicero, and Seneca believed that humans were by nature inhabiting two communities, one local and determined by individual birth places, and one universal represented by the entirety of humankind. Tied to this idea of dual belonging was that of a set of universal laws for humanity to comply with. The tradition initiated in the last three centuries bc also affected the Judeo-Christian thought of early philosophers, such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and continued through the early modern period when it reappeared in the thoughts of the Neo-Thomist Spanish thinkers Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco Suárez, and Francisco de Vitoria. These philosophers responded to and criticized the contemporary civilizing missions in the Americas and the slaughter of native people using the idea of universal natural rights as applicable to all human beings, including the natives of the land their country was colonizing. The notion of the cosmopolitan that emerged during the Enlightenment belongs to this tradition and shows connections to the ancient ideas of universal citizenship, universal human rights, and communication. Enlightenment concepts of universal human reason, equal human worth, and the demands for universal justice directly derive from the Western thinkers of the previous centuries had developed and are also affected by the political, economic, and social structures of these periods (Heater 1996, 1–26; Brown and Held 2010, 1–14).
- 3.
This passage is also used in the Oxford English Dictionary as example of the first appearance of the word cosmopolitan in the English language.
- 4.
While historians have also turned their attention to cosmopolitanism in early America, they have done so without paying enough attention to the rhetorical and literary aspects of the phenomenon. Using a literary study approach for my analyses, I expand and deepen what historian Gordon Wood has described as the exploration of how cosmopolitanism affected the way Americans “invented” their nation during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
- 5.
- 6.
The manuscript book containing the reference is located at the Dickinson College Library and it accompanies a letter that Fergusson’s nephew (a loyalist) wrote from England after the revolution.
- 7.
See footnote 5.
- 8.
In describing Equiano as cosmopolitan, I am taking a position that differs from that of some postcolonial scholars such as Srivinas Aravamudan. Aravamudan describes figures like Equiano as “tropicopolitans” and opposes them to Enlightenment cosmopolitans because of their geographical position and, especially, because they challenge the privilege of contemporary cosmopolitans. I do so because I see Equiano’s developing narrative identity as being generated using terms that belong to the rhetoric of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and rather than seeing the narrative subject as working to debunk the concept, the narrative reshapes the concepts itself within its own rhetorical frame (Avaramudan 1999, 1–25 and 2001, 615–619).
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Cillerai, C. (2017). Introduction. In: Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writing and Culture. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62298-9_1
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