Abstract
Ever since the 1990s, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has been reappearing as a critical concept; more precisely, as a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ that is specific to the historical conditions of late twentieth-century/twenty-first-century globalization.1 Inaugurated in criticism by, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, Timothy Brennan and Ian Baucom, the connotations and denotations for cosmopolitanism have ranged widely, from the derogatory to the liberal, and from an actuality to an ideal. To map it broadly, in these debates cosmopolitanism is usually seen as either the false idealism of globalization and cultural logic of neo-imperialism, or as globalization’s critical advantage, namely an ‘ethos that attempts to encompass all humanity while remaining attentive to the pitfalls of humanism’.2
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Notes
As David Harvey writes: ‘Cosmopolitanism is back’. David Harvey, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, Public Culture 12.2 (2000): 529–64
Tanya Agathocleous and Jason Rudy, ‘Victorian Cosmopolitanisms: Introduction’, Spec, issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 389–97
Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 21.
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan’, trans. Thomas de Quincey, in The Works of Thomas de Quincey., ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000)
John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols 2 and 3, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 2
All quotations Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, introd. A.J. P. Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 83.
Peter Van der Veer, ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 165–79
Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
See van der Veer, 178 and Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Neither Patriotism nor Cosmopolitanism’, in Martha Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 122–4
See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Thomas Carlyle, Life of Robert Burns (New York: Delisser & Procter, 1859), 129.
All subsequent quotations in this section, unless otherwise noted, are to Isabella L. Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (London: Murray, 1883)
See Pat Barr, A Curious Life for a Lady: the Story of Isabella Bird (London: Macmillan, 1970), 165.
See Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001)
See Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 1–12.
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Kuehn, J. (2015). Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Constance Cumming and Isabella Bird in Hong Kong, 1878. In: Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (eds) New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_17
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