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Benton Jay Komins In many discussions of contemporary culture, the notion of cosmopolitanism features prominently. However, what cosmopolitanism is remains unclear. Indeed, contemporary usages of cosmopolitanism oftentimes diverge from past formulations of what it means to be cosmopolitan. As the critic Bruce Robbins notes, "Something has happened to cosmopolitanism. It has a new cast of characters. In the past the term has been applied, often venomously, to Christians, aristocrats, merchants, Jews, homosexuals, and intellectuals. Now it is attributed, more charitably, to North Atlantic merchant sailors, Caribbean au pairs in the United States, Egyptian guest workers in Iraq, Japanese women who take gaijin lovers."1 Where cosmopolitan was used as a derisive epithet in the past to indicate separation and difference, today it has become a privileged sign of multicultural eclecticism. "Instead of an ideal of detachment," according to Robbins, "actually existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance."2 But what happens when distance is achieved through the displacement of minority communities? When a city has a multi-ethnic past that has been supplanted by a homogeneous population, can its current citizens be properly described as cosmopolitan? In a recent essay, the geographer David Harvey
Comparative Literature Studies – Penn State University Press
Published: Nov 15, 2002
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