Cosmopolitan Parables

Cosmopolitan Parables explores the global rise of the heavily debated concept of cosmopolitanism from a unique German literary perspective. Since the early 1990s, the notion of cosmopolitanism has acquired a new salience because of an alarming rise in nationalism, xenophobia, migration, international war, and genocide. This upsurge has transformed how artists and scholars worldwide assess the power of international civil society and its moral obligation to unite regardless of cultural background, religious affiliation, or national citizenship. It rejuvenates an ancient yet timely framework within which contemporary political crises are to be overcome, especially after the collapse of communist states and the intersection of postwar and postcolonial trajectories. To exemplify this global challenge, Kim examines three internationally acclaimed writers of German origin—Hans Christoph Buch, Michael Krüger, and W. G. Sebald—joined by their own harrowing experiences and stunning entanglements with Holocaust memory, postcolonial responsibility, and communist legacy. This bold new study is the first of its kind, interrogating transnational memories of trauma alongside globally shared responsibilities for justice. More important, it addresses the question of remembrance—whether the colonial past or the postwar legacy serves as a proper foundation upon which cosmopolitanism is to be pursued in today's era of globalization.

What does it mean to belong in a place, or more than one place? This exciting new volume brings together work from cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholars researching home, migration and belonging, using their original research to argue for greater attention to how feeling and emotion is deeply embedded in social structures and power relations. Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging argues for a practical cosmopolitanism that recognises relations of power and struggle, and that struggles over place are often played out through emotional attachment. Taking the reader on a journey through research encounters spiralling out from the global city of London, through English suburbs and European cities to homes and lives in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Mexico, the contributors show ways in which international and intercontinental migrations and connections criss-cross and constitute local places in each of their case studies. With a reflection on the practice of 'writing cities' from two leading urbanists and a focus throughout the volume on empirical work driving theoretical elaboration, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the politics of social science method, transnational urbanism, affective practices and new perspectives on power relations in neoliberal times. The international range of linked case studies presented here will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies and contemporary history, and for urban policy makers interested in innovative perspectives on social relations and urban form.

Examines how contemporary German and Polish novels reimagine borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces by engaging in border poetics, a narrative practice that relates political borders to figurative boundaries.Globalization notwithstanding, we live in an age of borders, as the ongoing conflict at Europe's eastern edge reminds us. Borders are meant to protect, but they more often divide and exclude. This book, however, focuses on literature that pushes back against the divisiveness of borders, advocating for transborder connections and criticizing exclusionary boundaries. It examines novels that reimagine past and present German-Polish borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces. Novels by Nobel Prize winners Olga Tokarczuk and Günter Grass are discussed alongside works by authors less well known internationally: the Polish Inga Iwasiów, the German Tanja Dückers, and the German-Polish Sabrina Janesch.The book utilizes and elaborates the concept of border poetics, a narrative and cultural practice that places political borders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.e as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.

How do museums confront the violence of European colonialism, conquest, dispossession, enslavement, and genocide?

The nation-state is a European invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. As a consequence, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the inside-as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him or herself “German” necessarily must identify. But what happens if we describe German culture and its history from the outside? And as something heterogeneous, shaped by multiple and diverse sources, many of which are not obviously connected to things traditionally considered “German”? Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, Germany from the Outside explores new opportunities for understanding and shaping community at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. Located at the nexus of cultural, political, historiographical, and philosophical discourses, the essays in this volume inform discussions about next directions for German Studies and for the Humanities in a fraught era.

The dream of a cosmopolitical utopia has been around for thousands of years. Yet the promise of being locally situated while globally connected and mobile has never seemed more possible than today. Through a classical sociological approach, this book analyses the political, technological and cultural systems underlying cosmopolitanism.

In Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community, first published in 2001, Jessica Berman argues that the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although these modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of James, Proust, Woolf and Stein, she argues, not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. This study seeks to revise theories of community and cosmopolitanism in light of their construction in narrative, and in particular it seeks to reveal the ways that modernist fiction can provide meaningful alternative models of community.

During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.