Introduction: ‘Lived cosmopolitanisms’ in littoral Asia

Abstract

Due to the analytical power and purchase of its inclusivist ideal, cosmopolitanism has been the subject of renewed interest in academic debates and discussions of the past three decades. As a 'way of being in the world' (Waldron, 2000: 227), cosmopolitanism is broadly defined as a willingness to engage with the Other. It entails 'an intellectual and aesthetic openness towards divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity' (Hannerz, 1990: 239). The view of cosmopolitanism as a political ideal, however, derives from the Kantian philosophical tradition, itself a much debated and highly complex configuration of ideas, and is aimed at the creation of 'a higher order space, not marked by a world government, but by a world federation of republican states in which citizens from particular countries would all come together in a "condition of lawful association with one another"' (Benhabib, 2004: 39). As a political project that aims at 'a higher order space' and also as a cultural principle that is built on an awareness of otherness, cosmopolitanism has emerged from its genesis in the time of the ancient Greeks through nineteenth-century thought to the present as a way of understanding social phenomena that transcend the boundedness of statist and nationalist formations.Since the 1990s, cosmopolitanism's universalist theoretical foundations have in particular been the subject of extended critique. In this regard, Kant's Enlightenment conception of cosmopolitanism, still a major reference point in modern philosophical thinking on the subject, has been questioned and reframed in the light of the evolving nature of political and economic structures as well as that of social and cultural contexts around the globe. The new and particular circumstances for (re) articulating cosmopolitanism is reflected in the number of revisionary formulations that exist in disciplines as varied as philosophy,

“Local” and “national” transformations: Cultural globalization, heterogeneity, and Malaysian literature in English

“…Its genealogies in the maritime encounters of the pre-colonial Malay World, including the latter's "complex connectivity" (Tomlinson, 2003) with yet other worlds, attest amply to the "globalness" of its constitution. However, the cosmopolitanisms of these "connected histories" and cultural geographies (Gabriel and Rosa, 2012) have been regulated into homogeneities by the state's "normalizing tendencies" (Bhabha, 1990: 4). Thus, one is asked to forget that Munshi Abdullah, a citizen of the Malay World of the early nineteenth century and hailed today as the father of modern Malay literature, was a Tamil-speaking Muslim, the first translator of The Bible in Malay, 3 and of mixed Arab and Indian origins.…”