Microloans and Micronarratives: Sentiment for a Small World

Abstract

How can we come to care about the fate of others far away? This question haunts the modern revival of interest in cosmopolitanism, a keyword that has emerged at the turn of the millennium to articulate the nuances of lived experience in an increasingly global era.1 While definitions of cosmo-politanism differ, I use the word here to signal a mode of belonging that implies a heightened sense of responsibility for an expanded view of community. Under-stood in this way, cosmopolitanism has frequently been criticized for its inability to inspire the genuine affect that enables such ethical responsiveness. Its skeptics often argue that the ties of cosmopolitanism are inevitably arid and artificial, especially when compared to the emotionally enduring bonds of nationality or ethnicity (Himmelfarb 1996; McConnell 1996; Pinsky 1996). However, these portrayals of emotionless cosmopolitanism overlook the long and rich history of sentimental discourse that has sought to create robust feelings of community across social borders.2 This structure of feeling, I suggest, has been dismissed because it frequently figures the cosmopolitan subject as female. As a discourse Public Culture 21:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-2008-02

Christian Marriage, Money Scams, and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

“…The use of the rural poor, widows, and children as worthy beneficiaries in the U‐Vistract propaganda evokes Black's research into ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘a mode of belonging that implies a heightened sense of responsibility for an expanded view of community’ (Black :169). Sentimentality, ‘emotionally suffused sympathy for others’ is, for Black, the key to understanding how cosmopolitanism produces affective ethical engagements that are not grounded in more familiar forms of social identity based on nationalism or ethnicity.…”

“…The sentimentality of these narratives fostered social connection aimed at linking donors and recipients in relationships of mutual respect. Black (:270) notes the use of ‘familiar sentimental tropes, such as the woman in distress, the self‐sacrificial mother, and the virtuous poor’ in the Kiva narratives. U‐Vistract websites and other propaganda used very similar approaches, presenting testimonies of successful investors as the deserving poor whose lives have been transformed.…”

Making Poverty Into a Financial Problem: From Global Poverty Lines to KIVA.ORG

“…Kiva has been positioned as an example of the ‘intimate mediations with poverty’ of concerned citizens in the Global North (Roy, : 149). In fact, it is its ability to capitalize on the double feeling of 'being invested in somebody' financially and emotionally that has contributed to Kiva’ success (Black, : 277). Whereas the financial connections materialize in millions of microloans, the emotional bonds between borrowers and lenders are forged via borrower stories on the website, loan updates in lenders’ inboxes and blog posts from Kiva fellows.…”

Fictions of Humanitarian Responsibility: Narrating Microfinance

“…The site used the affective power of a promised intimacy between lender and borrower to recruit loans, encouraging its lenders to see themselves as part of a visible chain that worked against the unmanageable specter of global poverty and rescaled the globe to proportions that fit the emotional and intellectual register of the individual. This smallworld cosmopolitanism emerged through the site's careful manipulation of new literary genres, or what I call micronarratives, that have become the hallmark of popular digital social networking sites in the first decade of the new millennium (Black 2009). …”

“…I argue that sentiment should still have a role to play, however, under specific circumstances (Black 2009(Black , 2010: 69). 2.…”