Wild Cosmopolitanism, Wily Oscillations in Artificial Neighborhoods

Abstract

Might it not be the contrast between the impassive stones and such disturbances, which convinces people that, after all, nothing has been lost, for walls and homes remain standing?-Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 1925/1992 He then punched the stucco frame about the door to the sacristy. A piece of stucco fell off. "See?" he said. He punched it again, casually… "Look, this place is really old! At least a hundred years. These chunks come off easy!"-Alfredo at the church of La Manga, Chile as witnessed by Gastón Gordillo, Rubble, 2010 Cosmopolitanism has garnered renewed critical attention by questioning the disposition to travel without risk and full of entitlement in mind, body, and spirit to faraway places, and now to foreground struggles over ordinary existence within new arrangements of imperial power. For the cultural critic Paul Gilroy (2005), living equitably, respectfully, and clutching a "cosmopolitan hope" turns on the refutation of "state-centeredness and its attractive vernacular style" (p. 67). Vernacularity has itself been routinized and monetized and now a "vulgar" or "demotic cosmopolitanism becomes necessary to estrange oneself from dominant culture and history. Instead of resting easy with open information borders, global markets, and exported democracy, we must learn how to live with "exposure to others" and to push back against a "universalist rhetoric. (Gilroy, 2005, p. 59)