Introduction to Focus: Postmodernism, Cosmopolitanism, Cosmodernism

????G introductiontofocus:postmodernjsm Cosmopolitanism, Cosmodemism Christian Moraru, Focus Editor "You wonder," Bharati Mukherjee muses in her 2004 novel The Tree Bride, "if everyone and everything in the world is intimately related. . .. You pluck a thread and it leads to. . .everywhere.... Is there a limit to relatedness?" Less and less so, the artists, writers, and scholars of the post-Berlin Wall era tell us. This "relatedness," they intimate, is a staple ofthe new economy, international relations, demographic, cultural, and material flows, and it also defines the life ofthe mind, how people see themselves and their world on the threshold of the new millennium. What we have been witnessing for a while now is the rise of a new cosmopolitan or, as I call it, cosmodern imaginary. The classical kosmopolites ("world citizen ") has become again relevant, helping us come to grips with determining cultural developments of the global age. Given the recent, tactical revival of crude dichotomies ("us'V'them," East/West, and so on), there is something urgent and unique about this cosmopolitanism, and both the urgency and uniqueness are conveyed by this cosmodern imaginary. I prefer "imaginary" to the more common "imagination" because, like the French l'imaginaire, the term signifies, beyond the human faculty itself, a characteristic structure ofthe "imaginings" stemming from the exercise of this function across a range of literary and cultural forms. This set of projections, tropes, and images by which people represent themselves and their places at the dawn ofthe twenty-first century, hinges, as I stress again in my review of David Cowart's book, on relation; underpinning this configuration is a logic of relatedness. As Charles Taylor points out in Sources ofthe Se//(1989), "one cannot be a self on one's own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors.... A self exists only within what I call 'webs of interlocution.'" No doubt, this has always been the case. But the age of"webs," of a"network society" (Manuel Castells) that is wit: nessing "the disappearance of the outside" (Andrei Codrescu), is imparting unprecedented urgency to this truth. More than ever before, the self finds itself in a Bakhtinian "world of others' words." It grows, tells the story ofthis growth—defines itself—in relation to an other and her own relations or stories. Usually against the backdrop of globalization, the notion of cosmopolitanism has been revived of late by critics and philosophers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah {The Ethics ofIdentity [2004] and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers [2006]), Timothy Brennan {At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now [1997] and Wars ofPosition: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right [2006]), Bruce Robbins {Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress [1999] and Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation [1998], edited with Pheng Cheah),AmandaAnderson {The Powers ofDistance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation ofDetachment [2001]), Derek Heater {World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking andIts Opponents [2002]), and Rebecca L. Walkowitz {Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation [2006]), reviewed in this issue by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, to name only a few. Buthow "new" is this cosmopolitanism (a question Walkowitz's book also addresses and Jeffrey R. Di Leo takes to further historicize the interrogation itself)? How unprecedented are today's cosmopolitan formations and the "imaginary" undergirding them? In what sense do twenty-first-century world citizens differ from their fourth-century BCE peers? Peter Coulmas, for instance, authorofthe most comprehensive history of "world citizenship" to date {Weltbürger: Geschichte einer Menschheitssehnsucht [1990]), contends that cosmopolitan thought does not evolve. He notes that after Diogenes of Sinope, all cosmopolites could aver that "the world is my country." To be sure, this is a perennial tenef of the cosmopolitan mindset. But both "country" (the nation-state) and "world" have changed quite a bit since the Cynics. To be a cosmopolitan no longer means today what it did back in the eighteenth century (when the classical notion registered its most spectacular comeback), let alone what it had designated in older times. Further complicating the notion's history are its competing and sometimes intersecting genealogies. As Vinay Dharwadker observes in his introduction to Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2000), the concept's roots are not only...