Cosmopolitan Modernism

Moraru continuedfrom previous page self-absorbed, metalinguistic, experimental, prevailingly Western early postmodernism of the sixties, as well as beyond late-modernist cosmopolitanism. The cosmodern also supersedes the multiculturalist ideology of difference-for-the-sake-of-difference typical of the same time period, as much as it challenges the postcolonial as a model ofcoming to grips with culture in a world affected by David Harvey's "space-time compression" (see Cowart's book and Kenzer's review for such tendencies). Nor has multiculturalism run its course in the West and elsewhere. In many countries including the US, the Canon and the Tradition are still being revisited, opened up, and fruitfully complicated. We are still recovering heretofore ignored or underappreciated lineages, cultural forms, and works of women, minorities, and "other" groups. In this view, another, multicultural decolonization is under way across cultures. But, inside former metropolises and colonies, as well as in our accounts of their dynamic, we have begun to move away from a separatedness-based model shaped by the center/margin, "in here'V'out there," our culture/ their culture, and other similar disjunctions, a model typical ofcoloniality, postcoloniality, and the earlier stage of multicultural awareness, toward a conjunctive or relational model informed by cross-cultural, cross-geographical, indeed, world-scale contacts, juxtapositions, interchanges, and batterings. A core feature of the emerging cosmodern world, relatedness is one way or another a major focus of the works reviewed in this Focus. As these texts suggest, the arena ofrelational dealings is a new, physical and nonphysical (at-distance) proximity, a culturally woven immediacy with self and other, hie and hoc, "my" culture and "your" culture growingly in dialogue, intermingling and giving birth to new assemblages or remaining distinct yet more and more mutually dependent because less and less separated by actual geography and borders. This exchange horizon hosts what I call the typical outsourcing ofidentity —the defining modality of cosmodern identity production. Whatever I am or become comes about under the impact of remote, heterogeneous sources, places, and styles. The familiar is more and more a function ofthe "alien."As aresult, the economy ofmy being is hardly self-sufficient, depending as it does on "others" for "parts" (dreams, fantasies, stories, symbolic structures). And this carries our world both beyond modernity and postmodernity as we know it. Initially Gemeinschaft, as Ferdinand Tönnies noted in his classical work Community and Civil Society, a community premised on face-to-face, daily dealings, modernity, then its postmodem aftermath, gradually turned into a more impersonal and "distant" society, Gesellschaft. Taking advantage of networks where they exist and creating them where they do not, the new cosmopolitans—the cosmoderns—are working, if still unsystematically, toward a new togetherness where face-to-face is again possible, where I can see the other's face more clearly and closely than ever before—or, where this kind ofcontact is impossible, another kind of inter-face may be tried out instead. So what the new proximity allows for as we come closer to one another in cosmodemism is an unforeseen visibility ofthe other, a worldly reading matrix within which we all are legible objects, available to the other's gaze. Only time will tell what we will ultimately see and what lessons we will learn in the cosmodern panopticon. Christian Moraru is an associate professor of American Literature and Critical Theory at University ofNorth Carolina-Greensboro. His latest books are Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) andRewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (SUNY Press). Cosmopolitan Modernism Jeffrey R. Di Leo Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation Rebecca L. Walkowitz Columbia University Press http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup 288 pages; cloth, $29.50 The contemporary resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism began in the mid- to late- 1990s in both philosophical and cultural/literary circles. In philosophy, articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, and Samuel Scheffler sparked interest in cosmopolitanism, while in cultural and literary studies, works such as Timothy Brennan's At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997) and Bruce Robbins's Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999) as well as edited works such as Pheng Cheah and Bruce...