Postcolonial thinking has often been defined by questions of cosmopolitan and pluralist living in the decolonizing world: through figurations of exile and unrootedness (Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad), poetics of identity, hybridity, and relation (Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Édouard Glissant), intimacies across racial and colonial differences (Lisa Lowe, Leela Gandhi, Rahul Rao), or the territorial and planetary entrapments of multiculturalism and globalization (Rey Chow, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak). We ask, how do postcolonial and subaltern subjects excluded by global elites make claims of cosmopolitan (non/)belonging? This seminar invites participants to reflect on lived vocabularies of cosmopolitanism across boundaries of religion, race, caste, nationality, gender, and region from the Global South over the 20th and 21st centuries.

A new cosmopolitanism forged in the aftermath of WWII had offered itself as a “practice of mediation” (Robert Young) between claims of national sovereignty and universal ideas of justice, equality, and human rights. The asymmetries of such a transnational imagination have been interrogated by scholars working on the “imperfect solidarities” (Madhumita Lahiri) that permeate the Global South; by those who critique the limits of “re-educating” (Sonali Thakker) the international racial order against divergent struggles for decolonization and internationalism; by those who insisted on “re-inventing the third world” (Durba Mitra) through the lens of multicultural feminist epistemologies; and many others who have expanded our repertoire for co-existence outside of Euro-centric frameworks of individualism, multiculturalism, or ‘secular’ tolerance.

The questions we are interested in interrogate how conditions of estrangement, uncanny/unhomely encounters with foreignness, and internalized xenophobia can govern experiences of cosmopolitanism. How do modern frameworks of inter-cultural belonging engage with non-modern practices of inter-faith worship, migration, and affiliation? Can cosmopolitanism be imagined as a practice of solidarity between globally dispersed and disenfranchised peoples? When does the desire for cosmopolitanism become oppressive?

We welcome scholars working on relevant literary texts, audio-visual media, performances, as well as non-literary pieces. Possible topics can include:

• Forms of cosmopolitan intimacy and coexistence across sexuality, love, friendship
• Cosmopolitanisms in the age of renewed xenophobia and nationalism
• Religious and secular cosmopolitanisms
• Refugee, migrant, and borderland narratives of displacement, occupation, and belonging
• Transnational and transregional solidarities across differences of religion, caste, race, and indigeneity
• Economics and cosmopolitanism, asymmetries of development and access
• Minoritized identity and identity politics in a globalizing world
• Translation, language, multilingualism, and untranslatability
• Modernism, avant garde, and internationalist aesthetics and experiments