‘Belonging’ in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary (Calhoun, 2003)

This political text offers an historical overview of liberalism, globalization, and the resulting rise of the ‘cosmopolitan’ identity, positioned in opposition to particular localized identities and solidarities, and juxtaposed especially against fundamentalism. It then explores various forms of cosmopolitanism, how they are constituted across literature, and how they approach ideas of citizenship, both of nation-states and of the world as an apparent whole. The material and social conditions by which the privilege of that world – and its culture – are identified as culture rather than the absence of it, or the view from nowhere that it is sometimes deployed as. This is compared against the belonging that multiple forms of solidarity – of cultures, of groups, of networks, of power structures – can provide.

Calhoun, C. (2003). ‘Belonging’ in the cosmopolitan imaginary. Ethnicities 3(4), 531-553. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1468796803003004005