New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity

This anthology offers fresh perspectives on cosmopolitanism that reflect cultural challenges in the contemporary world. It demonstrates that new cosmopolitan thinking can be combined with a sensitivity to ethnic and local difference. Moreover, it argues that rather than clinging to the utopian notion of color-blind universalism, new cosmopolitan cultural practices should acknowledge the persistence of "race" in lived experience

New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity

This anthology offers fresh perspectives on cosmopolitanism that reflect cultural challenges in the contemporary world. It demonstrates that new cosmopolitan thinking can be combined with a sensitivity to ethnic and local difference. Moreover, it argues that rather than clinging to the utopian notion of color-blind universalism, new cosmopolitan cultural practices should acknowledge the persistence of "race" in lived experience

Artificial Flesh: Rights and New Technologies of the Human in Contemporary Cultural Texts

My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works share a concern with the implications of a relationship, a shared or co-produced world, in which both humans and nonhumans have agency. I conclude by revisiting the bifurcated discourses of antihumanism, especially through a brief consideration of an Afropessimist critique of the category of “Man”, to ask: What status, affordances, and rights, should be extended to nonhumans: robots, anthropomorphized commodities, humanoids, AIs, or human adjacents, or to those excluded or abjected from the category of “the fully human”

New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity. Cultural Perspectives

This anthology sheds new light on cosmopolitanism and culture in the contemporary world. Drawing on postcolonial, ethnic, and critical race studies as well as recent literary and critical theory, it demonstrates that new cosmopolitan thinking can embrace an awareness of ethnic and local differences. It disputes the utopianism of colorblind universalism and argues for the persistence of “race” and racialized thinking in lived experience. The essays collected in this volume valorize minoritarian perspectives and urge readers to rethink cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the underprivileged and marginalized and highlight the role of culture in mobilizing social empathy and solidarity with the world’s precariat. The contributors, who come from over a dozen different countries and from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, constitute a vibrant cosmopolitan community in itself

Writing Borders and Other Barriers in the Era of Climate Crisis: Communities of Engagement

Understanding walls, borders, and barriers, not only as physical but also as ontological entities, the essays in this volume explore how they emerge and transform across different geo- and biopolitical contexts. Embarking from intersectional standpoints, and through ecocritical, postcolonial and decolonial lens, inter alia, the essays in this volume explore the power of nationalist ideas that promote borders and the ways through which activists and artists work to challenge, combat, or break them down, often using utopian ideas of post-nationalism or transnationalism. The significance of borders also becomes emphasized in relation to the climate crisis, since climate change also literally alters the physical geography of borders, undermining vulnerable communities worldwide as well as creating schisms between political and economic groups. The malleability of such borders, the threat to them from denier ideology and the vulnerability of those living in these liminal spaces are also key themes in this collection, similarly to the contestation of ideological as well as natural borders and other barriers. Intersectional explorations of these themes include but are not limited to perspectives that focus on race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, which have gained new relevance in the international context of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo activism. Environmental Humanities perspectives are also core in this collection in terms of shedding light on the gathering catastrophe that these border strains presage