Becoming cosmopolitan: encountering difference in a city of mobile labour

ABSTRACT

Many who move countries today do so for work, and labour mobility – both temporary and permanent – is the mechanism by which countless people (both movers and stayers) come into contact with cultural difference. The domain of mobile labour is thus an important context through which to consider the transformative possibilities of encounters with racial and cultural difference. Situated within debates on everyday multi-culture and vernacular cosmopolitanisms, this essay considers the question of intercultural encounter at work in relation to the layered histories of race and variegated citizenships of mobile labour in Singapore. Exploring the micro-nature of cosmopolitan practices, the paper considers under what labour conditions might an outward-looking cosmopolitan sensibility and a convivial openness to otherness emerge among migrant workers, as against a set of survival-based intercultural capacities. I reflect specifically upon two cases of ‘incongruous encounter’ in workplaces reliant on precariously employed migrant labour: a mainland Chinese man and a Filipina woman who, because of Singapore’s racialised system of work visas, find themselves working in South Asian restaurants in Singapore’s Little India. They both engage ‘cosmopolitan practices’, yet their sensibilities differ sharply. Their stories highlight how, in a place like Singapore, the ‘encounter’ needs to be understood within a regime of mobile labour, situated racial hierarchies, and a highly stratified system of work visas. I further suggest that situational factors such as the nature of work including its spatial and temporal qualities, the mixture of co-workers, and recognition relations with superiors all mattered in framing the affective atmospheres of encounter. In a context of forced encounter, I argue that learnt capacities to function and interact across difference should not necessarily be romanticised as a cosmopolitan sensibility.     

Maya cosmopolitans: engaging tactics and strategies in the performance of tourism

Maya heritage is embraced throughout Yucatán as a crucial component of tourism promotions. This, coupled with an emphasis on multiculturalism, makes the state itself a local actor in the marketing of Maya identity through the creation and funding of community-based tourism projects. This article discusses the shifting role of the state in shaping these communities, referencing a Maya village in the Mexican state of Yucatán as the context. The aim is an understanding of the articulation of local tactics to conceal cosmopolitanism while remaining competent in the eyes of funding agencies and the strategies employed by the state that reinforce the importance of performance for tourists. The desire on the part of state creates situations in which individuals are expected to exist in concurrent states of authenticity and modernity, as both traditional and cosmopolitan.     

Cosmopolitan stance negotiation in multicultural academic settings

Our analysis of an informal event involving Chinese and Spanish students and lecturers displays the cumulative nature of stance negotiation in multicultural settings. It also highlights the role of sociocultural and ideological elements in stancetaking, not only in relation to the positions adopted by the participants, but also in the successive redefinition and reframing of the stance objects. Sociocultural and ideological elements are also crucial for the collective construction of intersubjectivities, particularly among mobile citizens. The way in which our international students managed to overcome misalignments, the values and ideologies evoked within the interaction, reveal nuances of cosmopolitanism that point to a globalization of tastes triggered by multiculturalism and the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Sharing a cosmopolitan orientation, however, did not prevent ideological contradictions among the participants. An analysis of how these were voiced and negotiated allows grasping the remarkably wide spectrum of cosmopolitanism(s) today.     

A cultural approach to culture

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display takes a global approach to how museums make sense of increased globalization and migration. Museums construct narratives that link their locality to the nation and to the world. Peggy Levitt’s major book explains how museums imagine themselves and how they work towards composing a kind of visitor experience. It is about museum visions, missions, and exhibitions as told through the eyes of those who create and are responsible for them, namely, top administrators, curators, politicians, and more. Her analysis explains why museums only a few hundred miles apart can have such different conceptions of how to create the proper citizen. As such, the book illuminates the power of a cultural sociological approach.     

Cosmopolitan sociology and the classical canon: Ferdinand Tönnies and the emergence of global Gesellschaft

How relevant are figures from the classical sociological canon for present day efforts to found cosmopolitan forms of sociological thought? According to the critique of Ulrich Beck, the classical sociologists remain far too wedded to nation‐state‐centred ways of thinking to play an important role in the development of cosmopolitan sociology. This paper argues that such a critique fails to account for the ways in which certain classical sociologists were attuned to the emerging cosmopolitical conditions of their own time, were not wholly wedded to nation‐state‐based conceptualizations, and thus can function as both groundings of, and inspirations for, cosmopolitan sociological endeavours. The apparently unpromising case of Tönnies is focused on, the paper showing how he outlined an account of how and why a planet‐spanning condition of Gesellschaft developed a position which diverges from and counterpoints Marx's analysis of similar phenomena in important ways. The stereotype of Tönnies as an arch‐conservative is also dissolved, allowing him to be considered as one of the most important antecedents of contemporary cosmopolitan sociological practice and a canonical figure still relevant for present‐day purposes.     

The Chinese writer as empty signifier: a corpus-based analysis of the English-language reporting of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

This study examines the English-language reporting of the award in 2012 of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese author, Mo Yan. Through the corpus-based analysis of news reporting in four countries, the study found that Mo was discursively produced as an “empty signifier” through which significant cultural-political work was done in an attempt to make sense of and manage a resurgent China. Specifically, the global cultural event of the Nobel Prize in Literature was used in the USA, Australian, and French news media largely to reproduce the dominant human rights discourse in which China's dissidents were highly prominent and highly valued. In the news media of the more culturally proximate India, the literary achievement was given greater prominence. The study's keyword and concordance analyses found a high degree of commonality in the linguistic strategies through which China was represented. The findings revealed that the English-language reporting of the Nobel Prize was characterized by narrow cosmopolitanism, in which “they” were invited to become part of “our” free world.     

THE IMMORTAL COSMOPOLITAN

The 1990s, internationally co-produced, television series Highlander was an early, successful example of everyday television produced under the pressures of negotiating the dictates of internationally conceived agreements concerning culture, representation, finance, and circulation. This essay parallels an institutional analysis of the series with a textual analysis of its fictive world and characters to examine the series’ attempts to elide the structural conditions and textual constraints underwriting its existence. To do so, the essay teases out the intricacies and implications of a new take on the colonial-era fantasy of cosmopolitan existence embraced by the series and embodied by the program's hero. It argues that this immortal cosmopolitanism offers a means for understanding the series as characteristic of transformations in the practice of transnational television production and circulation as a response to the globalization of neo-liberal economies. The machinations behind what gets displayed on screens around the world reveal a great deal about the substance of the global circulation of culture. At the same time, the text itself negotiated the pressures of attempting to appear constantly local and amenable as it traveled around the world. Highlander is significant for the specific ways in which it negotiated these pressures, revealing something of an allegorical take on its own existence as it imagined a hero that was relevant and interesting to globally-dispersed audiences in the 1990s: the immortal cosmopolitan.     

Classical sociology and cosmopolitanism: a critical defence of the social

It is frequently argued that classical sociology, if not sociology as a whole, cannot provide any significant insight into globalization, primarily because its assumptions about the nation-state, national cultures and national societies are no longer relevant to a global world. Sociology cannot consequently contribute to a normative debate about cosmopolitanism, which invites us to consider loyalties and identities that reach beyond the nation-state. My argument considers four principal topics. First, I defend the classical legacy by arguing that classical sociology involved the study of 'the social' not national societies. This argument is illustration by reference to Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. Secondly, Durkheim specifically developed the notion of a cosmopolitan sociology to challenge the nationalist assumptions of his day. Thirdly, I attempt to develop a critical version of Max Weber's verstehende soziologie to consider the conditions for critical recognition theory in sociology as a necessary precondition of cosmopolitanism. Finally, I consider the limitations of some contemporary versions of global sociology in the example of 'flexible citizenship' to provide an empirical case study of the limitations of globalization processes and 'sociology beyond society'. While many institutions have become global, some cannot make this transition. Hence, we should consider the limitations on as well as the opportunities for cosmopolitan sociology.     

略论比较文学学科的根本矛盾

世界主义与民族主义的矛盾,是比较文学自身矛盾中最突出而又最具根本意义的矛盾。这一矛盾,激发了比较文学的活力,成为促使比较文学在“危机”与“生机”的循环往复中不断发展更新的重要原因和内在原因。     

多边税收协定：税收协定的未来发展

国际上现有的双边税收协定最终应发展到多边税收协定的形式。本身就是多边谈判结果的OECD税收协定范本可以作为多边税收协定的谈判基点;当今世界经济相互依赖性不断增强,国家更可能考虑他国的利益。世界主义可以作为多边税收协定的伦理基础,世界主义主张个人在本国边界以外寻求发展和完善。多边税收协定为此提供了更大的机遇。根据建构主义理论,多边税收协定有助于塑造缔约国集体主义身份以及世界主义文化。