Cosmopolitanism

It should come as no surprise that EuroMaidan, as a neologism fusing the euro- prefix with the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish cognates for “square” or “forum,” evokes different things for different people. For the Western media, the late 2013, early 2014, popular uprisings centered in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti signal a desire for Ukraine to become more closely aligned with the European Union. For the opposition leaders on the street, the protests are a revolution, a passionate cry for the political, economic, and social reform of Ukraine under the umbrella of self-determination and human rights. For the Russian Federation, EuroMaidan is yet another ominous sign of European and American interference in the internal affairs of an independently constituted polity. In this paper, we examine how these various rhetorical constructions of EuroMaidan participate affectively within the larger linguistic, historical, and geopolitical discursive functions overlaid upon the geographic space of Ukraine over time. We begin with the contested etymology of the term Ukraine (Україна) itself, as either “borderland” or “homeland,” represented by Subtelny (1988) and Ševčenko (1996).  We then turn to the discursive function the River Dnieper played within the historical formation of the Cossack Hetmanate along a right-bank (Polish and Austrian)/ left-bank (Moscovite) axis during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Next, we position Ukraine within the geopolitical formulations of Mackinder (1904) as “heartland” for the “World Island, or Core,” and alternatively, as borderland or cornerstone for Gumilev’s (1989) Eurasia, Dugin’s (2008) Greater Russia, and Leontiev’s (1875) Byzantine “Third Rome.” Finally, we track how EuroMaidan’s Western media coverage, statements from protestors (from both the “moderate” opposition and the ultranationalist Pravy Sektor), and Russian Federation media and political analysis reenact, retrieve, reverse, or reject these various pre-existing discursive functions.  Ultimately, through this study, we seek to determine how EuroMaidan’s geopolitical discourses and affective geographies participate in, and contribute to, the larger social, political, and cultural discourses at play on the global stage today: the region versus the state (The Ukraine versus Ukraine), the actor versus the acted-upon (Ukraine as geopolitical player or chessboard), and identity formation (cosmopolitanism versus ethnogenesis).

From 1828–35, while Goethe was introducing his idea of world literature to the European public, Matija Čop and France Prešeren were engaged in the complex process of the cultural transfer of Schlegelian Romantic cosmopolitanism to Slovenia. In this way they hoped to ground the emerging and peripheral literature of Slovenia, tied to a national movement, in the universality of aesthetic humanism, and, by connecting it to the repertoire of European literary traditions from antiquity to Romanticism, to establish it as a modern classic at the world level. Čop and Prešeren, though without using the term, were realizing Goethe’s idea of world literature. There is a strong probability that Čop was also familiar with Goethe’s early remarks on Weltliteratur.

Starting from the optimistic hypothesis that neoliberalism and commodified education have their limits, the paper sketches a proposal for the design of a revised liberal education curriculum at the first level of university education. The proposal is based on the experience of the revision of liberal education curricula according to the principles of multiculturalism. The principal element is curriculum design based on social-science foundations, or more precisely, based on the social-science triangle of geography-anthropology-ecology (the study of “other places and people”). This structure also has room for other social science and humanities disciplines. This type of design is supported by two globally renowned intellectuals, geographer David Harvey and philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

""Historians have long identified the 1940s as a breakthrough moment, when American policymakers and public activists forged a new vision of international human rights. Within that decade, the period between Dumbarton Oaks in the summer of 1944 and the opening of the United Nations Conference at San Francisco in the spring of 1945 has been celebrated as a key moment of mass mobilization by American civil society in support of human rights. Faced with the rapid rise, seemingly out of nowhere, of American human rights discourse in the 1940s, most historians have assumed that this phenomenon derived principally from a broad surge of liberal internationalist values. Yet they are at a loss to explain the rapid decline of human rights after 1948 save for obligatory references to Cold War politics. This article seeks to challenge that narrative by recounting a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 “Declaration on Human Rights” campaign sponsored by the American Jewish Committee.
With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from “1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,” the 1944 “Declaration” at first glance appears to be a prime example of pluralist consensus in American internationalism. Yet as a closer examination of its reception reveals, the document actually generated a striking array of polar-opposite reactions, even from its putative supporters. Leading liberals praised its broad internationalist spirit; yet others criticized the manifesto as a premature or ill-conceived prescription for American unilateralism. Prominent Republican isolationists hailed it as a bold statement against Communism and the excesses of the New Deal; other conservatives denounced it as a dangerous threat to American sovereignty. Where some Protestant and Catholic observers saw a distinctively Judeo-Christian “international bill of religious rights,” others perceived a chauvinistic “Jewish Declaration of Rights” that ignored the rights of Catholics, African-Americans, Poles, and colonial peoples around the world. These reactions point to a very different image of human rights in 1940s American society.
            In recapturing this story of political conflict and ideological confusion over the basic meaning of human rights, I propose to disentangle the stories of liberal internationalism and human rights. Instead of abstract, fixed political principles periodically entering and exiting American thought, we must track the actual circulation of human rights as a dynamic idea and specific set of images in the American public culture. When we do so, we find that well before the Cold War escalated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American human rights had become a contested cultural terrain in the American imagination. Rather than view mid-twentieth-century human rights history as a tale of the emergence of global civil society and ethical cosmopolitanism, we do better to see it more as a story of repeated attempts at ideological convergence and an ongoing search for a language of American universalism.
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This article explores the idea that everyday moments hold cosmopolitan potential wherein such recognition can reorient educators and youth toward one another in meaningful and generative ways. Found in the quotidian practices of young people are indicators of their affiliations, their proclivities, their interests, and their curi- osities. Educators, should they choose to take these practices seriously, will find ample fodder in the wide range of youths’ communicative and expressive practices for making connections across differences and to move toward lowering barriers of participation for youth in institutional spaces. Data from an ethnographic study of a theater project housed within an alternative to detention program are reanalyzed using a lens of multimodal cosmopolitanism to explore everyday and often fleeting moments of interaction to render visible the ways in which participants expressed and experienced belonging in myriad ways—belonging to the project as well as to one another. A discussion following two ethnographic vignettes of the theater program offers recommendations for how a multimodal cosmopolitan orientation can support educators to approach curriculum and enact pedagogy that nurtures belonging with and among youth every day.

"Cosmopolitan Childland: Victorian Fantasy and the Cosmopolitan Child
The definition of Cosmopolitan most commonly refers to someone or something that is free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; at home all over the world; belonging to all the world; not limited to just one part of the world. Fantasy is a distinctly Victorian invention that is engaged in expanding and widening the scope of various political, social, and cultural debates. In combining numerous literary traditions Victorians such as Carroll, Kipling, Ingelow, Rossetti and others created a genre that answers to the very heart of cosmopolitanism and by redefining the Romantic image of the child from a character that connotes the rural, local, and national to one that transcends and defies these limitations; rejecting the real and embracing a world beyond our ken. Children like Alice, Mowgli, Jack, and Lizzie are not only at home all over the world, belonging to all the world, not limited to one part of the world, but they are at home in imaginary worlds, to which adults are denied access. My paper extends and broadens our understanding of Victorians' sentimentalization of childhood and seeks to place the long-standing debate over their fascination with the child in a less sexual and more political and cultural framework.
The Victorian child is a cosmopolitan child who is sent out of this world to interact with cultures beyond the reach of adult Victorians. The worlds beyond the world possible to them and not adults. The way the child interacts with these fantastic cultures and what these children brings back to Cosmopolitan England with them, and whether or not this new knowledge is accepted and included in contemporary definitions of the cosmopolitan is what this paper is about. Importantly this view informs our understanding of the author’s stand on the issues of the British as World-Class cosmopolitans and imperialists. The child hold within him the power to change and the change begins with himself. Alice remains the same, but her sister sees the change. Mowgli is a cosmopolitan child that is so consumed by the cultures he absorbed, he rejects his native, but like Kim he returns to it at last. Peter Pan is like Mowgli at one with the multi-cultural world of Neverland, but in London he is but a shadow.
Fantasy itself is a cosmopolitan genre, combining many literary traditions form different times and cultures, but it is in the end, thoroughly Victorian.
Cosmopolitanism may be thought of as the reward of cultural imperialism, but in every single one of these fantasy worlds the child meets the world successfully reject the child like the foreign object that he is. The child takes the new cultural knowledge with him back to England, but it is part of his cosmopolitanism only he can hold. The adults can never obtain it. It is a mockery and a comment on the exceedingly futile search of Victorians to see themselves as worldly. Their children are limitless, but they are not.
Fantasy is cosmopolitan in that it is a collection of genres from different periods. What Bunyan attempted in Pilgrim’s Progress with mild success, the Victorian accomplished. They combined myth, Romance, fairy tales, ghost stories, and travel narratives seamlessly and invented what are often called “impossible worlds.”
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Around the world, social media offer an informal virtual space for citizens who feel disenfranchised to connect socially. But for those who live in countries such as the three former Soviet republics of the Caucasus—where free expression is curtailed and official news outlets are under government censorship—information and communication technology (ICT) offers an increasingly important alternative vehicle for political expression.