Is cosmopolitanism not for women?

Frontiers

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 1-26

  Spyra, Ania ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33847030808     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2007.0008     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 136.
2. Ibid.
3. I refer here specifically to the articles collected in Bruce Robbins's The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), many of which, in Laurent Berlant's words, "are reconsidering Enlightenment constitutionality, and how specifically white male privilege has been veiled by the rhetoric of the bodiless citizen, the generic 'person' whose political identity is a priori precisely because it is, in theory, noncorporeal"
4. ("National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life" in The Phantom Public Sphere, 176).
5. Or, Elizabeth Grosz, whose Volatile Bodies is "concerned with the ways in which a corporeal 'universal' has in fact functioned as a veiled representation of a masculine which takes itself as the unquestioned norm, the ideal representative without any idea of the violence that this representational positioning does to its others - women, the "disabled," cultural and racial minorities, different classes, homo-sexuals - who are reduced to the role of modifications or variations of the (implicitly white, male, youthful, heterosexual, middle-class) human body."
6. Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 188.
7. Scott Malcomson, "The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 233-245.
8. Malcomson explains the imperial underpinnings of Kant's vision of "universal cosmopolitan existence" as spearheaded by Europe, which would imperially "legislate eventually for all other continents" (Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose," Kant's Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970]
9. qtd in Malcomson, "Varieties," 237). Thus, Malcomson observes, "the new cosmopolitans are keenly aware of the imperial pedigree of universalism and, thus, of cosmopolitanism" (237).
10. Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh, 137.
11. See Grosz, Volatile Bodies. In Grosz's useful outline of feminist approaches to corporeality, the belief in the female body as a constraint which limits women's ability to belong in the civic society on an equal basis is espoused by "egalitarian feminists," a group which includes "figures as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, ... and other liberal, conservative and humanist feminists, even ecofeminists" (15).
12. I refer here in particular to the essays collected in Cheah and Robbins's Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation
13. but also to work of Anthony Appiah, Mitchell Cohen, and James Clifford. See Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Reading," in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (London: Routledge, 2001), 197-227;
14. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006);
15. Cohen, "Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Thoughts on the Left, Nationalism and Multiculturalism," Dissent 39, no. 4 (1992): 478-483;
16. Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96-116.
17. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 171.
18. The "space of displacement" affords Appadurai the detachment of postcolonial academic identity, although he stresses that such comfortable positioning is challenged by "the ugly realities of being racialized, minoritized, and tribalized in everyday encounters." Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 170.
19. This distinction comes back to the hierarchical binary between activity and passivity encoded in the man/woman binary, which, as Hélène Cixous explains, "automatically means great/small, superior/inferior ... means high and low, means History/Nature, means transformation and inertia." Hélène Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" in Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art & MIT, 1990), 345-356.
20. Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes that the same "male/female opposition had been closely allied with the mind/body opposition." Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 14.
21. Susan Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). The critical responses to the article published in the same volume come from, among others, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Bonnie Honig, and Bhikhu Parekh.
22. Nira Yuval-Davis, "Citizenship, Territoriality, and the Gendered Construction of Difference," in Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, ed. Engin Isin (London: Routledge, 2000), 175.
23. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yeager, Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
24. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 43.
25. Amrita Basu, "Appropriating Gender," in Appropriating Gender; Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia, ed. Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (London: Routledge, 1998), 3-14.
26. Mary Layoun, Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 165.
27. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, "Women between Community and State: Some Implications on the Uniform Civil Code Debates in India," Social Text 18, no. 4 (2000): 70.
28. See Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?"; and Sara Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 128;
29. see also Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 3.
30. Rajan relates the liberal multiculturalism debates in the West to the South Asian situation, which although similar in the polarization into "communitarians" and "liberals," gains additional complexity because of its connection with the secularism debates in the multireligious state of India ("Women between Community and State," 58).
31. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 83: "The man, by virtue of his effective participation in public exchanges, has never been reduced to a simple reproductive function. The woman, for her part, owing to the seclusion in the "home," the place of private property, has long been nothing but a mother."
32. Chandra Mohanty, "Genealogies of Community, Home, Nation," in Feminism Without Borders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 124-136.
33. Qtd in Aamir Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture," Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 95-125.
34. Bruce Robbins, "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 250.
35. Martha Nussbaum, "Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism," in For Love of the Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
36. For an illuminating critique of the stoic ideal as based on the autarchy of reason excluding all those who do not share the wise stoic's point of view, see Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 20-21.
37. Mitchell Cohen, "Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Thoughts on the Left, Nationalism and Multiculturalism," Dissent 39, no. 4 (1992): 483.
38. Neil Smith, "Reseating Politics: Geography, Globalism, and the New Urbanism," in Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, ed. Claudio Minca (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 147-165. It is clear that Smith's notion of mobility does not apply to the subaltern, since the latter, as Spivak defines them, are "those removed from lines of social mobility." By extension, I realize how limited, and class-specific, is my own idea of "woman" in this essay.
39. Homi K. Bhabha, "Unpacking My Library . . . Again," in The Post-Colonial Question; Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. lain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 205.
40. Hyder uses Tulsidas' Ramayana in this text.
41. Qurratulain Hyder, Sita Betrayed, trans. C. M. Naim. A Season of Betrayals: A Short Story and Two Novellas (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999), 135. All further references to this text will appear in parentheses.
42. Priya Kumar, "Testimonies of Loss and Memory: Partition and the Haunting of a Nation," Interventions i (1999): 208.
43. Neil Smith, "Homeless/Global: Scaling Places," in Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and George Robertson (London: Routledge, 1993), 105.
44. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1988), 194. All further references to this text will appear in parentheses.
45. Kumar, "Testimonies of Loss and Memory," 207.
46. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, "The Division of Experience in The Shadow Lines" in The Shadow Lines, 288.
47. Suvir Kaul, "Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines," Oxford Review 16 (1994): 127.
48. Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference, 128.
49. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 19.
50. I realize that the phrase "stable identity" sounds almost oxymoronic in light of recent post-structuralist, feminist, or even postcolonial theory; nevertheless I decided to use it because it seems to stand in opposition to the invented identities of the women in the novels. What seems to be of paramount importance here is who does the imagining, or, in other words, whose agency creates the identity. The ability to self-invent would mean belonging to one's own body, so maybe "stable identity" means here "self-invented identity."
51. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 212.
52. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 23-24.
53. Ibid., 19.
54. Adrienne Rich, "Notes toward a Politics of Location," Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (London: W.W. Norton, 1986), 215.
55. Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Reading," in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (London: Routledge, 2001), 202.