Cosmopolitanism in Modernity

Cosmopolitanism in Modernity PDF

Author: Anand Bertrand Commissiong

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780739165393

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Cosmopolitanism in Modernity: Human Dignity in a Global Age examines the challenges and solutions in conceptualizing and actualizing human dignity in a global perspective. The book investigates and endorses the contributions of cosmopolitanism toward a dynamic vision of human beings in just communities that can stretch beyond borders of all kind.

Cosmopolitanism in Modernity

Cosmopolitanism in Modernity PDF

Author: Anand Bertrand Commissiong

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780739165409

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At the close of the twentieth century, cosmopolitanism emerged as an important source of ideas for approaching the current challenges and opportunities of the intensifying global interconnections and socioeconomic disparities within and across borders. Anand Bertrand Commissiong analyzes the contributions of theorists seeking cosmopolitan solutions to struggles for human happiness and dignity. He focuses on the ways in which the ideal has been forced to adapt, by accepting its limitations, as it maintains its fundamental insistence on the potential of universal human community that simultaneously constitutively encompasses difference. He examines a combination of strategies specifically addressing individual, communal and intercommunal levels of human interaction that he argues are the most productive ways forward. Commissiong recommends non-imperialist, accountable, coalitional strategies that set the stage for a different understanding of human beings in our contemporary globalizing world by offering a broad approach that can form coalitions with ideals beyond Western traditions, such as satyagraha, in order to conceive of dynamic human individuality and community that stretches beyond local boundaries. Commissiong makes a powerful argument for a new type of cosmopolitanism that is vital to the establishment of a truly just human existence at institutional, communal, and individual levels.

Cosmopolitan Modernity in Early 20th-Century India

Cosmopolitan Modernity in Early 20th-Century India PDF

Author: Sachidananda Mohanty

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-05-20

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 042901550X

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This book presents an alternative view of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and modernity in early 20th-century India through the multiple lenses of mysticism, travel, friendship, art, and politics. It makes a key intervention in the understanding of cosmopolitan modernity based on the lives and experiences of Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, James Cousins, Paul Richard, Dilip Kumar Roy, and Taraknath Das. Using archival texts and photographs, Mohanty interrogates the ideas of tradition and modernity, the local and the global, and Self and the world as integral to the conception of a cosmopolitan world order. This second edition will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, comparative literature, cultural studies, Indian philosophy, and South Asian studies and the general reader.

Zen in Brazil

Zen in Brazil PDF

Author: Cristina Rocha

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-12-31

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780824829766

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Widely perceived as an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, Brazil has experienced in recent years a growth in the popularity of Buddhism among the urban, cosmopolitan upper classes. In the 1990s Buddhism in general and Zen in particular were adopted by national elites, the media, and popular culture as a set of humanistic values to counter the rampant violence and crime in Brazilian society. Despite national media attention, the rapidly expanding Brazilian market for Buddhist books and events, and general interest in the globalization of Buddhism, the Brazilian case has received little scholarly attention. Cristina Rocha addresses that shortcoming in Zen in Brazil. Drawing on fieldwork in Japan and Brazil, she examines Brazilian history, culture, and literature to uncover the mainly Catholic, Spiritist, and Afro-Brazilian religious matrices responsible for this particular indigenization of Buddhism. In her analysis of Japanese immigration and the adoption and creolization of the Sôtôshû school of Zen Buddhism in Brazil, she offers the fascinating insight that the latter is part of a process of "cannibalizing" the modern other to become modern oneself. She shows, moreover, that in practicing Zen, the Brazilian intellectual elites from the 1950s onward have been driven by a desire to acquire and accumulate cultural capital both locally and overseas. Their consumption of Zen, Rocha contends, has been an expression of their desire to distinguish themselves from popular taste at home while at the same time associating themselves with overseas cultural elites.

Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity

Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity PDF

Author: June Hee Chung

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0429537417

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Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism turns to the author’s late fiction, letters, and essays to investigate his contribution to the development of an American cosmopolitan culture, both in popular and high art. The book contextualizes James’s writing within a broader cultural and social history to uncover relationships among increasingly sensory-focused media technologies, mass-consumer practices, and developments in literary style when they spread to Europe at the inception of the era of big business. Combining cultural studies with neoclassical Marxism and postcolonial theory, the study addresses a gap in scholarship concerning the rise of literary modernism as a cosmopolitan phenomenon. Although scholars have traditionally acknowledged the international character of artists’ participation in this movement, when analyzing the contributions of American expatriate writers in Europe, they generally assume an unequal degree of reciprocity in transatlantic cultural exchange with European artists being more influential than American ones. This book argues that James identifies a cultural form of American imperialism that emerged out of a commercialized version of cosmopolitanism. Yet the author appropriates the arts of modernity when he realizes that art generated with the mechanized principles of mass-production spurred a diverse range of aesthetic responses to other early-twentieth century technological and organizational innovations.

Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community

Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community PDF

Author: Jessica Berman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-08-13

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1139430777

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In Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community, first published in 2001, Jessica Berman argues that the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although these modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of James, Proust, Woolf and Stein, she argues, not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. This study seeks to revise theories of community and cosmopolitanism in light of their construction in narrative, and in particular it seeks to reveal the ways that modernist fiction can provide meaningful alternative models of community.

Cosmopolitan Vision

Cosmopolitan Vision PDF

Author: Ulrich Beck

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-11-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0745694543

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In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism PDF

Author: Zlatko Skrbis

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2013-04-29

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1446292312

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Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea offers an illuminating and dynamic account of an often confusing and widespread concept. Bringing together both historical and contemporary approaches to cosmopolitanism, as well as recognizing its multidimensional nature, Zlatko Skrbis and Ian Woodward manage to show the very essence of cosmopolitanism as a theoretical idea and cultural practice. Through an exploration of various social fields, such as media, identity and ethics, the book analyses the limits and possibilities of the cosmopolitan turn and explores the different contexts cosmopolitanism theory has been, and still is, applied to. Critical, diverse and engaging, the book successfully answers questions such as: How can we understand cosmopolitanism? What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and ethics? What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and identity? How do cosmopolitan networks come into being? How do we apply cosmopolitanism theory to contemporary, digital and mediated societies? This comprehensive and authoritative title is a must for anyone interested in cultural consumption, contemporary citizenship and identity construction. It will be especially useful for students and scholars within the fields of social theory, ethics, identity politics, cultural diversity and globalisation.

The Cosmopolitan Imagination

The Cosmopolitan Imagination PDF

Author: Gerard Delanty

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-10-08

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1139483277

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Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.

Liberal Cosmopolitan

Liberal Cosmopolitan PDF

Author: Qian Suoqiao

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9004192131

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This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America. It points to the desirability of a middling Chinese modernity.