1st Edition
Migrating Minds Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism
Awarded the 2023 "René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection" by the American Comparative Literature Association, Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with 20 innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations.
The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception.
In the deterritorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
0 Didier COSTE, Christina KKONA, Nicoletta PIREDDU. "Introduction. Where Are They All Going? Ways of the Cosmopolitan Mind."
Part 1 Cosmopolitan Theories, Contemporary Debates
1 Jean-Pierre DUBOST. "The Paradox of the Cosmopolitan: Individuality, Globalism and the Indefinite Openness of the World."
2 Robert TALLY. "A Postmodern Mappa Mundi: Cosmopolitanism, Heterotopia, and the World System."
3 Alexis NOUSS. "Exilic and Refugee Cosmopolitanism: The Migrant as a Political Subject."
4 Angélica MONTES-MONTOYA. "Édouard Glissant and Creole Cosmopolitanization."
5 Bertrand GUEST. "For an Earthly and Cosmic Justice: Some Voices Raised against Climatic Walls."
6 ZHANG Longxi. "Reaching Out to the World Against the Grain: The Relevance of Cosmopolitanism in our Time."
Part 2 Cosmopolitics in Literature
7 Didier COSTE. "A Mixed Lot on the Margins: Mimetic Desire and Native Impersonations."
8 Maya BOUTAGHOU. "Being Berber, or How to be Condemned to Cosmopolitanism: Jean Amrouche (1906-1962)."
9 Ignacio LÓPEZ-CALVO and Garima Singh PANWAR. "Global South Aesthetics of Anxiety: (Un)rooted Cosmopolitanism in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness."
10 Gautam CHAKRABARTI . "Hei-Ren-Hei-Hu: Be/Longing and E/Migration in the Work of a Chinese Dissident."
11 Sébastien DOUBINSKY. "Breakthrough or Breakdown? Transcultural Communication in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris."
12 Hena AHMAD. "Cosmopolitan Feminism/Feminist Cosmopolitanism in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire."
13 Christina KKONA."Xenophilic Queerness in Virginia Woolf and Reinaldo Arenas."
Part 3 The Teachings of Live Cosmopolitanism
14 Apostolos LAMPROPOULOS. "Cosmopolitanism, Ghostpitality, and Some (Un)critical Intimacies."
15 Tintin WULIA. "Making Worlds with Things: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism, Performance, and Iconic Objects from the Border."
16 Nicoletta PIREDDU. "Euroglottogonia, or Exercises in Continental Cosmopolitanism."
17 Mihaela URSA. "Cosmopolis Today: Comparative Literature and its Diacritical Marks."
18 Huiwen (Helen) ZHANG. "Transreading Across Cultures: American Students Decipher a Modern Chinese Classic."
19 Rukmini Bhaya NAIR. "Caged Childhoods? Human Capabilities, Migrating Cosmopolitanisms, and Educational Experimentation."
Part 4 A Writer’s Meditation on Migrancy and Cosmopolitanism
20 Ying CHEN. "Letters from Umbria and Other Places, Summer 2019: An Interview with Christine LORRE-JOHNSTON."
Biography
Didier Coste is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Montaigne University, Bordeaux, France.
Christina Kkona is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Montaigne University, Bordeaux, France.
Nicoletta Pireddu is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University, USA, and Inaugural Director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and Director of the Global and Comparative Literature Program.
It is with great pleasure that we unanimously award the ACLA René Wellek Prize to Didier Coste, Christina Kkona, and Nicoletta Pireddu for their edited collection Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism. Not only does the collection showcase omparative literature's openness to a wide gamut of traditions of scholarship in multiple languages, but it also insists on how the declension of cosmopolitanism must be seen as plural and at times displaying a dynamic tension among its diverse instantiations. The openness of the approach, the legibility of the style, and the strong pedagogical concern animating the volume make Migrating Minds an outstanding intervention that shows the way forward for comparative literature in the twenty-first century as a field that has the courage to rethink its concepts and methods and assume its responsibility as a crucial player in the ethical training of future generations of students, scholars, and world citizens
--American Comparative Literature Association Committee for René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection
"Migrating Minds offers a powerful new set of approaches to the cultures and experiences of cosmopolitanism. Its illuminating essays make it a major contribution to this important field." John Frow, Professor of English; ARC Professorial Fellow, University of Sydney, Australia
"This book takes up the significant and urgent task of reimagining the categories used in literary studies by emphasising the ‘event’ character of literature over the limitations of place and substance. Its strength and importance lie in demonstrating that dynamic and plural categories are necessary to reach across difference and enter the literary cosmopolis." Ipshita Chanda, Professor of Comparative Literature, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India.
