Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I seek to investigate the potential of cosmopolitanism to function as an emancipatory discourse for contemporary subaltern struggles. The normative dimension of the project argues that cosmopolitanism cannot act as a vehicle for the realisation of the ends of such struggles unless it can endorse - indeed champion - a certain notion of subaltern community. The empirical dimension of the project constructs portraits of actors in world politics who are able to do this: 'actually existing cosmopolitanisms' that, while acknowledging membership in a common humanity, seek to construct strong particularist collective agency. The specific actors I am interested in are players in the field of 'anti-globalisation' protest in the Indian subcontinent. In constructing portraits of these actors, I draw quite substantially on the metaphors for globality and locality that animate their political claims and propaganda. I also suggest that these metaphors are prefigured by an earlier generation of political actors in the Indian independence movement, who sought to mediate between the global and the local in a similar fashion - though for different political ends.