Session 2: Cosmopolitanism, Diversity and Hybrids

Session 2: Cosmopolitanism, Diversity and Hybrids
Chair: Ram Vemuri

Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Diversity
Holli Thomas
Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

Cosmopolitanism is often portrayed as a theory concerned primarily with the individual and for that reason has been criticised for being neglectful of culture. In this paper I argue that while cosmopolitanism is a moral theory that begins with the individual, a core concern of cosmopolitanism has been how interculturalism can be promoted. Cosmopolitanism has long been concerned with how to respond to a world where different cultures live, as Kant described it, ‘unavoidably side by side’. This paper explores how cosmopolitanism informs contemporary debates and issues concerning the protection of cultural diversity and the co-existence of different cultures. Cosmopolitanism implies diversity, plurality and seeks to expand the realm of moral inclusion to include all of humanity. The cosmopolitan challenge is to acknowledge and embrace the reality that individuals have multiple belongings and divided loyalties and that they co-exist with other individuals of different cultures with similarly divided loyalties and complex identities.
This challenge requires the creation a kind of cosmopolitan democracy where political and social institutional arrangements exist on a multiple of levels, both above and below the state. It is argued that such overlapping and interconnecting institutions and structure of governance promotes interculturalism between individuals and societies. Cosmopolitans also argue that institutions, and in particular the social and political institutions of states, should be based on a kind of civic nationalism or what Habermas has termed ‘constitutional patriotism’. It is argued that the promotion of the rule of law, equal rights, the practice of democracy and a civic identity allows people of diverse cultures and differing ethnic, religious or national identities to form a common bond and to co-exist within the framework of common law and equal rights.

Download Conference Paper –

Interculturality and Cosmopolitanism between the Cynics and Derrida
Jones Irwin
St Patrick’s College, Dublin, Ireland

No abstract is presently available.

Constructing Intercultural Hybrids: Adding Necessity to Contingency
Marcelo Svirsky
School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel

Postcolonial studies introduced cultural hybridity primarily as an inherent and contingent pattern of asymmetrical power relations between cultures under conditions of monopolistic hegemonies. I would like to add to this understanding of hybridity a political aspect that posits necessity as another feature of intercultural relations.
First, I want to distinguish between two kinds of intercultural hybrids. The first one is made out of contingency and it is well known from postcolonial articulations interpreting history and explaining identity (Bhabha, 1994; Tully, 1997; Chatterjee, 1993, Appiah, 1994). These understandings have changed significantly our perspectives on the meaning of culture. The second kind of intercultural hybrids can be interpreted as an art of governing, understood as the conduct of new cultural fabrications which bring together different cultural subjects, contents and arenas, inside multicultural cloven societies. The later embraces an approach which captures hybridity in political programmatic terms: as a possible and necessary response to contemporary and separatist ways of life reflecting colonial mentalities. These intercultural fabrications can promote peace like the associational forms of civic engagement between Hindu and Muslim communities in India (Varshney, 2002). They also can challenge hegemonic ethno-cultural separatist ways of reasoning, acting and managing subjects. This may be the case of the novel and not fully developed intercultural communications between the Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli communities in the Galilee in the areas of education, voluntarism and sports. These intercommunal engagements are folding hybridity as a political tool which characterize in turn new mentalities of governing community. Therefore, beyond treating hybridity as an historical indeterminacy, we may think of hybridity as an engine for elaborating ways of intercultural association.
Second, I claim that the formation of intercultural social hybrids raises a profound challenge for heterogeneity conceived as multifarious plurality since it focuses onto the space of mutual action instead of that of the closed community. Therefore, it entails a different path for disturbing monocultural hegemonies compared with the politics of recognition which through the minority-rights discourse becomes the main avenue of multicultural ways of thought and action. This predominant liberal form of conceptualizing multicultural societies (Kymlicka, 1989, 1995, 2001; Raz, 1998) indeed acknowledges the hybridity of cultural-historical relations through the celebration of difference while at the same time it nurtures a politics of monocultural hegemony and leaves intact the spheres of intercultural action. Rather than recognizing peoples and identities through a language of compensation based on a centrifugal logic, an intercultural mentality of governing communities bases its dynamic on a politics of familiarity which articulate the intercultural encounter as a social stable and quotidian event. In this view, the pursuit of recognition misses a cardinal aspect of cultural relations: the need to endorse a “face-’with’-face” (a la Levinas) relations of cognition and closeness among the different and conflicting parts of diversity through the building of shared and reciprocal socio-cultural practices which blur inside-outside boundaries in a culturally diverse society.
Through the elaboration of modular networks between neighbours living in encapsulated cultural spheres, intercultural familiarity adds an alternative construction which points to the disavowing of the heritage of colonialism. The case of the Arab-Jewish relations in making in the north of Israel is a worthwhile and interesting example.