Cosmopolitanisms
Edited by Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta · With an afterword by Kwame Anthony Appiah · NYU Press, 2017
Horta co-wrote the introduction; contributed “Cosmopolitan Prejudice”; co-translated, with Magdalena Edwards, Silviano Santiago’s “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor”; and translated Achille Mbembe’s “Afropolitanism.”
In an age increasingly defined by nationalism and populism, this volume investigates what countering role, if any, cosmopolitanisms from above or below may have to play, while remaining attentive to the possibility that the cosmopolitan experience may lead to prejudice as well as solidarity.
“The volume is a revisitation of cosmopolitanism, offering a new take on many of the ongoing debates and querelles, while also making headway by reorienting the field of cosmopolitan studies as such. … The volume edited by Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta rises to this challenge by embracing cosmopolitanisms in the plural, not as a fashionable label but as the fruit of decades-long engagement with the field.”
“In this volume, Horta offers a very fine reading of Richard Burton, the British explorer, as a cosmopolitan or counter-cosmopolitan in the light of Anthony Appiah’s engagement with the explorer and translator.”
“Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta's edited collection Cosmopolitanisms (2018) opens up cosmopolitan history's Eurocentric purview to include the subaltern cultures at the margins of that history.”