THE LITERARY CONSTRUCTION OF COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES

by Didier Coste
February 2019

The national perspective is a monologic imagination, which excludes the

otherness of the other. The cosmopolitan perspective is an alternative
imagination, an imagination of alternative ways of life and rationalities,
which include the otherness of the other.
Ulrich Beck (2002) 18

INTRODUCTION

“Cosmopolitanism,” due to the Greek etymology of the word and the circumstances in
which it is supposed to have been coined, is generally considered by its adversaries –and by not a
few of its practitioners– as a paradoxical notion, an oxymoron if not an undecidable or aporetic
proposition.
As the literary theorist and philosopher Jean-Pierre Dubost (2019) observes in a
forthcoming essay:
Diogenes Laërtius’ minimal dialogue between the glorious Alexander and the provocative
‘freethinker’, counterfeiter and strong advocate of ‘anti-worldliness’ who is supposed to have
coined the word, while dodging the question of origins, runs counter the illusion of a non-
paradoxical meaning of kosmopolites. The oxymoron kosmopolites is a conjunction of
incompatibilities. If we developed the word into a full sentence, we could rewrite it approximately
as follows : “I am here and anywhere at the same time. This is the only answer I can give to your
question”.
That Diogenes of Sinope is “here” can be conventionally checked as long as the man who
is bodily present has a name and can be identified, that is, recognized as the one man whose name
is Diogenes and whose life story fully coincides with the biography of Diogenes. That he is anywhere
in the world at the same time is not verifiable by the present witnesses —unless they are equally
cosmopolitan, unless they are of one mind with the Cynic (in which case they could be him, at least
discursively).
“Identity,” we shall see, is extremely ambiguous and can easily violate the logical principle
of non-contradiction, if it is not reduced to an empty tautology (“I am myself [the one speaking]”,
“She is herself [the one I refer to]”. Therefore, any attempt to associate “cosmopolitan” with
“identity” is bound to face major objections regarding not only the consistency and stability, but
the mere possibility of such an alloy.
Nevertheless, from baroque to neo-baroque, from Freud to so-called post-modern thought,
art and literature have thrived on plural rather than binary semiotic systems, most often without
fostering or accepting any “obscene collusion of opposites,” to use Herbert Marcuse’s critical
terminology, and without professing or prophesying some apocalyptical utopia. To quote Marcuse
again:
 2

The contradiction of reality in art must be more radical than it could have been before—because
there is more to contradict, to transcend. If and when practically all dimensions of human
existence are socially managed, then, obviously, art, in order to be able to communicate its proper
truths, must be able to break this totalization in consciousness and perception and to intensify the
estrangement. (2006 [1978], 223)
When it is said that, strictly speaking, it is impossible to be a kosmopolites because the (real)
world, in whatever sense, is divided and is not a Nation-state of which one could be a subject or
citizen, or a definite territory in which you could be located in relation to a physical or cultural
environment, it is fortunately acknowledged that the Nation-state is by definition exclusionary and
cannot offer a model for an inclusive network of allegiances and solidarities, but this statement, in
spite of its apparent objectivity, is a-historical and based on several assumptions that can all be
challenged:
1) the division of the world into communities and territories is seen in terms of exclusion
and incompatibility, instead of federation, cooperation, solidarity and kinship;
2) manners and ideologies, epistemologies, beliefs, languages and material cultures, form a
whole that cannot be dissociated without breaking the integrity of the subjects that hold and
practice them or are inhabited by them.1
3) the world and notions of the world are seen as diverse and incoherent aggregates, a
chaos that remains constantly chaotic across time, so that all kinds of world(s) can be unified (quite
paradoxically) across cultures to make them inhospitable; in other words, the emphasis placed on
the heterogeneity of existing communities and the amalgamation of these heterogeneities deny the
possibility of inhabiting “the world” or any other space than historically defined territories/cultural
spaces.
It is relatively easy to analyze and dismantle these anti-cosmopolitan assumptions one by
one with the usual tools of logic, anthropology and historiography. Many people, such as Ulrich
Beck, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah or, more recently Zhang Longxi, have
done it already, in part or in toto, each from her/his cultural and disciplinary standpoint. This critique
of the fallacies in which nationalist violence and all kinds of communitarian prejudice are grounded
is certainly necessary, today more than ever when almost every state and religious denomination on
earth resorts to politics of power, thus adding globalized fear/hatred of the other to the
globalization syndrome. But this critique does not suffice; based on rational thinking and factual
data, it will remain unconvincing in the eyes of those who seek protection from the other instead
of remedying their own ignorance; it will appear as a pale, abstract speculation when confronted
to the concreteness of close relationships and closed societies internalized as natural law, inner soul
or genetic patrimony. If the “national perspective” is seen as bounded and limited by definition, if
it is a “monologic imaginary,” in Ulrich Beck’s brilliant formulation that draws on three great minds
(Marcuse, Bakhtin and Benedict Anderson) and performs their convergence, then it is not enough
to dismiss it as “imaginary,” which would condemn the creative, heuristic powers of the imaginary
in the name of the illusory, deceptive images it can generate when ill-informed by fear and a

1
Anti-cosmopolitan, xenophobic identities are those studied and indicted by Aamin Malouf under the label
“murderous identities”.
 3

repressed hubris. The limited2 or even “shrunken imaginings” (Anderson, 7) of a monologic, one-
dimensional imaginary, limited like a nation, should be broken open by their confrontation to an
inherently dialogic, polysemous and plurilingual imaginary which is that of the aesthetic use of
natural languages, in other words, literature.
Now does it mean that any mode of cosmopolitan liberation, whose prototypes we could
find here and there in literature and the arts, demands the loss of the “self ” as in a mystical trance
or a psychedelic fit? The border between open polylogue, plurilingualism, deterritorialized
perception and multiple personality syndrome may be porous, it certainly involves a risk for those
tempted by the other, but it is on this border that sense and connection can happen. Salman
Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, that I will discuss later in this essay, is exemplary in this respect,
sense, in the end, being suspended and left in the hands of time.
But, before we examine the possibility conditions of cosmopolitan identities as virtually
constructed in the realm of art, we should take into account that the provocatively oppositional
character of cosmopolitanism has more often than not outlawed it, from the time of its
foundational anecdote or primeval scene to the deligitimization of the postnational turn in the
social sciences.

2
“The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human
beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with
mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join
their nation […]” Anderson 6
 4

1 – VAGRANCY AND JEWISHNESS

The word “cosmopolitan” has often been used as an insult, especially as a quasi-synonym
of (wandering) Jew. Except for some members of the worldly “jet set” and among a scanty and
scattered intellectual/scientific élite, belonging to “the world,” pretending to belong to it passes for
an impossible wager, a thin cover-up for rootlessness at best, if not shameless treason. To the racist,
the casteist, the nationalist, the traditionalist, the regionalist. the family man, to the so-called silent
majority and its outspoken identitarian mouthpieces, cosmopolitanism (like ‘nomadism’) does not
amount to a simple lack or loss of identity, its non-conformity to the custom of the land is deemed
to be against nature and elicits the suspicion of a hidden identity, another faith, an alien allegiance.
Cosmopolitans, by definition, do not acknowledge stronger ties to the geoculturally defined social
group they are issued from or among which they happen to live than to some other groups, real
(self-imagined) or imaginary. Being a minority now as they were in the past, and positioned on the
margin of any institutionalized group, the cosmopolitans are paradoxically seen either as lunatic
loners or as backward tribals who disrupt the homogeneity of organized society. On the one hand,
cosmopolitan ideals and ways of life are interpreted as a negation of origin, filiation and tradition;
on the other hand, they are easily attributed to a specific origin. When I lived and worked in Tunisia,
the majority of my Tunisian colleagues became rapidly suspicious of my sincerity when I refused
to identify myself as a Frenchman who loved his country and shared the (Christian) faith of his
forefathers. It was difficult to welcome someone who wasn’t a French mirror image, across the
Mediterranean, of the bourgeois Tunisian Muslim. If I didn’t describe myself as “coming from
(France),” it could well be because I was a Jew. Confessing that I wasn’t would have made things
worse, my cosmopolitanism couldn’t be easily explained away.
The history of Jewish cosmopolitanism and the heated controversies about
cosmopolitanism among Jewish intellectuals themselves are enlightening. At the very beginning of
his book Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order, Natan Sznaider draws on Anthony Appiah’s
postcolonial ethics to reread the complexity, variations and evolution of Hannah Arendt’s thought
on the topic and advocate a brand of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” with the goal “to bring into the
open the possibility of a cosmopolitan Jewish Europe, which involves reviving the memory of the
systematic breakup of the process that led to the domination of a national perspective on politics
and society.” (Sznaider 2011, 6) He explains that “the Jews were transnational and had to face a
national world,” and therefore “A cosmopolitan Jewish Europe, or so-called rooted
cosmopolitanism […] is defined as a composite of the two extremes of being at home everywhere
and being at home nowhere.” (ibid.) This is an interesting point because such a composite of
extremes, at variance with Diogenes’ conjunction of ‘here and anywhere” is only conceivable in
movement and assumed plurality (of languages and perspectives), while a common “voice”3 could
make itself heard through this very plurality:
Cosmopolitanism diverges from universalism in assuming that there is not one language of
cosmopolitanism but many languages, tongues and grammars. This belief corresponds to the
languages in which Jews wrote and spoke. There was no one Jewish language but many. Thus Jewish
culture is by definition multilingual, and this has implications for multiple cultural identities as well.
(Sznaider 2011, 7)
Dubost (2019) independently notes that:

3
“I propose in this book to reinscribe the Jewish voice in a more general narrative.” (Sznaider 2011, 6)
 5

Ideas are not easy to isolate, they are not patterns set against a background, but always embedded
in a multiplicity of texts and contexts, and they are inseparable from a language. The unending
debate about cosmopolitanism is a fine example of this truth, but that no language can claim for
itself the right to hold a monopoly on the definition of principles concerning the whole of Mankind
does not entail the radical impossibility of seeking to ‘negotiate’ universal principles or regulative
common rules in multiple and unstable contexts.
While Sznaider is taken to task by Gelbin and Gilman (2017, 7) among other things on the
account of his broadening the perspective well beyond the limits of the Jewish experience of
diaspora and ideas of cosmopolitanism, they are at pains to overcome the inner contradiction in
their approach.
[…] we do not use “‘Jewishness’ as a metaphor for people on the margins, people who are minorities,
whether against their will or by choice.” We examine the representation of Jews in writings by Jews
(however defined) and others as cosmopolitans not as a means of either judging “their victimhood”
or of “exploring the possibilities of autonomous cosmopolitan social and political action” (Sznaider,
1) but as an index to the ever-shifting internal sense of a Jewish cultural identity rooted both in
experience and in its representation in the world.
In a work that investigates “Jewish cultural identity,” it is an intriguingly circular and self-defeating
point of departure that it is to be found in “representations of Jews in writing by Jews (however
defined).” If there is no certain definition of Jewishness, if there are contradictory, incompatible
definitions of it (and there are, just the same as those of Indianness, for example), how can we
build a corpus of writings by ‘Jews’ who represent ‘Jews’? At least some of the writers will not be
considered as Jews by others because they are not religious or they are converts, or they are relapses,
and the same applies to the characters representing ‘Jewish people’ in these writings. A
cosmopolitan approach that radiates primarily from an internal sense of identity and/or from the
self-proclaimed identity of individuals or groups renounces “cosmopolitan hope” 4 at the very
moment when it seeks to ground it. If cosmopolitanism is a third way, neither an
imposing/imposed universalism, nor a collective particularism/exceptionalism, it cannot eschew
questions of identity, which implies at the same time that a redefinition of the very term of
“identity” is necessary…a more dynamic one, based on different and changeable referents.
Cosmopolitanism must re-think the paradoxes of identity as a precondition to dynamize its own
paradoxes, turning them into the motor of a “good life.” And this re-thinking cannot obtain
without the experimentation and manipulation of possible worlds afforded by literary and artistic
composition. The poiesis of compositions liberated from the constraints not of the possible but
of historia in the stale sense given to it by Aristotle will then become a salutary exercise in simulation,
will offer prototypes of cosmopolitan spaces similar to the worlds of others, where the exile or the
mental and physical migrant of any sort might be adopted, might be co-opted to let her/him adopt
some of their manners for some time.
Without denying in any way the importance of a reconstruction of the historical
cosmopolitan memory of those who were labelled (or branded) European Jews, it is vital to re-
activate it as a non-exclusive metaphor and try to make it produce new sense in the present context
of aggressive globalisation.
The European Jews, i.e. the people who lived in Europe (the European continent as it is
presently, although vaguely mapped) while professing overtly or covertly the Israelite faith and/or
claiming that they descended from the tribes of Israel, were almost constantly denied sameness to

4
Sznaider’s (2012) own wording.
 6

a foundational community model supposedly pre-existing their arrival among the dominant
communities in the geopolitical spaces they shared. Achilles and Eneas were not their mythical
heroes, Jesus of Nazareth was not their messiah. Most of those who sought assimilation were
denounced as impostors, those who rejected it were foreign bodies in the pagan as well as in the
Christian and Muslim realms, city states and states where they lived. Subjects and groups of subjects
who are denied and/or deny identity-with (identity as sameness, as belonging to an existing, self-
perceived and enforced set) can only define themselves as authentic, frozen monads caught in its
own narcissistic contemplation, unable to act and evolve —because the mirror image holds a reified
“truth” that must not be altered— unless they accept to believe in their own plurality and behave
accordingly, that is as cosmopolitans.
The cosmopolitan —the reputedly impossible, oxymoronic citizen of everywhere—, torn
between non-sameness and tautological selfhood, has no other way of existing —avoiding
selflessness— but to exit, to see and describe itself as of rather than from elsewhere, a subject in
transit, in process: the subject of change, something not altogether different from Ricœur’s notion
of a “narrative identity.” I’ll return to this complex notion later, but not before proposing a
rudimentary cosmopolitan reading of a constellation of texts that can exemplify narrative
constructions of cosmopolitan identities in terms of character development and self-examination.
 7

2 – SOME COSMOPOLITANS AND THEIR DOUBLES

One would think that a cosmopolitan identity should be textually constructed on the mode
of an inquisitive autobiography, but it is rarely so, because a cosmopolitan identity —if such a thing
is conceivable, as I hope to demonstrate—, relies on the stereoscopic non-coincidence of mobile
points of view, a sort of dialogism in motion. Abolishing distance, should it be feasible, would
make the cosmopolitan self-vanish like the Cheshire cat.
Cosmopolitan multifaceted, fractal mobility is displayed not only in space but in time. It is
far from a-historical, but it travels back and forth through historical time in order to liberate
possibilities to-come in reshaped or interstitial spaces. Contrary to the retrospective process of
autobiographical confession in its search for that coincidence that would eventually fill the gap
between originality and origin (Pygmalion and Galatea happily reunited), the literary construction
of cosmopolitan identities requires both a non-finite deferral and a continuous discrepancy, the
multi-dimensional and “bougé” effects of mobile points of view. The resulting portrait of the
cosmopolitan is anamorphic, it can be drawn best in baroque, impressionist or cubist aesthetics.
There are only three occurrences of the word “cosmopolitan” in the supposedly complete
English translation of Casanova’s Story of my Life (1894). One of them is an ideological addition, a
phrase not present in any of the restored original French texts: “In our days nothing is important,
and nothing is sacred, for our cosmopolitan philosophers.” (Casanova 1894, 1611). The original
simply reads: “De nos jours, rien n’est important.” The second occurrence seems at first to be an
exact translation: “These worthy people, seeing me dressed like a lord, with a cross on my breast,
took me for a cosmopolitan charlatan who was expected at Augsburg, and Bassi, strange to say, did
not undeceive them.” (Casanova 1894. 4564) But a note to this sentence in one of the latest French
critical editions5 suggests that a better reading of the manuscript would be: “the famous charlatan
Cosmopolito,” that is an impostor who used this name to sell false potions and remedies. Finally,
some editor’s amused hand wrote at the abrupt end of Casanova’s Memoirs (supplemented by a
biographical chapter on his last years): “Thus abruptly end the Memoirs of Giacome Casanova,
Chevalier de Seingalt, Knight of the Golden Spur, Prothonotary Apostolic, and Scoundrel
Cosmopolitic.” (Casanova 1894, 7405). So, while Casanova —considered today as an arch-example
of the Enlightenment cosmopolitan prototype— has probably not used the word in his
autobiography and wouldn’t accept this label, the same word was indeed used provocatively as a
pseudonym by an international crook of the time, and, roughly a century later, it could insidiously
qualify the “philosophers” supposedly criticized by Casanova, and the writer himself. I would want
to speculate further on the reasons of both this textual absence and the superimposed editorial
graffiti. Beyond the pejorative potential of the word in the second half of the 18th century, a
laboratory of modern nations, it is most probable that Casanova saw himself as much too Venetian
to become a citizen of the world, or even of the limited breathable space of his time. He aspired
to be a sort of hero of his native Republic and spared no effort, ink or time to try to receive a final
pardon from it. It is clear from many remarks in his writings that travelling was to his eyes a vital
part of his quest for knowledge as well as pleasure, but the early years in (cosmopolitan) Venice
remained a center and an object of nostalgia. Although he manifested his multicultural worth by
writing most of his works in French, it is rather in his encyclopaedic philosophical fable, The
Icosameron, that an alternative imaginary world, with its own time, its own human-like creatures and

5 By Jean-Christophe Igalens & Éric Leborgne, Paris: coll. Bouquins, Laffont, 2015.
 8

reproductive laws, offers an experimental framework for re-thinking what it means to inhabit a
world, a world of others where one will remain another to oneself, even when one is fully accepted
by the others and one’s lineage is about to cause a “great substitution.” The strangeness of the
extraterritorial cosmopolitan abode defamiliarizes the world of origin, it holds a mirror to the face
of the world of origin at such an angle that both similarities and differences introduce otherness
where there was not.
Two centuries later, the word “cosmopolitan” only appears as the name of a cocktail in
Salman Rushdie’s Fury —considered, together with The Ground beneath her Feet, as one of his most
cosmopolitan novels because it is mainly set among a multicultural and multi-ethnic crowd in New
York6—, but not a single time in The Enchantress of Florence (2008) that I will briefly present and
discuss now. Its diverse classification as a magic realist tale, as a para-historical novel or as a
metaliterary intertextual concoction may offer many pedagogical options and it would be an
excellent choice for a Comparative Literature graduate syllabus, but what interests us here is the
conjunction of the shimmering mirror that, joining them in fine into a unified plot (as in a raga
structure), duplicates Florence in Fatir Sikhri and vice versa, with the puzzling diffraction of
multiple meditations on identity and multiplicity, on the self and the blurred limits of the self. I
will not try to summarize a plot whose main thread might be a matter of kinship and recognition,
as it would befit a late 18th or 19th century melodrama but whose loose ends and loopholes are
more convincing than any solution to the family romance puzzle. What matters for our present
purpose is that cultural displacement, questioning the nature of the self, questioning origins and
their relevance, and the encounter of the other as other and then as accomplice of oneself as other,
are the arduous possibility conditions of a minimum (feeling) of reality, consistency and
trustworthiness for any human subject who aspires to be more than a puppet or a prop.
The historical Akbar (redundantly called the Great) was the longest reigning and possibly
the most powerful Mughal Emperor, because his reign was less disturbed by revolts than
Aurangzeb’s. Contrary to the first two Emperors, he was also someone of mixed ethnic and cultural
origin. In the novel, he is characterized as a complex, changing and at times contradictory
personality, he needs more power to liberate himself from his own power and seeks at the same
time to become syncretically co-extensive with his empire (potentially embracing the “whole world”)
and to be protected from public scrutiny and secretly develop a private personality. Near the
beginning of the narrative but at the end of a very long cumbersome sentence, Akbar “had begun
to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, […] about the disturbing possibilities of the
first person singular--the "I."” (Rushdie 2008, 000)
… the emperor pondered, as he rode, such matters as […], today, this grammatical question of the
self and its Three Persons, the first, the second, and the third, the singulars and plurals of the soul.
He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as "I," not even in private, not even in anger or dreams.
He was--what else could he be?--"we." He was the definition, the incarnation of the We. He had
been born into plurality. When he said "we," he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation
of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes […].
This "we" was what it meant to be a king--but commoners, he now allowed himself to consider, in
the interests of fairness, and for the purposes of debate, no doubt occasionally thought of
themselves as plural, too.
[…] –in short, they were all bags of selves, bursting with plurality, just as he was. Was there then no

6 See Zimring 2010 and Luburić-Cvijanović 2016.

 9

essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself
in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the
singular rather than plural, could he, too, be an "I"? Could there be an "I" that was simply oneself ?
Were there such naked, solitary "I"s buried beneath the overcrowded "we"s of the earth?
It was a question that frightened him […]. What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he
were to say simply, "I'm back," or, "It is I," might she feel able to call him in return by that second
person singular, that tu which was reserved for children, lovers, and gods? And what would that
mean? […] would that tu, turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? "I," he practiced
under his breath. Here "I" am. "I" love you. Come to "me."
When he sees Jodha (his imaginary but preferred wife) again, he tries his “I” on her, but, to his
utter dismay, she doesn’t even notice. So will he keep his “I” for himself only and never use it in
conversation again, he decides. By a not completely innocent chance, this moment of grammatical
crisis coincides with the arrival of a Harlequin-coated yellow-haired foreigner, a trickster and a liar,
at the gates of the capital city. This firangi Niccolo, a Florentine subject, is a man of several names
and many tales, he will eventually reveal/make up (we don’t know which) that he is an “uncle” of
the Emperor and the son of a hidden/forgotten/erased princess of great beauty, nicknamed the
Lady of the Black Eyes, who had lived in Persia before becoming Angelica, the “enchantress of
Florence” and later even travelling to the New World. Akbar is fascinated by the story, but the
chronology doesn’t fit, Niccolo is banished, the water supply of the capital dries up, the city must
be abandoned. Qara Köz (whose name, we should remember, evokes Turkish shadow theatre)
comes to Akbar under his tent —he has become temporarily a nomad again, like his ancestors—
to reveal that Niccolo, although he is not her son, never lied, he was deceived, as was his mother
before him, into believing that he was Qara Göz’s son while he was in fact the grandson of her
double and servant, “The Mirror.”
The hidden princess, Qara Köz, Lady Black Eyes, came to sit at his feet, and softly touched his
hand. The night fled. A new day was beginning. The past was meaningless. Only the present
existed, and her eyes. Under their irresistible enchantment, the generations blurred, merged,
dissolved. […]
He had raised her from the dead and granted her the freedom of the living, had freed her to
choose and be chosen, and she had chosen him. As if life was a river and men its stepping stones,
she had crossed the liquid years and returned to command his dreams, usurping another woman's
place in his khayal, his god-like, omnipotent fancy. Perhaps he was no longer his own master.
What if he tired of her? —No, he would never tire of her.--But could she be banished in her turn,
or could she alone decide to stay or go?
"I have come home after all," she told him. "You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at
my journey's end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours."
Until you're not, the Universal Ruler thought. My love, until you're not. (Rushdie 2008, 348-349)
These final lines are in want of a lengthy close reading, at once intra- and intertextual —as well as
interlingual and intermedial. For example, “khayal” is at once imagination, poetic fancy, invention
or poiesis, and the name of the more modern form of Hindustani classical music, and the famous
musician Tansen whose Deepak raag could set anything on fire when sung by him, is very much
present in the novel. The raga structure of the novel is thus indirectly confirmed. But I will limit
myself to noting some points of utmost importance in our perspective: 1) the “freedom of the
living,” that Akbar had earlier dismissed as an illusion, can be granted, and the gift reciprocated; 2)
this freedom is achieved in the guise of a double liberation, from the past and the future; 3) it can
only be achieved at the end of a circuitous route along which otherness is discovered under
 10

resemblance and resemblance under a mask of diversity —but there is no end; 4) Qara Göz’s long
–awaited home-coming takes place on the road, when Akbar is in search of a new seat of Empire;
just as for Ulysses, no home-coming is final, no attachment is eternal; the unexpected that happened
can happen again and reverse the temporary happy ending; we should simply call it a pause,
especially when the scale of each human story is the Universe.
As a response to Akbar’s metaphysical (and political) cogitations at the beginning of the
book, he has now understood the cosmopolitan truth that one must accept one’s otherness and
one’s fallibility, as well as the other’s sameness and unsuspected resources, in order to be crowned
ruler of one’s mind, for a while.
 11

3 – NARRATIVE IDENTITIES AND DIALOGICAL SELVES

Before we move on from Akbar’s drought-stricken Northern India to the liquid and
archipelagic worlds of Amitav Ghosh, I want to make another motivated excursus that will take us
back to the emblematic cosmopolitanism of the Jews discussed in the first part of this essay.
3.1. Portable Jews
Rushdie, especially when he kaleidoscopically multiplies narrators and points of view, is
prone to sow scattered intertextual prompts in his fictions. They will be perceived by some cultured
readers, not by others; they can lift us to wonderful hypertextual heights or their mirage can bog us
in a mire of absurdity; in any case, the rule of the game is to leave no stone unturned, and, in the
case of The Enchantress of Florence, there are several stones of various sizes that point to a Jewish
underlying presence. The two most obvious ones are the title itself and the provenance of Niccolo’s
Harlequin coat. Let us start with this passage, swarming as it is with allusions:
The traveler, […] drew his particolored greatcoat about him, and hurried onto the main deck calling
for help. He had won the coat at cards in a hand of scarabocion played against an astonished
Venetian diamond merchant who could not believe that a mere Florentine could come to the Rialto
and beat the locals at their own game. The merchant, a bearded and ringleted Jew named Shalakh
Cormorano, had had the coat specially made at the most famous tailor's shop in Venice, known as
Il Moro Invidioso because of the picture of a green-eyed Arab on the shingle over its door, and it
was an occultist marvel of a greatcoat, its lining a catacomb of secret pockets and hidden folds
within which a diamond merchant could stash his valuable wares, and a chancer such as "Uccello di
Firenze" could conceal all manner of tricks.
The foreigner-cum-enchanter’s coat is won in Venice, Casanova’s birthplace 7 , the most
cosmopolitan hub of trade at the time, at a game of cards, but not just any game: the word
scarabocion immediately evokes Edgar Poe’s famous scarab, the Gold-Bug that comes with a cryptic
message which will allow the recovery of a hidden treasure. The “merchant” who loses it is a Jew
who shares his first name, Shalakh, transcribed as Shylock, with Shakespeare’s money-lender in The
Merchant of Venice. Be-Shalak is related to the story of the manna, riches that fall from the sky. The
merchant’s last name, Cormorano, is a maritime pendant to the first pseudonym of Niccolo,
Uccello, beside evoking Captain Corcoran, “on the hunt for a lost sacred Hindu text, but soon
distracted from his quest by […] a lotus-eyed [Indian princess].” (Assollant, Penguin blurb) Finally,
the Moro Invidioso irresistibly evokes El Moro expósito, a pseudo-Arab romance by the Duque de Rivas,
and confirms the very obvious similarity of the novel’s title with The Jewess of Toledo, a Spanish
legend brought to the theatre by many Spanish authors, before being taken up by Grillparzer in the
Romantic era and made internationally famous by Lion Feuchtwanger’s para-historical novel of
1955, written in German but translated into many languages.
In Feuchtwanger’s version of the legend, a rich Jewish merchant, originally from Castile but
whose family had to take refuge in Seville and outwardly embrace the Muslim faith, returns to
Toledo under a contract with king Alfonso VIIIº by which he becomes chief financier and a sort
of Great Steward of the Kingdom. Thanks to his huge personal funds, he recovers the palace from
which the family had been dispossessed. There he will officially return to the religion of his
ancestors and bear the name of Yehuda instead of Ibrahim, but the house is decorated with both
Quranic and Biblical inscriptions. Alfonso wants money to wage war again (against the kingdoms

7
Let us not forget that Casanova was an adept kabbalist.
 12

of Al Andalus) and prepare a crusade, but a treaty obliges him to abstain for a few years. In the
meantime, beautiful Raquel (la Fermosa), Yehuda’s daughter, has become the king’s mistress…
When Alfonso’s campaign fails, she is accused of having enchanted the king, making him forget
his duties to the realm as a true sorceress, and all the Jews of Toledo are massacred. Beside the
indictment of antisemitism, particularly appropriate ten years after the Shoah, and a retort to the
mostly anti-Semitic Spanish plays based on the same legend, it is notable that Feuchtwanger goes
to great lengths to characterise Sephardi cosmopolitanism, its ambiguities and its limits. Yehuda
Ibn Esra is not only a man of means but also a man of culture and feelings, a reflexive and refined
hedonist with a passion for beauty, peace and order, one who can negotiate in the most suited of
several languages: it looks like the idealized portrait of an independent mind and enlightened
cosmopolitan.
However, it is clear from the start that this grandeur is nothing but the counterpart and the
sign of a tragic destiny. As Yehuda explains it to his daughter before they leave Sevilla, the
haphazard world of the Jews is always precarious and full of fear:
Then he told her about the adventurous world of the Jews. They had always had to live dangerously,
even now they were threatened by both Muslims and Christians, and that was a great test to which
God put them, the chosen. But among this people, the chosen and long-tried, one lineage was
chosen over the others: the Ibn Esra's. And now God had imposed on him, one of these Ibn Esra's,
a mission8. (Feuchtwanger 1955, np, revised automatic translation through Spanish version)
Yehuda had begun his communication to his daughter in the style of a tale –that would
have a happy ending– and he had proposed to marry her off to some good young aristocrat, if she
preferred to stay in Seville as a Muslim as she had always lived, rather than follow her father to
Toledo. She will not. As an enthusiastically dutiful daughter, she lets the narrative change genre,
turn into an epic of the soul, before it concludes in tragedy. Yehuda responds to the call of Adonai
and Rachel to his call. Here the diasporic condition and the resulting cosmopolitan stance are the
specific lot of a people, and particularly of its best specimens because they were chosen and sent
on a mission that is both a blessing and a curse; they can consent, confirm the alliance, but these
subjects’ cosmopolitanism is more adaptive than deliberate and inventive, it’s a flight forward and
a flight from rather than the expression of an insolent freedom as Casanova would sometimes depict
his mobility, even in banishment.
If a cosmopolitan identity is an identity because it conforms to some God-given pattern,
Law and tradition, manifesting difference and particularism rather than a potential universal of
human nature, how does it differ from any other received, transmitted, submissive identity? What
can be done narratively to achieve, at least at times, a balance between chance and necessity,
intuition and deliberation, possibility and contingency?
3.2. It is all margins
I will now review some relevant features of the fictions of Amitav Ghosh —notably the
grand “Ibis trilogy”— to search for some creative answers to the questions left painfully in the air
by Casanova (because of the interests of self-image directly at play in autobiography), Rushdie (for

8
Dann hatte er ihr erzählt von der abenteuerlichen Welt der Juden. Immer hatten sie gefährlich leben müssen, auch
jetzt waren sie bedroht von Moslems wie von Christen, und das war eine große Prüfung Gottes, der sie einzigartig
gemacht und sie auserwählt hatte. Inmitten dieses Volkes aber, des berufenen, lange geprüften, war wiederum ein
Geschlecht auserwählt: die Ibn Esra's. Und nun hatte Gott ihm, einem dieser Ibn Esra's, die Sendung auferlegt.
 13

the sake of unmitigated nostalgia) and Feuchtwanger (because of the indescribability/untellability/

unintelligibility of the Holocaust). I do not mean that Ghosh provides a recipe for the happiest
cosmopolitan cocktail possible, but that his fictional world is organically arranged in such a way
that the seduced reader is obliged to experiment or at least toy with a cosmopolitan personality.
Much has been written already about Amitav Ghosh’s cosmopolitanism in general and
several of its original or specific aspects (cosmopolitanism at home, eco-cosmopolitanism, rural
cosmopolitanism, engaged cosmopolitanism, subaltern cosmopolitanism, maritime
cosmopolitanism, etc.), he has been criticized for it by some9 and it is also well-known that he
ceaselessly displaces in a non-linear time the spatial points of reference of his fiction and the
objects of a dreamlike quasi-historical reconstruction and deconstruction. If the Ibis novelistic
trilogy navigates on waves of opium smoke between the subaltern imaginary and defeated
delusions of conquest, it is no wonder that ‘questions of identity’ are raised in rather different ways
from those of the Bildungsroman from Wieland’s Agathon through Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education to Proust (although the first author did write an apocryphal
autobiography of Diogenes of Sinope). Each of these narratives focuses on or revolves around a
single character, their epic principle is that of the Odyssey, but, contrary to the Odyssey, actual
travelling, the displaced body, or improbable but striking encounters among foreign people and
composite cultures remain peripheral. In Ghosh’s fiction, with multiple characters, points of view,
codes and languages that sometimes converge, but only to drift apart again and join other sets and
story threads, hardly any ‘self ’ is ever presented as fixed from the beginning or settled in the end,
transformism is the rule in both the evolutionary and the theatrical senses. Despite the
extraordinary variety of moves and alterations in the midst of wars, political upheavals, human
trafficking and traumatic meteors, personal mobility, whether forced or deliberate, rarely confines
to meaningless agitation or total loss of bearings —as it does in so many American 20th century
narratives. Although sense is never a given, or a divine secret, a pre-existing mystery to be decrypted,
it remains a possibility, something that can perhaps be glimpsed in the making when unexpected
bonds are forged between strangers, and between them and the natural world. Contrary to
Rushdie’s metaphorical seas of stories, the flows and currents of Ghosh’s later novels can be
located on the map and are always to be reckoned with.
The vast “historical fresco” of the Ibis trilogy is situated around the time of the Opium
wars, it flows out to sea from the middle course of the Ganges and fully displays the archipelagic
structure adumbrated in several earlier novels such as The Hungry Tide. A great deal of it is located
not in India or in the Indian Ocean but in the Sea of China, in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Mumbai
and Peking, or even Paris; London and New York are implicitly or explicitly present. The whole
narrative is held together by a double simultaneous movement of dispersion/expansion and
convergence/condensation manifested not only in seemingly haphazard but motivated encounters
and crossed destinies, but also, especially in the first part, Sea of Poppies, by a huge array of Englishes,
pidgins and language hybrids of all sorts that precisely locate characters and events in a disorderly
plurality of coeval historical Orients and display early forms of globalisation with all their
contradictions and conflicts. However, the Babelian mutual (un)intelligibility of the One-World of
the time is not a defeat of verbal language, even when in the story it has to be complemented or
substituted by graphic representation: it is a testimony of otherness within the deep but confusing

9 See Paranjape 2012.

 14

unity of the represented world, a unity of conflict as well as of desire and repression. This Orient
that ceases to be Orientalist or Occidentalist could then become the name of the whole world at
the time of globalisation insofar as it presents the three key characteristics of liminality,
incompletion and unlimited interpretation in alternately metaphorical and metonymic gestures. The
clandestine subject who could become a committed denizen of this Orient might be the
cosmopolitan figure of the present, a member of a fluid cosmopolitan community always to-come.
It is unfortunate how most academic readings of Amitav Ghosh, conforming to the narrow
requirements of critical and postcolonial theory, approach his works in the sole light of their
political relationship to (mainly Indian colonial) history and historiography, and minimize the less
obvious, but more decisive role of aesthetics, rhetoric and the subtle manipulation of symbolism
in the fabrication of a world at once self-contained and transparent, constrained by material reality
and replete with innumerable possibilities, including that of representing our 21st century present,
as unknowingly as we ignore it. The four female protagonists of the trilogy, for example (Deeti,
Paulette Lambert, Mrs Burnham, and, much later, Shireen, Mrs Bahram) should not be viewed only
as representative (or, alternatively, exceptional) samples of the female condition under patriarchal
and colonial rule and a collection of modes of transgression with unequal success. This is not to
say that socio-historical or socio-cultural determination can be neglected, for all the characters are
embedded in these contexts and contribute together to making them the stuff of a world, but the
clues to the sense-making, life-giving processes at play in this world must be activated, brought to
consciousness by close intertextual reading, even though they are meant to act subconsciously on
the reader. I will give just one example.
When Paulette boards the Ibis (a ship name so rich in allusions), can we forget that she is
not only an orphan whose mother, per narrative convention in fairy tales and popular narratives,
died on giving birth, but someone who was born on the water of the big river:
As he was pulling away, he heard the coksen talking excitedly to the men around him: Do you see
that boy’s dinghy? Miss Paulette - the daughter of Lambert-sahib, the Frenchman - she was born in
it: in that very boat …
Jodu had heard the story so many times, told by so many people, that it was almost as if he had
witnessed the events himself. It was his kismat, his mother had always said, that accounted for the
strange turn in their family’s fate […] (SP epub 60)
You don’t need to be a scholar of ancient myths, or even to remember that Ghosh wrote In an
Antique Land to see how the figure of Paulette is associated with that of Moses, and Moses is the
biblical figure in whose career two elements are operative: water, with the crossings of the Red Sea,
and fire. Three volumes later, toward the end of the saga, Paulette, who has been badly wounded
by Zachary’s rejection, will realize that any bond contracted on the Ibis is unbreakable:
Listening to him Paulette was suddenly, blindingly aware of the import of his words: she understood
that no matter how much she might want to be finished with Zachary, she would never be free of
him – the bond of the Ibis was like a living thing, endowed with the power to reach out from the
past to override the volition of those who were enmeshed in it. It was as if she were being mocked
for harbouring the illusion that she was free to decide her own destiny. (FF epub 942)
Just as for Neel and many other characters, the liquid element is at once vital and deadly, it makes
all encounters and alterations possible, it gives shelter and remains forever the harbinger of loss.
This brand of cosmopolitanism, that extends into the cosmos as unfinished totality or always
 15

deferred totalization, beyond the very historical circumstances that limit the individual perception
of a world while allowing its unconscious collaborative construction, is marked by the intensity of
its dialogism. It differs widely from the position and the self-image of any histrionic adventurer.
In the plurilingual texture of language as in non-linear narrative syntax and narrational
polyphonic complexity, this modern cosmopolitan literature endeavours to world itself through a
deterritorialization that multiplies precise anchorings in a precariously simultaneous present rather
than severing all bonds and blurring all boundaries. Unlike the average “writing back” of the
Empire, the question of a dominant, imperialist Center, although it is part of the causal chain that
has led to the state of today’s world, is no longer directly relevant to our action —as selves and as
others. In the present (the only site of meaning and feeling), it is all peripheries. For such a mapping,
the metaphor of aerial roots should probably be combined with those of force field and gossamer.
 16

(IN)CONCLUSIVE NOTES
The “Ibis community” (FF epub 1303) whose “history” Amitav Ghosh has composed, to
quote his own words in the epilogue, can be called a cosmopolitan community insofar as 1) it is
not based on ethnicity, religion, territory, class or language, but on chance encounters, long-distance
physical mobility or displacement, non-traditional social formations and transgressive desires or
affections; 2) its personnel relates, communicates and interacts between them in many moods,
bodily modes and many languages, slangs and pidgins; 3) the community is formed, reshaped, partly
dissolved and partly restored to dissolve again, etc., like a “living thing” —as Paulette sketched it
in her inner discourse above, it is not and cannot be institutionalized, corseted by law; 4) its identity,
and the identity of its components/members/passengers, are fluid enough to accommodate
unexpected events, new arrivals and new departures.
Several pressing questions remain.

1) If narrative fiction is a ‘laboratory of thought experiments’ and not solely an idle game
disconnected from the lives of the readers, their perception of these lives and their environment,
and their motivations and deliberations for future action, then we should ask whether a collective
identity of which few actors are fully aware, and elaborated together with a world that is not the
actual world (first of all, because it is posited as past), can be somehow transposed and internalized
by individuals in today’s world. It would be a sad irony if all cosmopolitan spaces and the
corresponding identities happened to close upon themselves, just the same as any traditional
territorialized outlook. The demand of coherence, although it may appear relatively relaxed in the
modern/postmodern cosmopolitan work of art, is still essential to let the reader or beholder
identify with this work’s world and experiment a possible cosmopolitan life. The balance between
coherence and incoherence, familiarization and defamiliarization, the known or knowable and the
unknown or mystery, and between the contingency of documentary mimesis and the requirements
of fictional truth is as precarious as it is necessary.
The dystopic contradictions and imbalances of mimetic modes of both Kafka (particularly
with The Castle) and Kundera (especially with Ignorance) bear witness to their respective failed and
forced cosmopolitanisms. Dark, absurdist or sinister humour, on the one hand, and the cynical
satisfaction of the supreme ironist, on the other hand, manifest a solitary compensation for the
irreducible otherness of the self. In both cases, the spatialization of narrative prevents every
character from reaching out to others instead of facilitating communication and access. Wherever
it is forced to be in the world, the self doesn’t fit here —and there are only “heres,” no elsewhere.
We could perhaps call this melancholy construction of identity a “negative cosmopolitanism”: “I
am a citizen of not-here and nowhere.” Roberto Calasso formulates it strikingly in his commentary
of The Castle:
“What else could have attracted me to this waste land, but the desire to stay here.” The ‘waste land”
is the Promised Land. And the Promised Land is the only one of which one can say, like K.: “I
cannot emigrate.”
What distinguishes The Trial and The Castle is that, from beginning to end, they take place on the
threshold of a different world that we suspect to exist implicitly in this one. […] These worlds had
never come so close together before, until they give the frightful impression of coinciding.
 17

Kafka talks of a world before any separation or naming. Neither a sacred or divine world, nor one
abandoned by the sacred or the divine. […] It is just a compound, that is only potency.
Compared with any other novelistic character, K is pure potential. […] And this is not because K
undergoes ceaseless metamorphoses like Klamm, but because K is the shape of what is about to
happen.
One of the paradoxes of a successful cosmopolitan globalization, if we can imagine it, would be
that total mobility would cancel itself into fusion: the Wasteland and the Promised Land are one,
elsewhere and here are one —although we cannot know it, because there is no outside to offer a
perspective on what is within.

2) Individually or collectively, the protagonists of the Ibis trilogy as well as those of The
Enchantress of Florence, show much serendipity when they invent unforeseen presents and sometimes
lay the foundations of possible futures. But these great Kairos players are more bound to the past
than it would seem appropriate where discontinuity is the pre-condition of emergence. The bond
to the past takes several forms: it can be an immense detour that takes the subject ‘back home’
even when he/she has never been there or there is nothing like a permanent place to be called
home; or the occupation of a promised land fulfils past dreams of a future and brings the past into
the present; or the present must be nurtured with memories ritually relived10; or yet, conversely,
memory is so radically erased, abolished or denied that it allows the past to repeat itself.
The question of time —permanence and change, duration and event— is central to Ricœur’s
attempt to found a non-essentialist ontology. After confronting two faces of “identity” —mêmeté
and ipséité, sameness and selfhood—, he needs the two aspects of time —as a continuum that is
only perceivable when it is broken by events— to outline a dialectical relationship between these
two faces of identity, it is “the fact that the person of whom we are speaking and the agent on
whom the action depends have a history, arc their own history.” (IAA 113) A “narrative identity”
emerges in the relation between the discontinuity of events and actions and the continuum of the
ergative relationship of a (human) subject with narrative predicates (predicates of change). At this
level, we are still thinking in the narrow frame of the singular. More steps must be taken to
understand cosmopolitanism as an identity (among others). Ricœur takes some but not all of them:
firstly, he states that “the identity of a person or a community is made up of these identifications
with values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which the person or the community recognizes
itself. Recognizing oneself in contributes to recognizing oneself by […]”. Then he makes the other
reappear, but it is still largely on the scene of the “self ”, and he is conscious that such an otherness
is always threatened to vanish in the mirror: “But under what condition is this other not just a
reduplication of myself—another myself, an alter ego — but genuinely an other, other than myself ?”

10
The last pages of Flood of Fire combine these two features: “In Deeti’s shrine, high up on the slopes of the Morne
Brabant, at the south-western corner of Mauritius, there was a special chamber for that episode of Maddow Colver’s
life that came to be known as ‘the Escape’. This part of the ‘memory-temple’ was especially beloved of the Fami
Colver, particularly the young ones, the chutkas and chutkis, laikas and laikis: every year, during the Gran Vakans, when
the family made its annual pilgrimage to the ‘memory-temple’, they waited breathlessly for that moment when Deeti
would point to the stylized image of a sampan, with six figures seated inside […]” Once again, Moses is evoked in the
guise of the Patriarch –who led the Escape– without being named. But the simultaneist slight of hand of the excipit
(“In a trice the sails are hoisted and filling with wind, and by the time the auction ends the schooner is long out of
sight …”) aims at liberating liberation from its commemoration.
 18

The next rung brings us somewhat closer to a philosophical definition of a cosmopolitan identity,
but still short of the target: “To self-esteem, understood as a reflexive moment of the wish for the
‘good life,’ solicitude adds essentially the dimension of lack, the fact that we need friends; as a
reaction to the effect of solicitude on self-esteem, the self perceives itself as another among others.”
(IAA 192)
It seems to me finally that only the “as” of “oneself as another,” in all its risky ambiguity, can
represent cosmopolitanism as a horizon rather than a mirage, as a never accomplished potential
but one without which initiative and responsibility would be both abolished. “As” is what metaphor
at once implies and omits/suppresses. But it also signifies the aspect of identity, the feature or role
that is relevant to the definition of a subject in context: “Am I speaking as an academic or as a
writer?” And finally, it is the clutch of hypothetical connection, of the heuristic impulse of theory:
as if we could be of another kinship, as if we could become some sort of selves by means of a
consented family romance.

3) Positing some sort of always pre-existing (my)self or (our)selves at the point of entry
limits the vision of the cosmopolitan condition (or identity) to the expansion of an otherwise stable
entity, an accumulation of borrowed epistemic capital in the same seat of power. I strongly disagree
with the following assessment:
The Cosmopolitan condition means to place ourselves at the standpoint of others without giving
up ours. […] This is the problem of cosmopolitanism, you don’t become the other, you remain
what you are, but you have the imagination to know what that kind of feeling might be for others
through their words and thoughts. (Sznaider 2012, 34)
The benefit of cosmopolitanism is that you are what you become, not on top of what you were,
but having to discard and replace some of it every time you manage to enter the castle: Akbar’s
fortress or the Ibis. The literary work of art functions anaphorically, its anthropomorphic subjects,
even when they are not empty vessels, are born featureless; their adventures, sometimes “abroad,”
will sketch up possible portraits but such that “eternity itself will not be able to change them into
themselves,” if I may use in the negative Mallarmé’s tight description of the action of death.
 19

REFERENCES

BECK, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies”. Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE,
London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 19(1–2): 17–44.
CASANOVA, Giacomo. Histoire de ma vie. Jean-Christophe Igalens and Éric Leborgne, eds. 3 vols.
Paris: Robert Laffont, “Bouquins”, 2015.
--------- The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova. Tr. Arthur Machen. London, 1894.
DUBOST, Jean-Pierre. “The Paradox of the Cosmopolitan: Individuality, Globalism, and the
indefinite openness of the World”, forthcoming in Migrating Minds, edited by Didier Coste,
Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu.
FEUCHTWANGER, Lion. Die Jüdin von Toledo. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2013.
-------------- La judía de Toledo. Tr. Ana Tortajada. Madrid: EDAF, 2013.
GELBIN, Cathy S. and GILMAN, Sander L. Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2017.
GHOSH, Amitav. In an Antique Land. London: Granta Books, 1992.
------------ [The Ibis Trilogy] 1. Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray 2008. 2. River of Smoke. London:
John Murray, 2011. 3. Flood of Fire. London: John Murray, 2015.
RUSHDIE, Salman. Fury. New York: Random House, 2001.
--------------- The Enchantress of Florence. New York: Random House, 2008.
KAFKA, Franz. The Castle. “a new translation, based on the restored text; translated and with a
preface by Mark Harman.” New York: Schocken Books, 1998.
KUNDERA, Milan. Ignorance. Tr. Linda Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.
LUBURIĆ-CVIJANOVIĆ, Arijana & MUŽDEKA, Nina “Salman Rushdie from Postmodernism
and Postcolonialism to Cosmopolitanism: Toward a Global(ized) Literature?” Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction, vol. 57 issue 4, 2016. 433-447.
MARCUSE, Herbert. “On The Aesthetic Dimension. A Conversation between Herbert Marcuse and
Larry Hartwick” [1978] in Herbert Marcuse: Art and Liberation (Collected Papers, vol. 4). Douglas
Kellner ed. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. 218-224.
PARANJAPE, Makarand. “Beyond the Subaltern Syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and the Crisis of the
bhadrasamaj”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature Vol. 47 Issue 3, 2012. 357—374.
RICŒUR, Paul. Oneself as Another. Tr. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago & London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1995.
SZNAIDER, Natan. Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order: Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Condition.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
---------- “Cosmopolitan Hope. A Comment.” In HEINLEIN, Michael, KROPP, Cordula, et al.
eds. Futures of Modernity. Challenges for Cosmopolitical Thought and Practice. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag,
2012. 33-36.
ZIMRING, Rishona. “The Passionate Cosmopolitan in Salman Rushdie's Fury.” Journal of Postcolo-
nial Writing, vol. 46 issue 1, 2010. 4-16.