Chapter 16 - Emma Lazarus’s Cosmopolitanism

Summary

In a 1998 essay, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Kwame Anthony Appiah recalls his father, “a Ghanaian patriot,” who believed that Ghana was worth dying for, but he also loved the broader region of Asante, a kingdom ultimately absorbed within a British colony that “he and his father also both loved and served”; as well as that “enchanting abstraction,” “Africa.” When his father died, Appiah tells us, he left an unfinished note to his children reminding them of their double ancestry – in Ghana and England – writing, “‘Remember that you are citizens of the world,’” by which he meant “wherever [they] chose to live,” so long as they left that place better than they found it.¹ Appiah describes his father’s worldview as one of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” or “cosmopolitan patriotism.”² The cosmopolitan patriot sees a world in which “everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities; who accepts “the citizens’ responsibility to nurture the culture and politics of their homes,” but who also celebrates the variety of human cultures in the world.³ With this notion of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Appiah gives us a model that, born out of a colonial project and the multiple national affinities engendered by colonial violence, helps us to understand the work of the late-nineteenth-century American poet, Emma Lazarus.