1 - Who Counts as Human within (European) Modernity?

Summary

In the midst of new ideological polarizations, we are struggling to find ways of imagining configurations and legacies that remind us of the everyday hybridity, creolization and metissage of our global relations. In this chapter, I argue for making a case for peripheral cosmopolitanisms in order to complicate a commonsense equation of cosmopolitanism with the elitist practices often associated with phrases such as “citizen of the world.” Such webs of cosmopolitan connections are often mediated by and rooted in an inescapably local and even parochial context, beginning with a body disciplined by visceral and affective regimes of foods, languages and familial rites that may include the metaphysical or spiritual (Wise and Velayuthan 2009).

I will focus the vast reach of “cosmopolitanism” through the question of who counts as European, offering some examples of how “europeanness” circulates with different meanings in various discourses historically and today. Addressing some of the global meanings of “E/ european” means acknowledging that Europe continues to function as an imperial or colonial metaphor that evokes modernity and civilization, and, in the words of Fernando Coronil, that “the West is often identified with Europe, the United States, us, or with that enigmatic entity, the modern Self” (1996, 52). Indeed, Neil Lazarus (2002, 44) describes the West succinctly as an ideological category masquerading as a geographical one. When Europe is made synonymous with the “West,” as, for example, in postcolonial discussions, or their neocolonial incarnation in the War on Terror, we need to be much more specific concerning these versions of occidentalism that are often wheeled in to function as convenient binary opposition to equally suspect forms of orientalism. For example, the relatively new entity of the European Union (EU) could be described as an attempt to create a “commonwealth” that transcends or creates an excess to the nation (Balibar 2004, 2007; Buruma and Margalit 2004; Todorov 2005). In its initial expansion, the European Union included those hitherto marginalized as the outer reaches of what was traditionally seen as comprising “Europe,” and thus made legible the hybrid nature of the West and of Europe.