14 - Religious Pluralism and Cosmopolitanism at the City Crossroads

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, various scholars have drawn attention to the way traditional definitions of citizenship based exclusively on the framework of the nation-state are being recalibrated under the forces of global capitalism with its pervasive space–time compression and speeding up of transnational flows. James Holston and Arjun Appadurai (1999, p. i), for instance, have suggested that “cities are both a strategic arena for the reformulations of citizenship and a stage on which these processes find expression in collective violence”. To be sure, for the last two or three centuries, the historic primacy of urban citizenship has been incrementally dismantled and replaced by the imaginary and ideological frame of the nation-state (cf. Anderson 2006 [1983]). Nevertheless, in more recent times, it is more often the case that:

[T]he cities’ streets conflate identities of territory and contract with those of race, religion, class, culture and gender to produce the reactive ingredients of both progressive and reactionary political movements. Like nothing else, the modern urban public signifies both the de-familiarizing enormity of national citizenship and the exhilaration of its liberties (Ibid., p. 2).

Said differently, the public spaces of a country's major cities have become microcosms of the nation-state where citizenship issues of belonging are re-imagined, mis-recognized, played out, and contested. On a similar note, AbdouMaliq Simone understands a central feature of a city — what he calls its “city-ness” — in terms of its cosmopolitan “crossroad” attributes. As he puts it, cities are places “where people take the opportunity to change each other around by virtue of being in that space, getting rid of the familiar ways of and plans of doing things and finding new possibilities by virtue of whatever is gathered there” (2010, p. 192). In comparison to small rural agricultural settlements, cities are seen as dynamic places where the potentialities for cosmopolitan encounters are multiplied manifold.

Be that as it may, under certain historical conditions, cities can become un-cosmopolitan or de-cosmopolitanized. For instance, critical scholars have tended to view contemporary urban citizenships in globalizing modern cities to be increasingly fragmented and splintered.