Rerouting the Postcolonial

New directions for the new millennium

Edited by
Janet Wilson, Cristina $andru and
Sarah Lawson Welsh

I~ ~~;1J!!n~R~up
LONDON ANO NEW YORK
 Betmeen roots and rout,es 23
them the feel and look of the countryside and this is what brings out the simple
2 Between roots and routes truth that my hberal sensibilities find hard to countenance: I have nothing in
common with these people; we do not share a common critical discourse or set
Cosmopolitanism and the claims of cultural values. They are not the postcolonials with whom I have spent the last
of locality weeks, but strangers caught in the cracks of the failed state.
Suddenly I feel like Walter Beajamin's fianeur; these refugees threaten my
identity as a cosmopolitan, a connoisseur of modern cultural goods. Tourists
Simon Gika,ndi are tolerable because what excites them about Africa is banal. I can afford to be
condescending. Fellow cosmopolitans, the passengers who sit ne>.."t to me reading
the familiar lntemaii.onat Herald Tribune or the Econami,st;, are comforting reminders
that you belong to a global cultural circuit. But refugees frighten me because they
are signs of a dislocated locality, a mote in the eye of cosmopolitanism, of that
I will start with a digression which nevertheless foregrounds the knot I will try postcolonial identity which derives its legitimacy from the mastery of the culture
and untie in this discussion of the relationship bet:ween cosmopolitanism and the of modern Europe.
production oflocality, the limits of what have come to be known as globalization, Where do these people, the rejects of failed states, fit into our fascination with
and the crisis of transnationalism after colonialism. These topics have been identities constituted across boundaries? When the former residents of Kakoma
addressed from different perspectives by other contributors to this volume, such ~ p or of the Lokichoggio made famous by Tu Constant Gardener (J..,e Carre 2000,
as Bill Ashcroft, Diana Brydon, and Robert Spencer, but now I want to reflect on Meirelles. 2005) arrive in Canada, do they become cosmopolitan in the same way
what it means to be a postcolonial subject in the metropolitan. cultures of the as the African elites who move and shake things in the corridors of the American
modern west. or European university and boardroom? Do they become cosmopolitans in the
In a single afternoon, strolling down the streets of the cities that I love, same sense as the intellectual class; or does their entry into the metropolis as
Nairobi, Johannesburg, Accra, I pretend to be a postcolonial flaneur. I see refugees denote a different relation with their adoptive countries? And what does
myself as an incarnation of Baudelaire's painter of modern life, the informed it mean to think of the refugee, rather than the intellectual, as the quintessential
spectator of the manners of the urban class. I'm often tempted to become one figure oflife across or outside boundaries? And how do we tell the stories of those
with the crowd, especially in the markets and the railway stations, and although who are not yet quite cosmopolitan even when they inhabit the spaces that have
my passion and profession, unlike that of the Parisian flaneur, is not to become come to be inscribed as global?
one with the masses, I seek to move with the ebb :µid flow of the crowds, 'in the Within the domain of what now goes by the name of postcolonial theory and
midst of the fugitive and infinite' (Baudelaire 1986: 9). I adopt a pose suspended criticism, seen as a broad attempt to account for subjects produced in the inter-
bet:ween the rank of the insider and the detachment of the tourist, the pose of stices of the European metropolis and the former colony, there is perhaps no
the heroic pedestrian who, in Walter Benjamin's terms, demands elbow space more pressing question now than the development of a vocabulary for explain-
in the crowd and refuses 'to forgo the life of a gentleman ofleisure' (Benjamin ing the experiences and writings of lives lived across boundaries, outside nation,
2006: 188). Although I walk as one with the crowd, I'm also detached from it. beyond et/me and what Virginia Woolf famously described as 'unreal loyalties'
It is only later in the evening, when I visit the haunts of the leisured postco- (1938: 78). The rerouting ofpostcolonialism is authorized by a signature gesture
lonial class, at book launchings, galleries, and symposiums, that I stop being of displacement - the unhomely moment which, in Homi Bhabha's majestic
a passionate spectator and become one with other connoisseurs of global phrase, is 'a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition', which never-
culture, the cosmopolitans, natives who share the cultural discourse of the intel- theless 'negotiates the power of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical
lectual class in the other spaces I inhabit - London and New York away from sites' (1994). To account for the lives of subjectivities performed across bounda-
the crowd. ries, languages, and traditions, postcolonial scholars have turned to theories of
But when I board the British Airways flight to London and New York, I find globalization (Appadurai 1996), of cultural difference and empire (Said 1994),
myself in the strange company of Somali, Ethiopian and Sudanese refugees on planetarism (Gilroy 2002, Spivak 2005), and even liberal cosmopolitanism
their way to new lives in North America under the sponsorship .of Refugees (Appiah 2006) as a way out of the narrow bonds of nationalism.
International and other global charities. These are the outcasts of the civil wars Indeed, it often seems that the very legitimacy of a postcolonial cultural politics
in Eastern Africa and they are encountering the modem metropolis for the first depends on the unabashed claim for the idiom of transnationalism. And more
time. Beneath the new garbs provided by international charity, they carry with than any other mode of theorizing, postcolonial criticism derives its authority
24 Simon Gikaruf.i
Between roots and routes 25
from a certain claim to displacement as the essential condition of modem subjec-
of those archaic, yet real, loyalties that make cultural elites uneasy, do not lead to
tivity. For many postcolonial critics, displacement is a fo~ ~freco~~on; it is freedom from those loyalties but to their entrenchment.
a point of entry into what Appiah has called 'the global tnbe (2006: xui). Here,
How else does one explain the actions of young Somalis who leave the comfort
the rejection oflocal or national loyalties is often posited as the journey towards
of American suburbs to go and fight for Islam in a state' that now is nothing but a
ideas and institutions premised on a set of universal moral obligations and loyalty
remnant of the collapsed heap of whatever was imagined to be the modern nation
to a common humanity, not nation or et/me. All these forms of identity would state? Consider the following story from CNN:
appear to represent the triumph of plurality over sin~ty. . .
And yet this aspiration for a common human humanity, one informed by nghts
I:a5t month, 17:rear-old Burhan Hassan told his family he was catching a
and responsibilities to all human beings irrespective of their cultur'.11 or oth~ nde to school with a friend. He then vanished.
differences constantly comes up against a set of problems that are inherent m
His mother spoke to her son just a few days ago over the phone. T O her
the projec{ of identity itsel£ First there is the question of aggregating difference:
shock, she says, he told her he was no longer in the United States.
If identity is predicated on the differentiation of the self from the Other, how can
'Mom, I'm in Somalia,! Don't worry about me; I'm OK', the mother
some forms of difference be considered more legitimate than others? Isn't the quoted her son as saying ...
invocation of difference also the foundation for the community-building projects
Hassan is one of more than a dozen young men of Somali descent
that have led to postmodern genocide across Africa and South-Eastern Europe
~any U.S. citizens_ to have disappeared from Minneapolis over the past
(Gourevitch 1999: 95)? . .
SJX months, according to federal law enforcement authorities. Authorities
Second there is the nature of the journey that the would-be cosmopolitan subJect
say 7oung men have also disappeared in Boston, Massachusetts; Portland,
must make in order to transcend parochial loyalties and become transnational. Mame; ~d Columbus, Ohio.
Appiah describes and celebrates the adventure and ideal ~f cosmopoli~ -
the movement of self-willing subjects away from 'segregat10n and seclusmn to (Cl\1.N, 12 December 2008)
shared cultural conversations as the only serious path to human civility and
For those of us who have striven to master the institutions and ideals of modern
comity (2006: xx). He recognizes that the problem of estrangement- the 'forei~-
E~ope and ha"."e assiduously cultivated our identities as postcolonial cosmo-
ness of foreigners, the strangeness of strangers' - is real enough, .but he resists politans, the actlons of people like Burhan Hassan trigger deep anxieties. Why
those who might exaggerate the significance and order of magrutude of these
would ~ey want to return to those places that now stand as empty shells of
problems (2006: xxi)? In the process, he also seem to minimize the fra~ht and mode;111ty, places where the only loyalties that matter are the most basic and
painful nature of the routes that take subjects out of cultural othe~ess mt? the ~chaic not those of nation or tribe, but Jes, the clan - the sign of an unmodern
ideals and institutions of cosmopolitanism, the journeys from the rrnpovenshed disorder.
and marginalized sectors of the global south to the ideals and institu~oXU: of The desires and values of Burhan Hassan, like those of the Islamist.s he
western Europe and the United States. In striving to position ideals and 1:1s?tu·
emulates, those who want to return Somalia to a deeper sense of itself outside
tions that are closely associated with Europe as the common goal of a divided
the tutelage of modernity and the infrastructure of colonialism seem to be at
humanity, Appiah seems to identify the cosmopolitan as the ~rivileged subject ~f
odds with everything that we postcolonial cosmopolitans hold dear. Indeed.
cultural goods and vocabularies that are only accessible to elites. Yet cosmopoli-
~ven in the ~etrop.o~tan spaces in which we perform our postcolonial identi~
tanism, as Ulf Hannerz has reminded us, is also 'a matter of varieties and levels'
ties and their requlSlte gestures of arrival, the existence of a mass of people
(1990: 239). . . who seem to hold on to what we consider archaic cultures lthose who wear
In regard to the politics or ethics of identity, a central ldea of cosmopolitan-
bhakas in classrooms, or slaughter sheep in the tubs of su~urb houses or
ism is that 'we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond th~se
'circum~e' _their daughters in hidden alleys) seem to disturb the temporali~ of
to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal tles postcol~nialism and the t~rms of its routing. Among the lower strata of migrant
of a shared citizenship' (Appiah 2006: xv); a condition of cosmopolitanism is the
?opulatJ.ons what we see JS not the fai;;ade of cosmopolitanism or multicultural-
'willingness to become involved with the Other, and the concern with a~evin.g JSm heralded by postcolonial elites, but signs of a radical attachment to older
competence in cultures which are initially alien' (Hannerz I 9~0: 2_40). Within this
cultural fo~ which seems to_ mock the politics ofpostcolonial identity, as Anna
logic, the route to cosmopolitanism is structured by the desire, if not th~ :ieed, Ball and Enn Goheen Glanville stress in their articles on the refugee diasporic
to understand the Other and establish a set of common values. But, surpnsmgly, . subject in this volume.
routes and journeys across boundaries and encounters with others do not neces- : It would be easy to dismiss people who are attached to the romance of the
sarily lead to a cosmopolitan attitude. Increasingly, the journeys that lead refugees places_ they have left behind and seek to recreate locality in the metropolis as
from the war zones of the global south, processes often prompted by the collapse archaic; we may throw up our hands in frustration at the refusal of refugees and
26 Simon Gikandi
Between roots and routes 27
migrants to take advantage of the cultural ~~ods offered ~y the modern west,
choosing instead to cling to parochial traditions _and. habits. We. ~ume that Said, ·~e characteristic figure of the twentieth century was the refugee and exile.
they do not meet the primary criteria of cosmor:olitarusm; that their mv:estm~t Both represented the underside of modernity and the failure of a discourse of
reason and rights.
in Woolf's 'unreal loyalties' has locked them up m narrow structures of identity;
and that the ties they cultivate are defined by kith and kin, not others. Abo;~ all, Reflecting on the mass dislocation of populations in Europe after the First
we seem to be troubled that their adherence to entrenched cultural or relig:tous World War in the Origi.ns ef Totali.taria.nism (1951, 1973), Arendt posited the
beliefs negates the dictum that true cosmopolitanism is predicated on the valua- stateless as the most obvious symptom of the decline of the culture of human
tion of differences and obligations to others. rights. A reflection on the condition of refugees produced by every event since
Yet, I'm not entirely convinced that this adheren~e to local loyalties necessary the First 'World War, Aren_dt noted, confronted students of modem politics with
negates the sense of obligation or even understanding of others. "What we have an unprecedented category of the stateless person forced to 'live outside the
here is a palpable clash between the desire to secure ~ocality and the claims of pale of the law' whose lives could not be 'renormalized' (286). Her description
universal being and becoming. "What appears to be a stnct adherence :o old loyal- of the stateless in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century might as
ties could be seen as the reflection of the prescribed journeys that bnng refugees well refer to the world of refugees produced by the postmodern civil wars
to the modem west, journeys which preclude the process of edu~tio_n and a~cul- witnessed in South-Eastern Europe and Africa after the end of the Cold War:
turation, the Bi/dung of modern life that makes ~beral cosmopoli~m possible.
Unlike elites whose engagement with metropolitan cultures begins ~ven before i.Vhat is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of
their arrival in Europe or North America, most refugees encounter this wor~d for finding a new one. Suddenly, there was no place on earth where migrants
the first time in the camps when they are being primed for life in those still ~ could go without the severest restrictions, no country where they would be
away places. For many refugees the idiom of ~ultural diff~ence_does not acq~e assi.mi)ated, no territory where they could found a new community of their
reality or value until they arrive at the holding centres m their new countnes. own. This, moreover, had nex.t to nothing to do with any material problem
Quite often, what appears to be the refugees' refusal or.in~bility to take_advantage of overpopulation; it was a problem not of space but of political organiza-
of ihe cultural goods of cosmopolitanism reflects amaeb.es and fears m the face tion. Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered
under the image of a family of nations, had reached the stage where whoever
of radical alterity. . . . .
I want to argue, then, that a discourse of cosmopolitarusrn remams mcomplete was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found
unless we read the redemptive narrative of being global in_ a contrap~ntal rela- himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.
tionship with the narrative of statelessness and, by r?production, oflocality, whe~e (Arendt, 293-4)
we least expect it - in the metropolis. The refugee :is ,the Other of the c?smopoli-
tan; rootless by compulsion, this figure is forced to develop an alternatlve ~arra- Here, the question of rights was connected to the loss of familiar localities and the
tive of global cultural flows, functioning in a third zone between metropolis '.'11d unreal loyalties scorned by Woolf and others. Indeed, for Arendt, the stateless
ex-colony, producing and reproducing localities in the centres of metropolitan persons crossing the boundaries of Europe after the treaty of Versailles repre-
culture itself. Missing the very states they fled in the first p:ace, re:ugees _do not sented the limit of modernity and formed 'the most symptomatic group in
contemporary politics' (238).
want to be cosmopolitan because they have no idiom for this expenence; mstead
they set out to demarcate a zone of ethnicity and ~ocali.ty. Yet they are global But social theory has not always considered homelessness to be the tragic fate
because they cannot return to their old spaces of identity and must somehow of the stateless. Indeed, in the period after the Second World War, the question of
learn to live outside both the nations that have rejected th= and those that have statelessness came to be transformed, especially in the thinking of European intel-
lectuals in exile, as a new and better condition of being, outside the prison house
adopted them. .. . .
In making this argument, it is not my intention to rehabilitate the discredited of nation, philology and tradition. For example, Theodor Adomo considered
postcolonial state or to argue for the phenomenological value of_rootedness, to exile to be transcendental, an existence outside the reified world of modem life
claim, after Simone Weil, that to be rooted is 'perhaps the most rmpo_rtant and and the prefabricated houses characterized by what he called the culture industry
least recognized need of the human soul' (2001: 43). What I propose :5 that we (1998: 120-4). Adomo insisted that the predicament of private life was evident
read cosmopolitanism under the sign of its own anxieties, the fear ofbe~g 01:-e ~f in the fact that the place of dwelling, the house as the arena of subjectivity, was
an impossibility:
the rootless crowd, and avoid the temptation to turn it ir:to a free :floatmg sigru-
fier of the moment of postcolonial arrival. My argument :is, of course, framed by
an earlier discourse on exile and the value of rootlessness. For some of the most The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait
distinguished thinkers of the modem period, from Hannah Arendt to Edward of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige
of shelter with the musty pact of family interests. [.. .] The house is past
28 Simon Gikimdi
&tween roots and routes 29
The bombings of European cities, as well as the labour and concentration 1:Il~ately, there is an inherent tension between the self-identity of postco-
camps, merely proceed as executors, ,vith what the immanent development Io~al elites an~ the peopl~ they claim to represent. For one thing, postcolonial
of technology had long decided was to be the fate of houses: !11ese ar_e now ;=lites are, by ~ e of their class, position or education, the major beneficiar-
good only to be throvm away like old food cans. The possibility of residence ies of the pro3ect of decolonization. As a matter of fact, one of the common
is annihilated by that of socialist society, which, once missed, saps the foun- :ea.sons why postcolonial elites end up in the American or European metropolis
dations of bourgeois life. [...] Today[ ...] it is part of morality not to be at IS because they were beneficiaries of the nationalism they would later come to
home in one's home. ~com. ~-deed, quite oft:n, these elites profited (directly or indirectly) from the
(1984: 38-9) mequalit:J.es and corrupt:J.on of the postcolonial state. At the same time however
the ~owth of elite diasp_o~ has been accompanied by mass migration of th~
Still the retreat into radical subjectivity that enabled Adorno and others to p~or mto the vyest an~ 1t ~ the presence of this latter group that compels the
embrace exile as what Said has called 'a redemptive motif was circumscribed elite ~ss to differ:entiate 1tself from what Antonio Gramsci would call 'the
and haunted by the very institutions it sought to transcend (1990: 364). In preceding e~ono=c structure' even when they are products of 'the develop-
other words confronted with an expansive map of displacement and 'an imper- ments of.th~ s~cture' (1957: 120). Since they cannot claim legitimacy from
sonal settin~', exile could not be made to 'serve notions of humanism'; on ~y associ.atlOn ,with the moral or political eeonomy of nationalism, postcolonial
the contrary, invocations of the aura of exile could not mask the horrors that eli1:s come to see themselves as autonomous and independent of the ruling
enabled it: social group' (120).
. It is this claim to autonomy and independence that makes cosmopolitanism an
Is it not true that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in reli- rmportant term for mediating the relationship between the roots that are denied
gion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irreme~ably secular o~ repressed and the routes that are taken. For from its very beginnings in the
and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human bemgs for other eighteenth cenmz:y to ti:ie present, cosmopolitanism has been pegged on the
human beings; and that, like death but without death's ultimate mercy, it autonomy -: tha: i.s, the mdependence - of the intellectual elite from the ruling
has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and class, especially m moments of crisis. As Thomas J Schlereth has noted in his
geography? ~dy of com:oJ?olitanism in the age of Enlightenment, one of the distinguish-
(Said 1994: 257-8) m~ characte~t:J.cs of the cosmopolitan ideal in the eighteenth century was 'an
attitud<; of ~d. tha.t ~tt~mpted to transcend chauvinistic national loyalties or
And yet, increasingly, in thinking about more recent dispersals of masses of parochial_.f:re3udices m its mtellectual interests and pursuits' {1977: xi'). The desire
people, we no longer seem to think of our world of refugees as 'unbearably to be a Cltlzen of the world, the hallmark of cosmopolitanism since Diogenes,
historical'. A prior ianguage of describing displacement and statelessness as a was prompted not by the love of the Other but by a negative imperative, what
threat to human rights has all but diminished as our focus has shifted to the ~oses Hadas aptly termed 'a rebellious reaction against every kind of coercion
redemptive narratives of global trade, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. imposed b?' the community upon the individual' (1943: I 08).
Qµite often, the new discourse of cosmopolitanism emerges in the process of The p~mt .r want to underscore here is that the larger universal claims of
differentiating the order of refugees from those of autonomous migrating cosmopolitamsm only make sense as an 'abstract faith' which becomes. in tum.
subjects. Thus Appiah makes his case for the redemptive narrative of cosmopoli- what M. H. Boehm once called 'a compromise with nationalism race c~nscious~
tan movement by drawing sharp distinctions betvveen 'the old migrants' and ness, pr?fessional interests, caste feeling, family prude, and ev~n with egotism'
'older diasporas' that 'began in an involuntary exile' and the celebratory stories (quoted m Schlereth, 1977: xiii). But this compromise is an important conduit for
of a cosmopolitan that 'flows from the free decisions of individuals or groups' understanding the tension between roots and routes that characterize the lives
(1996: 22). ofpostcolonial elites; for, when it is considered in a structural sense the cosmo-
My argument, however, is that global cultural flows are still dominated by politan ideal is caught between the desire to valorize one's culture' home and
those coerced migrants rather than the free-willing cosmopolitan subjects. The so~ position as essentially_good, while at the same time trying to p~rform ~ne's
figure of the refugee may not be as visible as that of the postcolonial flaneur, but ability to be tolerant of the strange and different. Tolerance here is performed
the refugee's presence in the heart of the metropolis challenges the redemptive for all sorts of contingent reasons including one's desire to maintain social status
narrative of postcolonial arrival. At the centre of this challenge are two issues: or to legitimize one's role as a native informant. After all, even when we find
First, there is the gro,vth in scale of violence and statelessness as conditions of the cultural practices of others repelling, our performance of understanding and
postcolonial identities. Second, there is the cultural blockage that refugees face as tolerance is essential to our identity as liberal cultural subjects (see Cheah and
they try to enter the orbit of cosmopolitanism. Robbins 1998).
30 Simon Gikmuli Between roots and ro'/1.tes 31
Let me provide an example. W. E. R DuBois -was an intellectual whose to become a primitive: 'No. I prefer New York. But my point is that New York
cosmopolitan credentials were continuously challenged by the spectre of race. and London and Paris must learn of West Africa and may learn' (128). If he
From the very beginning of his career, DuBois's project was nothing less than the h:d stayed longer and looked around Monrovia, DuBois would perhaps have
imagination of the black as a universal and cosmopolitan subject. Jill his major discovered that he had much more in common 'viii.th the Liberian intellectual
works were attempts to transcend the prison-house of race and to think through class :ban Vai and Cru sailors. Ifhe had spent time at Liberia College, founded
the possibility of the being and becoming of the black as human. Dubai.s's agony, by his mentor, Alexander Crummell, he might have found an intellectual
expressed most powerfully in The Souls efBl,ack Folk, was generated by the existence class engaged in the same project as members of the Talented Tenth in New
and persistence of race as the barrier between the self and its assumed universal York. He would have discovered that what aligned him to this intellectual class
identity, especially its striving 'to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to was not race or caste, but what one scholar has called 'an intellectual and aesthetic
escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent stance' (Hannerz 1990: 236).
genius' (1990: 9). . An:~tellec~al or aesthetic stance is crucial to understanding the degrees ofglobal
And yet, in spite of his universal and cosmopolitan aspirations, DuBois's project 1dent1t1es for 1t leads to the final question that interests me. Who qualifies for the
would not make sense except within the particularity of American culture. All term cosmopolitan? Writing at the height of the oil boom in Nigeria, the culture
his cosmopolitan desires his Anglo-Saxon intellectualism or Pan-Africanism, of petrodollar, Udoji and Wonyosi, UlfHannerz wondered whether 'cosmopoli-
for example were founded on an unquestioned claim to an American identity tanism' could be applied to traders from Lagos who went on shopping sprees to
and his adoption of European high culture as the national homeland of the London. He argued that these shopping trips did little to change the traders'
modern subject. Forced into the slot of cultural difference by racism, DuBois relationship to their local spaces or, indeed, their horizon of e,,.-pectations. When
still needed the spectre of the Other to enforce his cultural standing. He could Lagosian tra;=Iers and smugglers crossed borders, Hannerz argued, they hardly
find this difference in the hills of Tennessee, the streets of Philadelphia, or in West went 'beyond the horizons of urban Nigerian culture'; what they were engaged
Africa. This is how DuBois described the natives of Liberia that he encountered in was a process of 'assimilating items of some distant provenience into a funda-
on a 1923 trip: mentally local culture' (238). Was the process of globalization that was essential to
the lives and characters of Nigerian traders in London the same as the cosmo-
Then we came to the village; how can I describe it? Neither London, politanism of the intellectual elites who claimed to speak on their behalf? Or, as
nor Paris, nor New York has anything of its delicate, precious beauty. It I asked at the beginning of this essay, Do African refugees become cosmopolitan
was a town of the Veys and done in cream and pale purple - still, clean, :"'hen they cross boundaries even when it is apparent that many of them iare
restrained, tiny, complete. It was no selfish place, but the central abode of mcapable of, or simply disinterested in, the intellectual and aesthetic stance that
fire and hospitality, clean-swept for wayfarers, and best seats were bare. cosmopolitanism presupposes?
They quite expected visitors, morning, noon, and night; and they gave our These complicated questions and the level of generality that I have adopted
hands a quick, soft grasp and talked easily. Their manners were better than here does not necessarily lead to solid claims or conclusions. Still, there are two
those of Park Lane or Park Avenue. Oh, much better and more naturai. processes involved in the series of entanglements that I have been working with:
They showed breeding. The chiefs son tall and slight and speaking good those benveen roots and routes, refugees and elites, and globalization and cosmo-
English had served under the late Colonel Young. He made a little speech politanism. The first process involves the differentiation of globalization from
of welcome. Long is the history of the Veys and it comes down from the cosmopolitanism. Globalization emerges out of networks of trade, of culture,
Eastern Roman Empire, the great struggle of Islam and the black empires and eiq,eriences, in which the distant is assimilated into the familiar and local
of the Sudan. to facilitate exchange. Furthermore, globalization does not demand that we
(1984: 126) engage with the Other in any substantive sense. Indeed, African street traders
in New York or Paris do not necessarily conceive a radical disjuncture benveen
Here, DuBois was using the language of primitivism not only to understand their deep engagement with the mod= city and their commitment to their local
Liberian difference, but also to measure his worth as cosmopolitan subject. cultures. The Senegalese Mourid traverse the modern economy at the heart of the
He certainly valued Vai difference and history; but he also recognized that this western metropolis with apparent little interest in the culturai complexes around
was not his world, that it could only be embraced as a picture of the Other that them, leading scholars to describe them as vernacular cosmopolitans (Diop 2000,
was not himseJ£ DuBois's celebration of the Liberian primitive -was a form of Werbner 2006). There is no doubt that the Mourid are intensely global, but it is
distancing himself from cultural others while using them to maintain a cosmo• ?oubtful that they have cultivated a stance that would be described as cosmopolitan
politan identity. Dr DuBois -was not about to abandon the vestiges of civilization m the sense the t = has been used by its leading proponents.
32 Simon Gikzndi
Between roots a:nd routes 33
The second process that I'm interested in, then, is the inscription of cosmo-
and televisions, or, alternatively, of localities produced and reproduced in the
politanism as a state of mind and an aesthetic practice, ~ cultivate~ ~ensibility metropolitan centres. In this context, Appadurai argues that at the heart of the
.that underscores one's detachment from the local and ethnic and a willingness to
proj~ct of creating l~":31 knowle~ge is the difficulty of producing and reproducing
engage with the Other. Here I'm in general agreement with Hannerz _when he
locality .'under condin_ons of ~ety and entropy, social wear and flu..x, ecological
describes cosmopolitanism as 'a stance toward diversity' (239) and Appiah ':hen
uncertamty and co5:111c volatility' (181). But if the production oflocality is always
he insists on sustaining 'communities of difference' (2005: 105). Cosmopolitans surrou.-ided by amaety and entropy, how does one explain its attraction in an
are the flaneurs of our age, walking the •cities of the world, convinced that their
age of globalization? Why are people in failed states retreating from the centre to
identity can only be mirrored through their engagement with others, sure of their the region? 'Why are migrants recreating or simulating localities in the European
masterv of global cultural flows and their secure place within it. Still, as Hannerz and American metropolis?
again i; quick to note, the cosmopolitans' engagement with _the Other is enabled
There is an even more troubling question: Why do we now confront the
by their own privileged position within global culture. Unlike the refugees who
production oflocalities within metropolitan, urban centres, neighbourhoods that
opened my discussion, cosmopolitans are not stateless; they move freely across
~ve been produced by refugees and others within the most cosmopolitan cities
boundaries; they are autonomous subjects; they can choose when to engage m the world? In Seattle and Minneapolis, Cardiff and Nairobi, one encounters
with the Other and when to retreat. Above all, they function withi."l a discursive
neighbourhoods of Somali refugees and the first thing that one notices is how
formation, whati\lvin Goulder once called 'a culture of critical discourse' (quoted they have sought to produce Somaliness and to reproduce a Somalia identity
in Hannerz, 1990: 246). This critical discourse, of which terms such as cosmo- abroad (see Farah 2000). Logic would seem to go against this reconstruction
politanism and postcolonialism constitute a core ;o~bul~, is facilitat~d by the of locality; one would think that one of the reasons Somalis are refugees in the
media and institutions of interpretation among elites m different countnes. From
world,. leaving _aside the question of military dictatorship and the collapse of the
Lagos to New York, from Bombay to Cape Town, cosmopolitans are those w~o Som~ state, is because they could not agree on definitions and degrees of
share a critical discourse that is aesthetic in the sense that it seeks to transcend 1ts Somaliness. Yet, once ahroad, two generations of Somalis are involved in
'prosaic materiality' (de Man 1996: 90). In this aesthetic sense, cosmopolitanism the work that ensures the presence of the very Somaliness that was the cause of
becomes a form of phenomenalism in which members of a certain class can share deterritorialization in the first place. How do we explain the persistence of the
tastes and competences across national boundaries. etlme where one expects it to collapse in the face of cosmopolitanism?
\l\1here does the local fit into all this? One of the errors that perpetually We could argue, with Appadurai, that it is precisely because of their displace-
surrounds discussions of the local is to equate it with parochialism and funda- ment that Somali refugees seek ontological mooring in an imagined Somali etlme.
mentalism and thus to see it as a form of retreat from global cultural flows or ~'1ey reconstruct a 'local teleology and ethos' in the metropolis in order to ~ea!
to seek its meanings or value codings in phenomen?logical rather than episte- with roo~essness; here local knowledge is 'substantially about producing reliably
mological terms. Arjun Appadurai, to cite one famous example, views .10::ality local subJects as well as producing reliably local neighbourhoods within which
'as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial one such subjects can be recognized and organized' (1996: 181). We could debate
with 'a complex phenomenological quality' and a 'sense of immediacy' (1996: the means and ends of this project, but listening to local Somali talk radio in
178). But I'm not convinced that a phenomenological quality differentiates the Seattle, or Amhara call-in shows in Washington DC, or attending Kikuyu or
local from the global or the provincial from the cosmopolitan. In fact, an earlier Yo~ba ~en:ecostalist_ churc_hes in London or New York, one is struck by how
clainr was that cosmopolitanism, too, is defined by phenomenological proper- the imagmatron and crrculation oflocality creates, in a strictly phenomenological
ties, what Appadurai would call 'a structure of feelings that is produced ~ sense, secure and reliable neighbourhoods. .
particular forms of intentional activity and that yields particular sorts ofmatenal By the same token, cultivating a cosmopolita.."l identity is also an attempt
affects' (182). to deploy the resources of intellectual culture to produce and reproduce a
Still, one of the most perplexing and intriguing phenomenological aspects_ of subjectivity that is reliable and recognizable. Indeed, if the postcolonial elite
global movements is the survival oflocality outs~de natio1:al o: ethnic bound~es. ~as be~ome a major ~omponent of American and European high culture, it
Locality is no longer simply produced through ntuals of kinship or the production is precisely because of 1ts mastery of this culture as a tool for cultivating a reli-
of endogamous identities contained within narrow boundaries. On the co~trary, able postcolonial identity. To invoke postcoloniality is to clainr to be a citizen
locality itself has been globalized, its boundaries. dilated by ;11e .mass ~~ts of many cultures and nations; but it is to clainr rootlessness in order to position
that initiated my discussion. And thus the narratlve of globalizati.on and natlV:e o~eself in multiple cultural spaces and to have access to the goods that come
cosmopolitanism' comes to be saturated by images of what appear to be locali- with them. But by positioning itself as the stand-in for both metropolis and
ties functioning side by side with the insignia of globalization such as cell phones ex-colony, postcolonial cosmopolitanism conceals its own peculiar, particular,
34 Simon Giko:ndi
Between roots and routes 35
and often privileged entry into the world cultural system. By claiming to speak
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