From every quarter we hear of a new global culture, postcolonial, hybrid, announcing the death of nationalism, the arrival of cosmopolitanism. But under the drumbeat attending this trend, Timothy Brennan detects another, altogether different sound. Polemical, passionate, certain to provoke, his book exposes the drama being played out under the guise of globalism. A bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism, it also takes note of the many countervailing forces acting against globalism in its facile, homogenizing sense. A critical call to arms, At Home in the World summons intellectuals and scholars to reinvigorate critical cultural studies. In stripping the false and headless from the new cosmopolitanism, Brennan revitalizes the idea.
Author(s): Timothy Brennan
Series: Convergences: Inventories of the Present
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 1997
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor optimized
Pages: 388
City: Cambridge, Mass.
Tags: cosmopolitanism; globalization; internationalism; cuban culture
At Home in the World
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Claims to Global Culture: America Abroad
Du Bois's Color and Democracy
The Public Face of the “Third-World” Writer
States of Theory and the Absence of States
2 Cosmopolitanism and Method
Explaining the Obvious: Paul Nizan
Cultural Studies and Colonial Progress
Anna Deveare Smith, or Authenticity
3 The Culture of the Transnational Corporation
If the Nation Is Dead, Why Doesn't Henry Kissinger Know It?
Julia Kristeva as George Orwell: The 1950s in the 1990s
Managerial Training Manuals: Transnational Nationalism
4 Cosmopolitanism and the Explorer’s Eye
The Sublimation of Poverty: New York’s Lower East Side
GATT Poetics and the Traveling Critic
The Literary in the Light of the Nobel Prize
A Few Thoughts on What the Postcolonial Leaves Out
5 Cosmopolitanism’s American Base: C. L. R. James in New York, 1950
Socialist Desire: Ernst Bloch in America
Cosmopolitanism, America, and the Cold War
The Struggle for Happiness
James’s Art
Exeptional Americanism
6 The World Cuban: Alejo Carpentier and Cuban Popular Music
From Paris to Havana
Ethnographic Surrealism: The Red and the Black
Salsa and the Cuban Image
Reading Mass Culture through Youth
The Indigenous and the In-Between
Conclusion
Notes
Index
