Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Conscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo  

Oleh:

Rooney, Caroline

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 46 no. 1 (Mar. 2011), page 139-155 .
Topik: Dambudzo Marechera; Mourid Barghouti; Alaa Al Aswany; Ahdaf Soueif; utopian cosmopolitanism; pariah elitism; metaphoricity
Fulltext: Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Conscious.pdf (331.73KB)

Isi artikel

This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphoricity (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif.

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