Pynchon & Cosmopolitanism

[ish mailian]

s global culture merely a pale and sinister reflection of capitalist
globalization? Bruce Robbins responds to this and other questions in
Feeling Global, a crucial document on nationalism, culturalism, and
the role of intellectuals in the age of globalization.

Building on his previous work, Robbins here takes up the question of
the status of international human rights. Robbins' conception of
internationalism is driven not only by the imperatives of global human
rights policy, but by an understanding of transnational cultures, thus
linking practical policy making to cultural politics at the expense of
neither. Robbins' cultural criticism, in other words, affords us much
more than an understanding of how culture "shapes our lives." Instead,
Robbins shows, particularly in his discussions of Martha Nussbaum,
Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Michael Walzer and others, how "culture"
itself has become a term that blocks—for commentators on both the
right and the left—serious engagement with the contemporary
cosmopolitan ideal of a nonuniversalist discourse of human rights.

Rescuing "cosmopolitanism" itself from its connotations of leisured
individuals loyal to no one and willing to sample all cultures at
will, Feeling Global presents a compelling way to think about the
ethical obligations of intellectuals at a time when their place in the
new world order is profoundly uncertain.


http://nyupress.org/books/9780814775141/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l