Gurminder Bhambra - European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies

In sharp contrast to the anti-historical, methodological Eurocentrism that has permeated the greater part of scholarly work on Cosmopolitan Europe, this book applies a rare, lets call it, methodological cosmopolitanism to its subject matter. In so doing, it not only successfully challenges numerous assumptions and claims concerning the cosmopolitanism in and of Europe (and vice versa). As the books contributions amply testify, it also opens the door to a new, highly enlightening and thus utterly central empirical terrain for the field. This book is an achievement that should define the context for future research and intellectual debate.

Peo Hansen, Professor of Political Science at REMESO, Linkping University

At a time when the EU political project has been called into question as never before in its history, Bhambra and Narayans edited collection offers an insightful exploration of the hidden histories that have shaped cosmopolitan Europe, but are largely omitted by its historical canon. By recovering silenced histories, the book provides us with a novel perspective as well as expanded resources with which to address the challenges of our contemporary society.

Nando Sigona, Birmingham Fellow, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of IRiS, Univeristy of Birmingham

This book makes a bold and crucial intervention. It simultaneously challenges the complacencies of elite European self-understandings, whereby an official ideology of European cosmopolitanism in fact reinstates postcolonial historical denial and Eurocentric insularity and excavates the richly cosmopolitan histories of imperial Europes inseparability from anti-colonial cosmopolitanisms, that go beyond Europe. The critical insight and rigor of this collection is indispensable for any serious reflection on the questions of Europe and cosmopolitanism.

Nicholas De Genova, Reader in Human Geography, Kings College London

Whether as idea or ideology, cosmopolitanism has often been seen as the ethical rationale of the trade in goods and meanings. This book presents a far more interesting case for cosmopolitanism. Through intriguing historical narratives, incisive political analysis and sophisticated argument, the authors show that Europe if there ever was one is cosmopolitan at its origins. This not because of some ideational kernel of European thought, but because of the presence and practice of subjected and colonized peoples, on whom Europes imperial states always relied for its development and prosperity, yet whose part in Europe continues to be unrecognized. This is indispensable reading: a first truly cosmopolitan approach to the history and theory of cosmopolitanism.

Stefan Jonsson, Professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linkping University

This is an insightful, rigorous and well-timed book, highlighting the historical legacies behind the present migration crisis or the mourning for an enchanted multiculturalism, looking beyond Eurocentric self-reference. In the vast land of forgotten and silenced histories, the authors have found alternative narratives of cosmopolitanism that can help us to understand present European condition and the complex historical intertwinements that constitute it, offering an unconventional analysis of European cosmopolitanisms sources and ambivalences.

Paola Rebughini, Professor of Sociology and Intercultural Communication, University of Milan

European Cosmopolitanism

This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories which have rarely been at the forefront of such understandings. It also uses neglected historical resources to draw out new and unexpected entanglements and connections between understandings of European cosmopolitanism both in Europe and elsewhere. The final part of the book places European cosmopolitanism in tension with contemporary postcolonial configurations around diaspora, migration, and austerity. Overall, it seeks to draw attention to the ways in which Europes posited others have always been very much a part of Europes colonial histories and its postcolonial present.

Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor and Research Director of Sociology at the University of Warwick and Guest Professor of Sociology and History at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden. She is author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, which won the 2008 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book in Sociology, and Connected Sociologies.

John Narayan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. His research interests are in the fields of globalisation, pragmatism and post-colonialism. He is the author of John Dewey: The Global Public and its Problems.

International Library of Sociology

Founded by Karl Mannheim
Editors: John Holmwood and Vineeta Sinha

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European Cosmopolitanism
Colonial histories and postcolonial societies
Edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Narayan

Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies

Edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Narayan

First published 2017
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2017 Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Narayan

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