We Need New Priests

The African today is caught between a past s/he cannot recall, a present s/he is ill-equipped
to understand and a future s/he cannot contemplate. Chis Okechukwu Uroh.
Page | 1
brave new world;

imagine theres no country:
we need new priests.

on utopia, cosmopolitanism and the city.
on the artist-priest, freedom, the city and the obligation of
sacrifice.
on the fragmented self, postcolonial identity, crisis, hybridity
and multicultural trauma, also the inability to mourn.
amma birago
cosmopolitan is the new indigenous

and utopia a call to mourning.
Cosmopolitanism is, in identity terms, betwixt and between without being liminal.
It is shifting, participating in many worlds without becoming part of them. - Friedman
Page | 2
proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition

to insanity - accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations,
Madness and Colonization:
Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962,
Richard Keller
The normal role for the modem creative writer is to be an exile... Deracination has become almost
a prerequisite of intellectual distinction' (p. 13). ' and suggested that the triple uprooting from home, language
and culture resulted in the immigrants and the immigrant writers having 'modernism forced upon' them.'
Gn Orgun
Mukherjee and Rushdie in Through Travelled Eyes
the interpretation of trauma and sovereignty in the postcolonial era

... hierarchies of development, evolution, progress - that are inextricable colonial domination of much of the globe
in the first half of the century and the legacies of that domination in the second half.
Unconscious Dominions:
Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.
Matthew M. Heaton
Discontinuity with a colonial past is impossible, most so in the psychic and affective realm where ironically, its
erasure is also most sought. Its residues linger in the unconscious memory, which is the constitutive bedrock of
conscious existence (9). It inflects the everyday mundane existence without necessarily bringing attention to itself.
It creates an inexplicable longing, a puzzling circulation of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression .
On The Colonial/Post-Colonial Subject.
Postcolonial identity in a globalizing India.
Sangeet Kumar
that the experiential space of the individual no longer coincides with national space,
but is being subtly altered by the opening to cosmopolitanisation should not deceive
anyone into believing we are all going to become cosmopolitans.
Ulrich Beck
On the political level, the partial release from traditional bonds and
the protective frame of the nation-state may be perceived as a loss of accountability
given that there are not yet equivalents to the vanishing power monopoly
of the state on the transnational or global level.
Cosmopolitan attitudes through transnational social practices?
Steffen Mau, Jan Mewes and Ann Zimmermann
Page | 3
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless,

indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The revival of cosmopolitanism to which Martha Nussbaum, among others, has made significant contributions also
reflects an urge to go beyond the postmodern and multicultural imprisonment in difference and realize our common
humanity. But the pointer to our common humanity by the prevalent discourses does not sufficiently embody the
pain and suffering of crying humanity as it has been and is being subjected to a series of violations and colonial
violence.
Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards a Multiverse of Transformations
Ananta Kumar Giri
On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Pramod K. Nayar
"Thus, no utopia can be without an implicit or explicit theory of suffering. This is especially so in the peripheries of
the world, euphemistically called the third world (21). Nandy goes on to say that "to have a meaningful life in the
minds of men, such a utopia must start with the issue of man-made suffering, which has given the third world both
its name and uniqueness" (Traditions 21).

Ananta Kumar Giri
Ethical cosmopolitanism refers to our belonging to the world in terms of some duties and obligations. For the Stoics
we are not just members of our city states but citizens of the world. However, this does not mean building a world
state. As Nussbaum helps us understand: The point is more radical still: that we should give our first moral
allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power. We should give it instead to moral community made
up by the humanity of all beings (Nussbaum, 1997: 8). This does not mean abandonment of local affiliations but
realization that as human beings we are surrounded by a series of concentric circles (ibid.: 9). Stoic cosmopolitans
acknowledged the divisive role of politics and challenged us to develop empathetic understanding whereby we
come to respect the humanity of our political enemies (ibid.). A favoured exercise in this process of world thinking
is to conceive of the entire world of human beings as a single body (ibid.: 10). Stoic cosmopolitanisms were also
concerned with peace and they took cosmopolitanism to require certain international limitations upon the conduct
of warfare (ibid.: 11).
violence.
Though Stoic cosmopolitanism always emphasized education and enlightenment of the passions for cultivating
cosmopolitanism - what Nussbaum (1997) calls passional enlightenment - modern projects of cosmopolitanism
from Kant to Habermas and on to Ulrich Beck have been primarily epistemic and have not sufficiently addressed the
ontological challenges of appropriate self-preparation and self-transformation for belonging to and creating a
cosmopolitan world. There is also the discourse of cosmopolitanism from below to counter the elitist
cosmopolitanism from above but this does not interrogate the foundations of contemporary cosmopolitanism itself,
for example to ask whether it is primarily epistemic, ethnocentric, anthropocentric and imperial.
Page | 4
In this context the multiverse of transformations that contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism are confronted
with. It submits that cosmopolitanization1 as an ongoing process of critique, creativity and border-crossing involves
transformations in self, culture, society, economy and polity. Cosmopolitanization involves multi-dimensional
processes of self-development, inclusion of the other, and planetary realizations (Giri, 2004a). In the field of selfdevelopment, cosmopolitanization involves development of a transcendental self, transnational citizenship, and
cultivation of our cosmic humanity.
Ananta Kumar Giri
"The world is as it were the common home
of the gods and humans, the city that belongs to both."
The Stoic Balbus
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never
lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.
That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison.
Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine

In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices
and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription
and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor,
private property, and money,
The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state

ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde
of the many parochial Stoics
Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal
Thomas Pangle.
In contrast, the life of the wise, because it is a life centred on devotion to moral virtue as the end in itself, is a life
spent chiefly in performance of the "perfect duties." By thus living in obedience to the law of nature or reason, the
wise man becomes the true friend of the gods, and their only true priest, the knower of the proper sacrifices, to
whom the gods communicate divinations of the future through dreams and scientific auguries, and whose soul they
may preserve after death, at least until the next cosmic conflagration. The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a
cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde
Socratic Cosmopolitanism:
Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal
Thomas Pangle.
Colonial Intersections and the Ideology of Cosmopolitanism

The status of cosmopolitanism as a hegemonic, ideological aspect of the global marketplace is integrally related to
this colonialist legacy and its historically shifting constructions of the destinations for culturally enriching travel.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European cultural elites regarded travel (often with expert
guides) to the sites of classical antiquities and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Renaissance as
essential to the preparation of young men for the responsibilities of empire (Adler 1989; Towner 1985). By the
nineteenth century, the symbolic associations among travel, self-development, and the cultivation of worldliness had
Page | 5
become well established in the class consciousness of European elites.
Cosmopolitanism. Wikipedia.
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared
morality. Cosmopolitanism may entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to more inclusive
moral, economic, and/or political relationships between nations or individuals of different nations. A person who
adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan or cosmopolite.[1]
The cosmopolitan (Kosmopolit) obeys all the laws of the state in which he lives, to whose wisdom, legitimacy and
common utility he adheres in his role as a citizen of the world (Weltbziigqei'), and he submits to the rest in the realm
of necessity. He is certainly in agreement with his own nation, but he is equally so with all others as well, and is
therefore not prepared to found the well~being, glory and greatness of his homeland on intentional harming or
oppression of other states. (Wieland, 1830: 217 - 18)
Daniele Archibugi. Immanuel Kant, Cosmopolitan Law and Peace
Alain Touraine. Society as Utopia.

Utopia was really born only when the political order
separated from the cosmological or religious order.

Pramod K. Nayar
Introducing Daoism. Cosmos, Gods, and Governance. Livia Kohn

Creating order in the universe accordingly meant matching the cosmic phases and pacifying the various gods and
demons, aligning self and society in a larger context that included everything from the stars through the gods to the
lowly creatures of Earth. The vision of ultimate harmony, then, was described in terms of Great Peace, a state of
complete openness and pervasion of all.
Page | 6
Cosmopolitanism is a conception of multiculturalism as maximum freedom, for minority as well as majority

individuals, to mix with, borrow and learn from all (whether they are of your group or not) so individual identities
are personal amalgams of bits from various groups and heritages and there is no one dominant social identity to
which all must conform. The result will be a society composed of a blend of cultures, a multiculture.
The Strange Non-Death of Multiculturalism
Tariq Modood
On Cosmopolitanism
Nandys notion of cosmopolitanism is by far the most fascinating. In his essay Nandy first offers a critique
of the current forms and modalities of cultural exchange and dialogue. Nandy notes that the dominant
official mode of dialogue excludes the disowned or repressed West (1998: 146). But why is this
important?
Nandy proposes that a new cosmopolitanism would benefit from retrieving what has been repressed in the
West. Nandys cosmopolitanism critiques the prevalent ones because, for him, the present concept of
cosmopolitanism considers Western culture to be definitionally universal and therefore cosmopolitan
(146). What is needed urgently is to locate and retrieve the suffering (i.e., the repressed) in the West itself.
As we shall see, this has important consequences for a new cosmopolitan philosophy.
cosmopolitanism is, in identity terms, betwixt and between

without being liminal. It is shifting, participating in many worlds
without becoming part of them the cosmopolitan is unauthentic
and quintessentially modern Jonathan Friedman.
Cultural Identity and Global Process
Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business.

Page | 7
It is, in effect, a kind of exile from the comfort of local truths, from the warm nestling feelings of patriotism,
from the absorbing pride in oneself and ones own. Cosmopolitanism offers no such refuge;
it offers only reason and the love of humanity.
Martha Nussbaum
It creates an inexplicable longing, a puzzling circulation of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression (11).
On The Colonial/Post-Colonial Subject. Postcolonial identity in a globalizing India by Sangeet Kumar on
Albert Memmi
We Nations of Europe, I thought, who do not fear to floodlight our own inmost mechanisms, are here turning the
blazing lights of our civilization into dark eyes, essentially different to ours. If for a long enough time we continue in
this way to dazzle and blind the Africans, we may in the end bring upon them a longing for darkness, which will
drive them into the gorges of their own, unknown mountains and their own, unknown minds.
Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa.
Africa is primitive because it is the land of genuine beings, unspoiled, original, unadulterated and
close to life. But the other aspect of the meaning of primitivism is demeaning and self defeating: those held to be
genuine are so because they are starkly underdeveloped.
Post-Colonialism, Memory and the Remaking of African Identity
Idowu William
"disposing of dangerous African employees."

Finally, they offered "evidence of the civic virtue of settler societies," proving the ultimately
philanthropic nature of colonialism through their symbolic value. 40
By the end of the nineteenth century, the British colonial press lamented the problem of mad Nigerians roaming the
streets of Lagos, and called upon authorities simultaneously to preserve public order and to take pity on deranged
Africans. A lunatic ward at the Lagos prison became quickly overcrowded, and as public madness became more
visible by the early twentieth century (with an increasing British presence in the colony), officials passed a lunacy
ordinance in 1906 stipulating the construction of specialized institutions for confining the insane.
The desire of the colonizer for the colony is transparent enough,
but how much more difficult it is to account for the inverse longing of the colonized.
How, as Memmi queries, could the colonized deny himself so cruelly How could he hate
the colonizers and yet admire them so passionately? (1968, p. 45)
Postcolonial identity in a globalizing India by Sangeet Kumar on Albert Memmi
in the West they are known through the Africa they offer,
their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and through
an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa (63).
The Trauma of a Diminished Existence: Chinua Achebe Revisited

Page | 8
Angela Lamas Rodrigues
Deracination has become almost a prerequisite of intellectual distinction' (p. 13). Rushdie, who proposed
migration as a 'metaphor for all humanity, ' and suggested that the triple uprooting from home, language and culture
resulted in the immigrants and the immigrant writers having 'modernism forced upon' them.
immigrant experience in the contemporary world, and its consequent link with the dominant modes of
thought and writing of the day, which Rushdie describes as modernism
This is an extract from Imaginary Homelands,' the article in which Rushdie elaborates on the idea of the
universality and relevance of the immigrant experience in the contemporary world, and its consequent link with the
dominant modes of thought and writing of the day, which Rushdie describes as modernism.
Gn Orgun on Mukherjee and Rushdie in Through Travelled Eyes
After describing the psychosocial implications of migrating from the colony to the metropolis, he states that 'in
varying degrees, the normal role for the modem creative writer is to be an exile... Deracination has become almost a
prerequisite of intellectual distinction' (p. 13). This is a common enough observation, made over and over again by
an exiled writer like Rushdie, who proposed migration as a 'metaphor for all humanity, ' and suggested that the triple
uprooting from home, language and culture resulted in the immigrants and the immigrant writers having 'modernism
forced upon' them.
Idowu William
the concept of identity is itself problematic and transient,
and the qualifier African is changing and slippery, it engulfs the nature of African identity in an engaging
process of re-invention: African identity is no more than a potentiality, not an actuality.
Eric Brown on Martha Nussbaum and the stoic invention of cosmopolitan politics.
Martha Nussbaum Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business. It is, in effect, a kind of exile from
the comfort of local truths, from the warm nestling feelings of patriotism, from the absorbing pride in oneself and
ones own. . . . Cosmopolitanism offers no such refuge; it offers only reason and the love of humanity.
Timothy Brennan (1997) has recently argued that this canonization of the cosmopolitan reproduces the Western
colonial image of the rational, autonomous individual, whose repressed (and oppressed) other remains tied to land,
labor, and home. Although ostensibly endorsing a relativistic embrace of cultural diversity, this postcolonial form of
cosmopolitanism both sustains and masks the hierarchal pattern of North-South power relations established through
colonialism.
the stoic invention of cosmopolitan politics
Eric Brown
Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma,

and Global Sovereignties. A review by Matthew M. Heaton
Page | 9
psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma and sovereignty in the postcolonial era

... hierarchies of development, evolution, progress - that are inextricable
from the context of European colonial domination of much of the globe in the first half of the century
and the legacies of that domination in the second half.
two intertwined goals: the first is to illustrate that in historical terms the categorization of human societies
under colonialism and the formation of the modern psychoanalytic subject are inseparable (p. 4). Secondly, the
volume aims to uncover the extent to which the colonialist discourses on psychoanalytic subjectivity have
influenced transcultural interactions well into the era of globalization (p. 5). Several essays in this volume
therefore seek to recover a specific political potential in psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma and sovereignty,
in the postcolonial era (p. 3).

The first utopias we know were fabricated in Greece; and in spite of their repeated efforts at confederation, the
Greeks were never able to conceive of a human commonwealth except in the concrete form of a city. Even
Alexander had learned this lesson so well that at least part of the energies that might have gone into wider or more
rapid conquests went into the building of cities. In return, every member of the community was obliged to
perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription
and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money, the utopias of
More, Cabet, and Bellamy all reverted to the primitive condition of this aboriginal urban organization: a managed
economy under the direction of the king.
Cynics, the most famous of whom was the Diogenes who is reputed to have
lived in a barrel, who is said to have been the first to use (applying it to himself) the term
"citizen of the world" or "cosmopolite, cosmopolitan,"
Thomas Pangle.

Pramod K. Nayar
A medical definition of the "other" thus mattered far less to the operation of colonial regimes than it did to modern
Page | 10
European states, as racial difference provided a clear social fault line. Finally, as colonial administrators were more
concerned with group identities than individuals, medical knowledge emphasized the definition of "normal" rather
than pathological Africans. 37
Most theorists about African madness felt that civilization itself brought psychic disturbances to "deculturated"
Africans who were unprepared for rapid progress. The highest proportion of psychiatric patients belonged to the
intelligentsia (who had the closest contact [End Page 306] with Europeans), and sexual dysfunction followed the
introduction of clothing to certain tribes. In contrast, those who remained in traditional situations showed a low
incidence of insanity, according to physicians like J. C. Carothers, who founded an East African psychiatric
"School" in the 1930s. Carothers found that traditional cultures "relieved individuals of responsibility," but that
depressive patients tended to be wracked by guilt: clear evidence that civilization facilitated madness.
this global intelligentsia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition of its own classposition in global capitalism, it can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices
of resistance against the system of which it is a product
The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.
Arif Dirlik

to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations, .
Idowu William
we need new priests:
to have a nation is to have an altar for sacrifice,
and so is identity and belonging.
the postcolonial artist as cosmopolitan is priest.
British ethnopsychiatrists were watching a world being born,

uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects set loose from a grounding tradition into an advancing civilization.
doctors like Carothers and Robert Cunynham Brown noted in their surveys of Nigerian institutions that proximity
to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of
asylum populations, this awareness did not hinder these same individuals from developing theories about African
insanity based on this limited population sample.
McCulloch argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who were themselves largely drawn from settler society)
"were watching a world being born," where uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding
tradition into an advancing civilization.
Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962
Richard Keller
Page | 11
Multiculturalism or Transculturalism: Towards a Cosmopolitan Citizenship.

These unchanging realities of our modern world, coupled by the fact that time and space are no longer
insurmountable barriers have fuelled an urgency, especially within the last fifty years of the 20th century, in
providing a model for cultural harmonization or at the very least cultural understanding, in the process of human
interaction for our new century.
Multiculturalism: The Loss of Culture
R. P. Ben Dedek
The recognition that modern societies are no longer monolithic, that the imaginary social space has mushroomed
into a multitude of identities has propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality,
transculturalism and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan citizenship can become a reality.
Donald Cuccioletta Ph.D.
Impurity is the order of the day.
The we and you, include also the he and the she of all linguistic groups, of all nationalities,
of all the sexes. We are of all the cultures. Each person is a mosaic.
Guy Scarpetta, Limpurit
Culture, Multi-culture or Trans-culture.


and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for
Page | 12
the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money,

Lewis Mumford. Utopia,

The City and The Machine
Before the mid-eighteenth century, approximately, the practice of utopists,
following Plato, was to present their imaginary societies like Athena, sprung fully formed from the brow of their
creator, perfected in every detail.
But the city was, from the beginning, related to the newly perceived cosmic order: the sun, the moon, the planets, the
lightning, the storm wind. In short, as Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen pointed out a century ago, the city was
primarily a religious phenomenon: it was the home of a god, and even the city wall points to this super-human
origin;
This cosmic orientation, these mythic-religious claims, this royal preemption of the powers and functions of the
community are what transformed the mere village or town into a city: something "out of this world," the home of a
god. the city itself was transmogrified into an ideal form a glimpse of eternal order, a visible heaven on earth, a
seat of the life abundant in other words, utopia.

Pramod K. Nayar

Thomas Pangle.
when he was asked where you come from?

I am a citizen of the world.
But Diogenes fancied himself citiless, homeless, deprived of a fatherland,
and it is not easy to see where his commitment to world-citizenship goes beyond this rejection of more local
citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so
much as the worldliness of a nomad.
Page | 13
Eric Brown
the title 'polis' to no ordinary human community.5
But according to the Stoics, the cosmos as a whole is put in order by right reason,
and it is a place where human beings live. So the cosmos as a whole
does satisfy the definition of 'polis'.
This is the Stoic doctrine of the cosmopolis.6 Because it rests on normative ideals that far outstrip what ordinary
practice manages to satisfy, one might well assume that the Stoic who strives to live as a citizen of the cosmopolis
would have to turn away from ordinary politics. On this assumption, "living as a citizen of the cosmos" would be
nothing more than a metaphor for living in agreement with the right reason that pervades nature- just a metaphor for
living a good human life as Stoicism understands it. Seneca interprets the doctrine of the cosmopolis in this way
when he insists, in De Otio, that the original Greek Stoics justified a life of withdrawal from political engagement on
the grounds that no extant city satisfies the Stoic standards of a true political community.7
Eric Brown
On this account, postmodern consumers live as tourist citizens who delight

in traversing the world (via travel, media consumption, and immersion in hyperrealist simulations),
gladly paying for the right to spin webs of meaning all their own (Bauman 1996, p. 53).
Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962
Richard Keller
to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations, ...
McCulloch's Colonial Psychiatry and "the African Mind" British discourse about the normal African mind
his analysis to include psychiatric ventures throughout the continent, and to account for the specific ways European
mental medicine changed scientific parameters to produce an inferior African through the mind, rather than the
body. Where he falters is in his attempt to provide a comprehensive account of both British and French efforts to
capture the "African mind" through scientific investigation, and in the problematic parallels he consequently draws
between fundamentally different contexts.
the majority of patients treated in asylums were Africans who found the psychological transition from a rural
agricultural tradition to urban wage labor insurmountable. McCulloch argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who
were themselves largely drawn from settler society) "were watching a world being born," where uprooted (or
Page | 14
"deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding tradition into an advancing civilization.
McCulloch asserts that their purpose was less to preserve social order than it was to serve three political
functions. First, like their metropolitan counterparts, colonial asylums empowered physicians by giving medicine
free and exclusive reign over madness. Second, these institutions provided settler communities with a location for
"dumping" their own insane relatives as well as [End Page 307] for "disposing of dangerous African employees."
Finally, they offered "evidence of the civic virtue of settler societies," proving the ultimately philanthropic nature of
colonialism through their symbolic value. 40 the majority of patients treated in asylums were Africans who found
the psychological transition from a rural agricultural tradition to urban wage labor insurmountable. McCulloch
argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who were themselves largely drawn from settler society) "were watching a
world being born," where uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding tradition into an
advancing civilization. Although doctors like Carothers and Robert Cunynham Brown noted in their surveys of
Nigerian institutions that proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition to insanity-accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations, this awareness did not hinder these same individuals from
developing theories about African insanity based on this limited population sample.
Carothers noted similarities between published accounts of leucotomized Europeans and his own observations of
African patients at Mathari, and this led him to conclude that inferior development (or at least employment) of the
brain's frontal lobes was common in Africans. He also proffered cultural theories for African inferiority that
modernized obsolete physiological determinants by demonstrating how African cultural phenomena reinforced racial
inferiority. "[I]ntellectual and social impoverishment" stunted the African child's development, and a poor capacity
for individuation preserved "the African's" mind in a childlike state. And while education could change some
environmental stimuli for Africans, African culture, according to Carothers, remained nearly as fixed as race: this
culture was tied so closely "physical setting and genetic disposition" that it trapped cognitive development
effectively enough to render British civilizing efforts futile. Theories like these justified settlers' projections of their
own violent tendencies onto Africans (one of McCulloch's more controversial points), and pointed to the
unsuitability of the African temperament for political leadership. (Expensive) education was harmful for Africans,
psychiatrists argued, and democratic institutions would be impossible given the African "inability to accept
responsibility...[and] predisposition to mental illness." 41
McCulloch's most important conclusion is that ethnopsychiatrists, governments, and settler societies alike attributed
indigenous political protests more to psychological impulsiveness than to any legitimate claim for enfranchisement.
Strong archival and published sources support such claims about British psychiatric endeavors in Africa and
McCulloch's assertions about British theories of an "African mind."
Richard Keller
The fundamental fact

Ulrich Beck
Page | 15
Idowu William
colonialism.
Eric Brown
As I hope this discussion will show, despite his claims, Achebe is still very much imprisoned in the crossroads of
two cultures, not so much as a victim of the colonial and post-colonial predicament, but as a representative of what
Kwame Appiah has called a comprador intelligentsia, that is, a relatively small, Western-style, Westerntrained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the
periphery (62): in the West they are known through the Africa they offer, their compatriots know them both
through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and
for Africa (63).
citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so
much as the worldliness of a nomad.
On this account, postmodern consumers live as tourist citizens who delight
in traversing the world (via travel, media consumption, and immersion in hyperrealist simulations),
gladly paying for the right to spin webs of meaning all their own (Bauman 1996, p. 53).
Page | 16
The Language Question and the Place of Education: Contrasting Views

Achebes politics of language can be better understood in the context of the many political positions on the language
question in Africa. As is well known, Achebe is not alone in his defense of English. The hegemonic status of
European languages is endorsed by numerous African writers, critics and politicians who consider their use in
African countries, official or otherwise, as an inevitable and necessary pathway leading to the modernization of the
continent and its urgent integration into the contemporary/globalized world. There are also those who ponder on the
need to acknowledge the cultural and personal gains of the contact with modern languages. This is the case, for
example, of Abiola Ireles famous In Praise of Alienation, whose main arguments I would like to recall. In his
view, Africans are profoundly ambivalent in relation to Europe, being simultaneously resentful of the alienation
caused by colonialismand therefore willing to recover a lost African identityand incurably affected by European
modernity and by what is usually called Western culture.
For Irele, it is crucial that Africans overcome this ambivalence by replacing that pathological alienation with a
positive one. In other words, the negative alienation provoked by colonialism should be transcended not through a
return to tradition, but through a total capitulation to European modernity: In the historical context of present
African development, we may now ask, Alienation for what, and in what direction? I will answer that question
unequivocally: as a matter of practical necessity, we have no choice but in the direction of Western culture and
civilization (215).
Recent post-colonial discourses are replete with controversies over

the nature of African identity. though identity is an endangered concept,
the particularity of African identity can still be salvaged.
of resistance against the system of which it is a product.
"Postcoloniality," Appiah writes, "is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia."
36 I think this is missing the point because the world situation that justified the term comprador no longer exists. I
would suggest instead that postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism. The question,
then, is not whether this global intelligentsia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition
of its own class-position in global capitalism, it can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and
formulate practices of resistance against the system of which it is a product.
Arif Dirlik
There would be no man or liberty, no history or individual" (12).

A cut is required, both Nancy and Bataille suggest, a circumcision, to institute "Man" (and "animal"),
"the West," "the rest of humanity," and so forth. The "distanced and repetitive relation" that such a situation implies
presupposes a "mimetic rupture," or cut, between "the West" and its other.
Page | 17


and Global Sovereignties. A review by Matthew M. Heaton

"Postcoloniality," Appiah writes, "is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia."
36 I think this is missing the point because the world situation that justified the term comprador no longer exists. I
would suggest instead that postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism. The question,
then, is not whether this global intelligentsia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition
of its own class-position in global capitalism, it can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and
formulate practices of resistance against the system of which it is a product.
Arif Dirlik

Pramod K. Nayar
Page | 18
Thomas Pangle.
Richard Keller
the close connections between colonial medicine and power-the importance of medical knowledge for colonial conquest. 11
"[t]he physician, if he understands his role,
is the primary and the most effective of our agents of penetration and pacification."
French conqueror of Morocco Hubert Lyautey admitted in 1933
colonial psychiatry allied itself closely to civilizing missions as it assembled knowledge
about "indigenous psychologies" that facilitated rule.
a third literature that the study of colonial mental health care expands. Much of the recent scholarship in postcolonial studies focuses intently on the specific psychological problems of the colonial predicament. Unlike Frantz
Fanon, however, who argued that colonialism breeds psychopathology and necessitates liberatory violence, and
Octave Mannoni, who asserted that colonialism relies on internalized and pathological notions of dependency on the
part of the colonized, a more recent wave of studies in colonial psychology examines subtler mechanisms of
domination. Freudian, Eriksonian, and object relations theories provide the tools for examining the meanings of
ambivalence for colonial psychology, for example. According to one interpretation, a mythology of British heroism
in the face of native criticism shielded late Victorian military men and civil servants from the seductions of a
"magical Orient." 13 Another critic reveals the duplicity of British promises to colonial subjects. Official policies
encouraged the "Anglicization" of Indians, but in practice many British colonials found any attempt by Indians to
emulate them profoundly threatening: imitation was the sincerest form of mockery.
Sources in the history of colonial psychiatry reveal a great deal about

what psychiatric practitioners, judges, police, families, and neighbors considered "pathological" in the
colonial context, thereby shedding light on the "normal" as well. As the works discussed here show,
definitions of mental normality and pathology preoccupied medical and lay colonizers.
Even though many British and French psychiatrists ignored the role played by colonialism in psychological
relationships between colonizer and colonized, their writings remain historically important because of the ways they
did address psychology: through accounts of dysfunction that they localized in "the indigenous mind," and almost
never in a culture of political and racial oppression.
This scholarship is intriguing, but much of it remains highly speculative. Although laying a psychoanalytic grid over
historical evidence can be informative, [End Page 297] this methodology often proves limiting, and reveals far less
about the psychology of the colonial predicament than it obscures. Scholarship on colonial psychiatry opens a new
window into this important historical problem, and offers significant if ambiguous evidence about "colonial
psychology." Sources in the history of colonial psychiatry reveal a great deal about what psychiatric practitioners,
judges, police, families, and neighbors considered "pathological" in the colonial context, thereby shedding light on
the "normal" as well. As the works discussed here show, definitions of mental normality and pathology preoccupied
medical and lay colonizers. While colonial psychiatric work may reveal little scientific "truth" about psychology, the
practice of colonial mental health care provided a venue for discussing colonial psychology explicitly, and therefore
Page | 19
constitutes an essential location for scholars grappling with this important historiographical problem. Even though
many British and French psychiatrists ignored the role played by colonialism in psychological relationships between
colonizer and colonized, their writings remain historically important because of the ways they did address
psychology: through accounts of dysfunction that they localized in "the indigenous mind," and almost never in a
culture of political and racial oppression.
the functions of race for colonialism.
Whereas historians of Europe and the United States have noted the importance of gender and class as locations for
examining the social implications of psychiatry, in the colonial context race is the paramount category for social
analysis. Certainly race figures in European and American psychiatry as well: American psychosurgeon Walter
Freeman singled out African-Americans and Jews as particularly good subjects for lobotomy, and Freud focused
intently on race and mentality in Totem and Taboo, to note just two examples. But colonialism raises different
questions. Psychiatrists provided scientific justifications for racist policy.
Readers are forced to turn to other sources for clues about psychiatric developments in this period. Although they
address psychoanalysis rather than psychiatry, Christiane Hartnack and Ashis Nandy have produced important works
that examine the political implications of the psycho-sciences in the context of the independence struggle.
Ashis Nandy's essay on "The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves
in Colonial India" expands Hartnack's investigation. 32 Nandy begins by questioning why psychoanalysis has
suffered such an ambiguous fate in twentieth-century India. He responds with a careful examination of
psychoanalytic culture in India at the moment of its inception.
In sub-Saharan Africa, tropical diseases represented a much more immediate threat than mental illness, and therefore
colonial authorities found epidemic health care and vaccinations more pressing than psychotherapy. Economic
considerations also played an important role. No equivalent of the British East India Company provided private
financing for hospitals, and beleaguered administrations often followed a laissez-faire policy for both indigenous
and European populations. In indigenous communities throughout Africa, harmless fous were left to their own
devices (usually under family or communal care), and authorities often confined dangerous alins in prisons. As for
Europeans, the wealthy sought private care either in the colonies or in the Metropole, and poor whites usually
suffered the same neglect as natives.
Officials fretted about how to define insanity in an alien culture, and psychiatrists from both British and French
schools published widely on "indigenous psychopathology" and the political and social implications of "the African
mind." These doctors also cared for European patients, but their preoccupation was the identification and
classification of madness in Africans. Although the first studies of African mentalities date from the mid-nineteenth
century, then, the inauguration of psychiatric institutions that functioned as virtual laboratories for documenting
madness across cultures began a period of officially sanctioned ethnopsychiatric inquiry.
These historians also suggest that psychiatric knowledge found a political outlet in a number of important cases
throughout the twentieth century. Doctors and administrators often described acts of political defiance as
manifestations of mass insanity. Finally, these scholars emphasize the failure of European methods to cure local
mental illnesses. Whereas psychiatrists in India treated their European patients somewhat effectively by importing
European methods, subsequent efforts to transfer a technology for managing insanity to Africa met with miserable
failure, as insufficient resources and cultural misunderstanding impeded any program for healing African patients.
As Foucault argues, the transition to modernity brought the dialogue between sanity and madness to a standstill, and
the power of reason thereafter identified, categorized, and dominated the irrational "other" within European society.
Megan Vaughan finds significant contextual differences for this dialogue in Nyasaland in Curing Their Ills:
Colonial Power and African Illness. European medicine may have "played an important part in constructing 'the
African' as an object of knowledge, and elaborated classification systems and practices which have to be seen as
intrinsic to the operation of colonial power." At the same time, colonial administrations operated through direct
subjugation and active domination rather than through the "productive power" that Foucault dissected in modern
European societies. While liberal democracies rely on individual self-policing inscribed through educational,
Page | 20
medical, and judicial discourses, colonial societies actively police their subjects through direct repression of
political, criminal, and antisocial behavior. A medical definition of the "other" thus mattered far less to the operation
of colonial regimes than it did to modern European states, as racial difference provided a clear social fault line.
Finally, as colonial administrators were more concerned with group identities than individuals, medical knowledge
emphasized the definition of "normal" rather than pathological Africans. 37
Most theorists about African madness felt that civilization itself brought psychic disturbances to "deculturated"
Africans who were unprepared for rapid progress. The highest proportion of psychiatric patients belonged to the
intelligentsia (who had the closest contact [End Page 306] with Europeans), and sexual dysfunction followed the
introduction of clothing to certain tribes. In contrast, those who remained in traditional situations showed a low
incidence of insanity, according to physicians like J. C. Carothers, who founded an East African psychiatric
"School" in the 1930s. Carothers found that traditional cultures "relieved individuals of responsibility," but that
depressive patients tended to be wracked by guilt: clear evidence that civilization facilitated madness.
Vaughan's crucial point is that the "deculturated" mad (as opposed to those suffering from witchcraft delusions) were
not "Other," in the traditional sense of reason's perspective on insanity. Instead, they were "insufficiently 'Other"':
deculturation made pathological Africans not different, but rather not different enough to warrant attention. Instead,
British authorities and psychiatrists concerned themselves with "normal" African mentalities, the defining "Other" of
the colonial situation. Even though these "normal" African subjects exhibited "symptoms" that suggested parallels
with the European insane--superstition, primitive beliefs, an incapacity for abstract rational thought--they did not fit
a European concept that considered only those alienated from their own culture legitimately insane. Those who
were alienated--the "deculturated"--were studied carefully and used to support arguments against bringing the
benefits to civilization to Africans. But these "deculturated" figures did not fit into a social composition in the same
way as the European insane did in the classical era. As a consequence, psychiatric treatment amounted to little more
than confinement in brutal institutions, administered as prison annexes. 39
Vaughan's brief account outlines some of the major issues at stake in psychiatric theory and practice not only in
Nyasaland, but throughout British sub-Saharan Africa. Jock McCulloch's Colonial Psychiatry and "the African
Mind" explores many of the same personalities and concerns introduced in Vaughan's analysis. Like Vaughan,
McCulloch makes British discourse about the normal African mind his central focus, he laments the silence of
African voices about the topic, and he draws on archival sources in addition to medical publications to support his
account. But the luxury of space allows McCulloch expand his analysis to include psychiatric ventures throughout
the continent, and to account for the specific ways European mental medicine changed scientific parameters to
produce an inferior African through the mind, rather than the body. Where he falters is in his attempt to provide a
comprehensive account of both British and French efforts to capture the "African mind" through scientific
investigation, and in the problematic parallels he consequently draws between fundamentally different contexts.
"disposing of dangerous African employees."

Finally, they offered "evidence of the civic virtue of settler societies," proving the ultimately
philanthropic nature of colonialism through their symbolic value. 40
By the end of the nineteenth century, the British colonial press lamented the problem of mad Nigerians roaming the
streets of Lagos, and called upon authorities simultaneously to preserve public order and to take pity on deranged
Africans. A lunatic ward at the Lagos prison became quickly overcrowded, and as public madness became more
visible by the early twentieth century (with an increasing British presence in the colony), officials passed a lunacy
ordinance in 1906 stipulating the construction of specialized institutions for confining the insane. As Sadowsky
argues, however, these institutions that were "[c]reated in response to the scandal of untreated lunatics on the
streets...themselves became enduring scandals of the colonial period." 47 Until the 1950s, Nigeria's colonial prisons
and asylums were "functionally equivalent." Sadowsky focuses on the Yaba asylum in Lagos, where psychiatric
patients received no treatment and lived in dank cells with only rudimentary facilities for hygiene and medical care-indeed, in worse conditions than convicts. Rampant overcrowding and restricted public health budgets limited
institutional efficacy, and for most of the colonial period there was no psychiatrist on the state payroll.
Sadowsky ascribes these poor conditions to a paradox of Britain's "Indirect Rule" in Nigeria, which promised the
Page | 21
exploitation of economic resources by the British, and the civilizing of Nigerians with minimal intervention in local
traditions. Like other scholars, Sadowsky notes that despite egregious conditions asylums symbolized the civilizing
mission. But just as "[t]he expense of a truly modern asylum...was incompatible with the economic goals of
colonialism," a policy of "financial restraint was justified by the goal of preserving the African way of life." Before
the 1930s, officials argued that to reform the rudimentary system of confining dangerous lunatics would impose
European standards on native customs. Additionally, official rhetoric about cultural differences was conveniently
ambiguous. Although administrators admitted that they could recognize madness--and therefore social danger--in
Africans, they felt that racial and cultural difference made it impossible for them to cure these patients, so they urged
cost-effective confinement over expensive treatment. By the 1930s, when colonial officials realized the necessity of
improving conditions at Yaba, such reforms had become fiscally impossible. 48
Sadowsky's emphasis on the social history of the Yaba asylum is the most novel [End Page 310] aspect of his study.
In attempting to understand how British colonials defined madness among Nigerians, Sadowsky pays close attention
to those whom they confined. Most patients at Yaba were Africans, and these patients tended to be urban wage
laborers rather than peasants. Contrary to the British officials who constructed theories based on such statistics,
Sadowsky is careful to note that inmates' occupations "tell us more about the institutions and which lunatics they
housed than they do about lunatics generally." He makes the same observation about sex-statistics. Men
outnumbered women three to one in British colonial asylums, but again this is more "an artifact of treatment
patterns... than a reflection of the 'true' prevalence of mental illness."
He notes that the British appear to have confined patients not because their behavior was "anomalous or
deviant" but instead "because they drew attention to structures of power in ways which denaturalized those
structures." These patients' disorders allowed them to speak what other Nigerians only thought. Many patients
confined at Yaba, for example, suffered from what psychiatrists called "persecutory delusions," a diagnosis that
Sadowsky notes "was overdetermined by the persecutory nature of colonialism itself." Sadowsky cites a number of
cases to support this point, including those of patients who "refuse[d] food...provided by the British government"
and who claimed that local officials had authorized murders. The most intriguing of these is the case of Isaac O., to
which Sadowsky devotes an entire chapter. A nineteen-year-old missionary student at the time of his first
confinement in 1932, Isaac claimed "that he would kill all the Europeans in Nigeria," posed as a colonial official in
order to solicit help from villagers while he carried loads on a highway, and claimed that he had "purchased a motor
car for a million pounds." Isaac's delusions drew attention to his position between cultures. His violent sentiments
toward Europeans demonstrated his resentment at the hollow promises of a colonial education, while his other
claims "appropriated" symbols of British dominance: military power, automotive technology, and capital. 50
Of course, Sadowsky admits, it would be a mistake to conflate madness with anticolonial resistance. But the
"content" of madness "demands attention; without it the patient is decontextualized, and the social dimension of
affliction is obscured." Even if we cannot interpret delusions and confinement as manifestations of resistance
and oppression, they "have significance as a gauge and representation of social pressures and contradictions"
in a moment when Nigerians increasingly realized just how limited their opportunities under colonialism
were. Sadowsky follows Fanon, concluding that "as inchoate articulations of the stresses of colonial society" the
"'symptoms' of Nigeria's lunatics and the psychiatric labels that were affixed" deepen our understanding of the
psychology of colonialism. And the psychiatric literature that medical theorists produced about indigenous madness
informs us about the psychological predicaments of [End Page 311] colonialism for the colonizers as well as the
colonized. Sadowsky argues in his concluding chapter that although the Nigerian psychiatric literature is generally
more liberal than other colonial literature on madness, knowledge produced in the colonial context could not escape
the prejudices of that milieu. Practitioners in Nigeria "viewed Africans as representatives of a race, rather than as
individual patients," with the result that they described Africans' "innate character" without examining British
policies that provoked trauma by transforming the social landscape. 51
Sadowsky's close readings of case files and his account of Nigerian psychiatry's transition to independence are
Imperial Bedlam's greatest strengths. His innovative interpretations of insanity's content demonstrate the usefulness
of psychiatric history for understanding colonialism's hold over emotional as well as material domains, and his
examination of the Nigerian psychiatrist T. A. Lambo's reform programs in the 1950s draw surprising parallels
between postcolonial theories of liberation and psychiatric developments. For Sadowsky, Lambo's
rapprochement of psychiatry and local traditions brought to mental patients a liberation concomitant with
Page | 22
Nigeria's independence. The British-trained Lambo rejected notions of European superiority by hiring
regional traditional healers at the Aro hospital to assist in treatment and interpretation of mental illness.
Lambo also established a community outreach program that installed recuperable patients with local families
on a work exchange program. This innovative service reduced the hospital's heavy case load, helped patients
adapt to extra-institutional environments, and gave villagers access to hospital financing for housing and
infrastructure. The programs were so successful that the UN produced a film about Aro, and the hospital
served as a model for other African mental health systems. Sadowsky notes the inappropriateness of a Whiggish
narrative of progress in both postcolonial and psychiatric history, given the persistence of authoritarianism and
poverty in much of Africa and the revelations of antipsychiatric literature. But ignoring the political origins of
individual cases of progress is also a grave mistake: the "Nigerianization of psychiatric institutions provides an
example of the creative energy for which independence provided greater scope [I]t provided more opportunity for
Nigerian physicians to use their expertise publicly [and] represented...a collapse in the basic logic of colonialism
itself." 52
By asserting that "colonial policies were generating the social changes which were altering epidemiological
patterns" among Nigerians, Sadowsky grants a certain truth to psychiatrists' theories about deculturation, where he
could problematize them. Certainly the colonial environment, where "civilizing" rhetoric raised expectations that
realities failed to meet, and where individuals seeking opportunity found themselves alienated from both local and
British communities, provoked significant trauma. But even though patients' utterances reflected colonial dynamics,
these dynamics [End Page 312] may not be the root of madness. This is also inconsistent with Sadowsky's argument
that it is "crude to say that colonialism caused madness," although "it brought about specifically colonial
pathologies." 53 But these few issues should not detract from a work that serves as a model for scholars of colonial
psychiatry through the richness of its narrative, its balanced treatment of its historical problem, and the innovations
that Sadowsky brings to both the history of psychiatry and colonial studies.
British ethnopsychiatrists were watching a world being born,

uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects set loose from a grounding tradition into an advancing civilization.
doctors like Carothers and Robert Cunynham Brown noted in their surveys of Nigerian institutions that proximity
to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of
asylum populations, this awareness did not hinder these same individuals from developing theories about African
insanity based on this limited population sample.
McCulloch argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who were themselves largely drawn from settler society)
"were watching a world being born," where uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding
tradition into an advancing civilization.
Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800-1962
Richard Keller

to insanity--accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations, .
McCulloch's Colonial Psychiatry and "the African Mind" British discourse about the normal African mind his
analysis to include psychiatric ventures throughout the continent, and to account for the specific ways European
mental medicine changed scientific parameters to produce an inferior African through the mind, rather than the
body. Where he falters is in his attempt to provide a comprehensive account of both British and French efforts to
capture the "African mind" through scientific investigation, and in the problematic parallels he consequently draws
between fundamentally different contexts.
the majority of patients treated in asylums were Africans who found the psychological transition from a rural
agricultural tradition to urban wage labor insurmountable. McCulloch argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who
were themselves largely drawn from settler society) "were watching a world being born," where uprooted (or
Page | 23
"deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding tradition into an advancing civilization.
McCulloch asserts that their purpose was less to preserve social order than it was to serve three political
functions. First, like their metropolitan counterparts, colonial asylums empowered physicians by giving medicine
free and exclusive reign over madness. Second, these institutions provided settler communities with a location for
"dumping" their own insane relatives as well as [End Page 307] for "disposing of dangerous African employees."
Finally, they offered "evidence of the civic virtue of settler societies," proving the ultimately philanthropic nature of
colonialism through their symbolic value. 40 the majority of patients treated in asylums were Africans who found
the psychological transition from a rural agricultural tradition to urban wage labor insurmountable. McCulloch
argues that the British ethnopsychiatrists (who were themselves largely drawn from settler society) "were watching a
world being born," where uprooted (or "deculturated") subjects were set loose from a grounding tradition into an
advancing civilization. Although doctors like Carothers and Robert Cunynham Brown noted in their surveys of
Nigerian institutions that proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition to insanity-accounted for the social makeup of asylum populations, this awareness did not hinder these same individuals from
developing theories about African insanity based on this limited population sample.
Carothers noted similarities between published accounts of leucotomized Europeans and his own observations of
African patients at Mathari, and this led him to conclude that inferior development (or at least employment) of the
brain's frontal lobes was common in Africans. He also proffered cultural theories for African inferiority that
modernized obsolete physiological determinants by demonstrating how African cultural phenomena reinforced racial
inferiority. "[I]ntellectual and social impoverishment" stunted the African child's development, and a poor capacity
for individuation preserved "the African's" mind in a childlike state. And while education could change some
environmental stimuli for Africans, African culture, according to Carothers, remained nearly as fixed as race: this
culture was tied so closely "physical setting and genetic disposition" that it trapped cognitive development
effectively enough to render British civilizing efforts futile. Theories like these justified settlers' projections of their
own violent tendencies onto Africans (one of McCulloch's more controversial points), and pointed to the
unsuitability of the African temperament for political leadership. (Expensive) education was harmful for Africans,
psychiatrists argued, and democratic institutions would be impossible given the African "inability to accept
responsibility...[and] predisposition to mental illness." 41
McCulloch's most important conclusion is that ethnopsychiatrists, governments, and settler societies alike attributed
indigenous political protests more to psychological impulsiveness than to any legitimate claim for enfranchisement.
Strong archival and published sources support such claims about British psychiatric endeavors in Africa and
McCulloch's assertions about British theories of an "African mind."
The fundamental fact

Ulrich Beck
Page | 24
Tariq Modood

Thomas Pangle.
The Athenian polis was supported by democratic practices and theatrical performances of tragedy and comedy.
Tragedy educated democracy not only by providing the cathartic experience of a violent spectacle but also by
showing the dangers of mythical violence through the twists of theatrical plots. At the center of Athenian tragedy is
the issue of corrupted sacrifice, which from its beginning as a sacred ritual becomes a deliberated act, opening into
a space of negotiation and reflection in worldly theater.
Considerably later, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55c. 135 CE), himself a freed slave who experienced
many misfortunes in his life including physical handicap and exile, developed the doctrine of inner freedom as the
individuals only refuge, an inner polis and an acropolis of the soul. Uncannily, inner freedom mirrored the
public architecture of the lost polis of the Greek city-state in the age of the Roman Empire.
Many historians have noted that the ancient Greek polis offered a limited space of self-realization that was available
only to male citizens, but the polis gave shape to an aspiration, an ideal of freedom that spread beyond its walls. An
understanding of spiritual freedom delineated by Epictetus reveals cross-cultural connections between East and
West, between Indian, Persian, Hellenic, and Hebrew cultures. What is originally Greek is the concept of political
freedom. Yet from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, debates on freedom, both spiritual and political, and on
the preservation of the Greek philosophical heritage, became a cross-cultural affair.
The history of freedom is what Anthony Kwame Appiah calls the case for contamination. Worldliness is not the
same as cosmopolis, but the two notions overlap. There are many vernacular cosmopolitans coming from different
localities (with memories of inequality, but not entirely defined by a colonial or postcommunist or any other
particular history) but sharing the preoccupation with worldly architecture. Freedom is never about purity - ethnic or
otherwise - but contacts, contaminations, and border crossings. And so is what I would call fascinating unfreedom,
which takes different shapes but shares an eros of power and paranoic antimodern or post-postmodern ideology.
Another Freedom. The Alternative History of an Idea.
Svetlana Boym
Lamberto Tassinari suggests that we can imagine and envision transculturalism as a new form of humanism,
based on the idea of relinquishing the strong traditional identities and cultures which in many cases were products of
imperialistic empires, interspersed with dogmatic religious values. . In many ways transculturalism, by proposing
a new humanism of the recognition of the other, based on a culture of mtissage, is in opposition to the singular
traditional cultures that have evolved from the nation-state.
Transculturalism, places the concept of culture at the center of a redefinition of the nation-state or even the
disappearance of the nation-state. This process of recognizing oneself in the other leads inevitably to a cosmopolitan
citizenship. This citizenship, independent of political structures and institutions, develops each individual in the
Page | 25
understanding that ones culture is multiple, mtis and that each human experience and existence is due to the
contact with other, who in reality is like, oneself.

Tariq Modood
colonialism.
Eric Brown



Pramod K. Nayar
Page | 26
the work of mourning not only implies the working through of mundane
losses and traumas, but the development of a certain identity (in what Klein calls
the depressive position) that is sensitive to the larger scenes of persecution and
violence that shape the social and political landscape.
Mourning in America: Racial Trauma and the Democratic Work of Mourning
David Wallace McIvor
Cosmopolitics, on this view, is closely associated with a series of questions relating to the rights of the foreigner,
immigrant, exiled, deported, stateless or displaced person. As we have already seen, in his Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant appears to extend cosmopolitan law to encompass universal hospitality without
limit on account of communal possession of the earths surface. However, in Perpetual Peace, Kant tempers this by
stipulating: the law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.

Ananta Kumar Giri
There is also the discourse of cosmopolitanism from below to counter the elitist cosmopolitanism from above but
this does not interrogate the foundations of contemporary cosmopolitanism itself, for example to ask whether it is
primarily epistemic, ethnocentric, anthropocentric and imperial.
Ethical cosmopolitanism refers to our belonging to the world in terms of some duties and obligations. For the Stoics
we are not just members of our city states but citizens of the world. However, this does not mean building a world
state. As Nussbaum helps us understand: The point is more radical still: that we should give our first moral
allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power. We should give it instead to moral community made
up by the humanity of all beings (Nussbaum, 1997: 8). This does not mean abandonment of local affiliations but
realization that as human beings we are surrounded by a series of concentric circles (ibid.: 9). Stoic cosmopolitans
acknowledged the divisive role of politics and challenged us to develop empathetic understanding whereby we
come to respect the humanity of our political enemies (ibid.). A favoured exercise in this process of world thinking
is to conceive of the entire world of human beings as a single body (ibid.: 10). Stoic cosmopolitanisms were also
concerned with peace and they took cosmopolitanism to require certain international limitations upon the conduct
of warfare (ibid.: 11).
violence.
Though Stoic cosmopolitanism always emphasized education and enlightenment of the passions for cultivating
cosmopolitanism - what Nussbaum (1997) calls passional enlightenment - modern projects of cosmopolitanism
from Kant to Habermas and on to Ulrich Beck have been primarily epistemic and have not sufficiently addressed the
ontological challenges of appropriate self-preparation and self-transformation for belonging to and creating a
cosmopolitan world. There is also the discourse of cosmopolitanism from below to counter the elitist
cosmopolitanism from above but this does not interrogate the foundations of contemporary cosmopolitanism itself,
for example to ask whether it is primarily epistemic, ethnocentric, anthropocentric and imperial.
In this context the multiverse of transformations that contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism are confronted
with. It submits that cosmopolitanization1 as an ongoing process of critique, creativity and border-crossing involves
transformations in self, culture, society, economy and polity. Cosmopolitanization involves multi-dimensional
processes of self-development, inclusion of the other, and planetary realizations (Giri, 2004a). In the field of selfPage | 27
development, cosmopolitanization involves development of a transcendental self, transnational citizenship, and
cultivation of our cosmic humanity. Cosmopolitanization, as inclusion of the other, builds upon contemporary
strivings in economics, politics, religions and spiritual mobilizations embodying post-capitalist, post-national and
postreligious spiritual formations (Bellah, 1970; Habermas, 1998;Vattimo, 1999, 2002). the issue of cosmopolitan
responsibility three major challenges here realization of global justice; realization of cross-species dignity
(cf. Nussbaum, 2006); and dialogue among civilizations, cultures, religions and traditions. It outlines the pathways
of going beyond cosmopolitanism by striving for a post-colonial cosmopolis characterized by global justice, transcivilizational dialogues and dignity for all.
Ananta Kumar Giri
Thomas Pangle.

Pramod K. Nayar

the heart of claims over and about identity itself, which I take to be less be a
sedimented object with permanent features than as an ever-changing and inherently
unstable entity-in-becoming.
Pramod K. Nayar
In his moving essay "Towards a Third World Utopia: inter-civilizational perspective on oppression," Ashis Nandy
makes a concerted effort at realizing the Third World both as perspective and as the possibility of a different vision
and content. To quote Nandy: "Thus, no utopia can be without an implicit or explicit theory of suffering. This is
especially so in the peripheries of the world, euphemistically called the third world (21). Nandy goes on to say that
"to have a meaningful life in the minds of men, such a utopia must start with the issue of man-made suffering, which
has given the third world both its name and uniqueness" (Traditions 21). Nandy affirms that his essay is "guided by
the belief that the only way the third world can transcend the sloganeering of its well-wishers is, first, by becoming a
collective representation of the victims of man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times; second,
by internalizing or owning up to the outside forces of oppression and then coping with them as inner vectors; and
third, by recognizing the oppressed or marginalized selves of the first and the second worlds as civilizational allies
Page | 28
in the battle against institutionalized suffering" (21).
However, the content term that Nandy chooses is not "development," "progress," "emancipation," or
"industrialization"; the key word for him is "suffering." And with that word Nandy strikes unequivocally an ethical
register (see also Sen). Rather than invoke the pathos inherent in suffering, Nandy seeks to ground suffering as a
powerful intra and inter- subjective and cognitive category. Unlike technological and developmental/positivist
utopianism that seeks to negate suffering, consolidate gains already made on the basis of a zero-sum, winner-take-all
model, and thereby perpetuate the terrain of imbalance and inequity (see Guinier) ,Nandy's utopianism is directed at
the human conscience in all its inter- and intra- civilizational complexity. In conceptualizing suffering as that
perspectival category from which utopia is to be envisioned, Nandy opens up a vital relationship between selfcentered imaginings and other oriented commitments (cf. Madan).
In endowing epistemology with an authority that is coevally but differentially ethical, Nandy in effect limits and
renders the self-centered economy of the abidingly vulnerable to the ubiquitous demands of alterity. Two points need
to be made to differentiate Nandy's conceptualization of suffering from pathos-based and/or victim-centered
articulations of suffering. First, in Nandy's discourse, suffering is realized simultaneously as experiential and
proactively agential; and out of suffering comes critical knowledge which in turn empowers the voice of suffering to
make its own cognitive epistemological intervention by envisioning its own utopia rather than accept an assigned
position within amelioratory schemes proposed by the dominant discourse.
Secondly, suffering, though exemplified in a certain way by the Third World, is a universal and omni-locational
phenomenon that cuts across rigid and overdetermined self-other oppositions. No one or no one position has a
monopoly on suffering, and, furthermore, no one should partcipate in what Angela Davis has memorably termed,
"an olympics of suffering." Suffering as such demands exotopic and translocal modes of understanding and
diagnosis (see Bakhtin).
Just as Said would insist that ethico-political projects need to be imagined across and beyond existing asymmetries
and that generalizations need to made audaciously precisely when they seem least probable, Nandy too enlists the
First, what used to be the Second, and the Third World as civilizational allies in the fight against institutional
suffering. For Nandy insides and outsides are never given as absolute a priori points of and for orientation, but are
indeed constituted and produced as transactional functions of inter- and intra- historical and civilizational influence
and dialogue. Just as he argued in The Intimate Enemy that colonialism inflicts deep wounds both on the colonizer
and the colonized, here, too, Nandy tries to imagine therapeutic spaces of reciprocal rehabilitation. It is precisely by
avowing the ubiquitous nature of oppression and suffering and by acknowledging ongoing collusions between socalled insides and outsides in the perpetuation of oppression and suffering that a utopian transcendence may be
imagined in a multilateral mode.
By a reading of psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory,
I show that mourning should be considered less as a limited response to particular loss - one that will resolve itself
after a certain lapse of time - than as a process of identity formation through recognition of, and reflection on,
formative traumas in the democratic polity.
The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization
and/as a process of identity achievement - a means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and instaurating
a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect, the work of mourning is not only a
broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an essential part of democratic life today.

Page | 29
Tariq Modood
On the contrary, Bhabha argues that all social collectives, nation states, cultures or small-scale ethnic groups, are
caught in a continuous process of hybridity. They all have developed in relation to a larger context and therefore
consist of elements of different origins which they to varying extent have in common. The process of hybridity thus
makes the idea of cultures and ethnic collectives as homogeneous entities inconceivable, or in Gayatri Spivaks
words, elusive: I have long held that, insofar as something called 'culture' can be accessible, either inside and/or
outside, either to its theorists and/or practitioners, culture is the explanations of culture. On the contrary, the basic
element of departure is normally generalised fictions of homogeneous cultures or ethnic groups. Of course, the rate
of both heterogeneity and hybridity is a question of degree for each individual case (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 2001).
The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization and/as a process of identity achievement a means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and instaurating a capacity for facing history and ourselves in a healthier
way. In this respect, the work of mourning is not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an
essential part of democratic life today.
The history of freedom is what Anthony Kwame Appiah calls the case for contamination. Worldliness is not the
same as cosmopolis, but the two notions overlap. There are many vernacular cosmopolitans coming from different
localities (with memories of inequality, but not entirely defined by a colonial or postcommunist or any other
particular history) but sharing the preoccupation with worldly architecture. Freedom is never about purity - ethnic or
otherwise - but about contacts, contaminations, and border crossings. And so is what I would call fascinating
unfreedom, which takes different shapes but shares an eros of power and paranoic antimodern or post-postmodern
ideology.
Another Freedom. The Alternative History of an Idea.
Svetlana Boym
Ancient Stoics claim that the world as a whole (the cosmos) is like
a city (a polis) and that one should live as a citizen of the cosmos.
I maintain that the Stoics' cosmopolitan claims have three layers of meaning. First, to live as a citizen of the cosmos
is a metaphor for living a good human life. Traditionally, a Greek lives well by living up to the norms of his polis.
Chrysippus argues that one should live up to the norms of nature by living in agreement with right reason, which is,
as rational coherence, the same as the right reason that governs the cosmos. Later Stoics deflate this metaphor. On
their view, citizenship in the cosmos is not earned by agreeing with right reason but is conferred automatically to all
human beings, by virtue of our rational nature. Second, the Stoics maintain that living as a citizen of the cosmos is
not a mere metaphor because it requires showing what I call "cosmopolitan concern," which is the thought that every
human being is worthy of special ethical concern. Stoics differ among themselves about what sorts of feelings and
actions cosmopolitan concern requires, and about whether these or those special people (friends, family, compatriots
in a local community) deserve special concern beyond cosmopolitan concern. But third, the Stoics argue that
cosmopolitan concern entails that one should work to benefit human beings as such, at least in some circumstances.
The most interesting evidence for this cosmopolitan beneficence emerges in Stoic discussions of what career a
person should take up. They favor political engagement because it can benefit more people, and they typically urge
that one could emigrate to engage politically and benefit people more readily. But, again, the Stoics disagree among
themselves on whether the consideration to benefit humans as such by a political career needs to be balanced against
special considerations to benefit these particular humans because they are compatriots in a local community.
Thus far, Chrysippean reasoning explains why a Stoic living in agreement with nature,
Page |as30
a citizen of the cosmos, will generally prefer to engage in politics. In fact, Chrysippus appears
to have believed that all effective politics is necessarily local.


Pramod K. Nayar
The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization

and/as a process of identity achievement - a means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and instaurating
a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect, the work of mourning is not only a
broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an essential part of democratic life today.
The heart of claims over and about identity itself, which I take to be less be a
The only way the Third World can transcend the sloganeering of its well-wishers is, first, by becoming a
collective representation of the victims of man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past
times, second, by internalizing or owning up the outside forces of oppression and, then, coping with them
as inner vectors and third by recognizing the oppressed or marginalized selves of the First and Second
Worlds as civilizational allies in the battle against institutionalized suffering.
Ashish Nandy
Ashish Nandys utopia is based on a particular view of cosmopolitanism one that acknowledges and acts
upon suffering as a global feature irrespective of geographical and historical location. Nandys proposed
response to this recognition of suffering is primarily affective. This recognition leads to a politics, and a
vision that her is termed affective cosmopolitanism. Nandys affective cosmopolitanism constitutes, it
is argued, the opening moments of new debates in cosmopolitanism.
the world, euphemistically called the third world . "to have a meaningful life in the minds of men, such a utopia
must start with the issue of man-made suffering, which has given the third world both its name and uniqueness".
Page | 31
Pramod K. Nayar*
On Ashis Nandys Suffering, Utopia and Comopolitanism.
Affective Cosmopolitanism by Pramod K. Nayar*
Affective cosmopolitanism is the new ethical or cosmopolitan nativist turn to cultural
dialogue. It is an act of absolute hospitality (without asking the name or origin of the sufferer) and welcome
extended to the suffering Other. To be able to listen, to be empathetic is to see the global writ locally, and
vice versa. To be at once local and global, an antinomy of self-reflexivity, critical knowledge and thought.
This is the strange destination of Ashis Nandy not ever directed solely at the native or the foreign but at
both. Nandys destination the utopia of suffering is a disruption of linear, vectoral destination. We
could, after discovering his affective cosmopolitanism, his cosmopolitan nativism, call it not simply in
Vinay Lals terms, a strange destination. Instead, Nandys is what Jacques Derrida termed
clandestination [Derrida 1992: 350].
Nandys cosmopolitan vision and utopianism, to sum up, is the anterior moment to the return to
affect in contemporary social theory and anticipates a whole new form thus based on (i) suffering, (ii)
affect, (iii) empathy (iv) an ethics of recognition. The affective cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitan nativist is
here. And one of his names is Ashis Nandy.
Ashish Nandy
On Ashis Nandys Suffering, Utopia and Comopolitanism.

Affective Cosmopolitanism by Pramod K. Nayar*On Suffering
Nandy begins his account of a Third World utopia thus: The only way the Third World can transcend the
sloganeering of its well-wishers is, first, by becoming a collective representation of the victims of man
made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times, second, by internalizing or owning up the
outside forces of oppression and, then, coping with them as inner vectors and third by recognizing the
oppressed or marginalized selves of the First and Second Worlds as civilizational allies in the battle against
institutionalized suffering. (441)
Later, Nandy makes the most crucial move in this rhetoric of suffering: If the Third Worlds vision of the
Page | 32
future is handicapped by its experience of man-made suffering, the First Worlds future, too, is shaped by
the same record (467).
Nandys preliminary move is to mark suffering as the main place holder, the marker of civilization itself. It
will be this marker that will also, in Nandys scheme of things, provide the plank from which to launch a
politics.
On Utopia
No utopia, writes Nandy, can be without an implicit or explicit theory of suffering (441). Then he adds:
to have a meaningful life in the minds of men, such a utopia must start with the issue of man-made
suffering which has given the Third World both its name and its uniqueness (441). Utopia for Nandy is a
means of agency, self-critique and self-discovery even as it helps civilizations come together. In this, a
move related to identifying suffering as a marker of civilization, Nandy proposes an ideologically
significant grid: suffering as the vision that helps formulate a politics, a vision for the future. If
development, rationality, or mega-technology (one of Nandys favourite themes) has been the
scaffolding for utopian projects, revolutions and even historiography thus far, Nandy proposes an
alternative structure: suffering.
However, Nandy is quick to file his caveat here that this notion of a utopia predicated on suffering
(associated usually with Third World nation states) is not an elaborate attempt to project the sensitivities of
the Third World as the future consciousness of the globe or a plea to the First World to wallow in a
comforting sense of guilt. This is, incidentally, a point made in much the same terms by the Caribbean poet
Derek Walcott in an essay no teacher of postcolonial literature in India, to the best of my knowledge, dares
teach because it takes away the rhetoric of self-pity, victimhood on which postcolonial writing/criticism
depends.[2]
On Cosmopolitanism
Nandys notion of cosmopolitanism is by far the most fascinating. In his essay Nandy first offers a critique
of the current forms and modalities of cultural exchange and dialogue. Nandy notes that the dominant
official mode of dialogue excludes the disowned or repressed West (1998: 146). But why is this
important?
Nandy proposes that a new cosmopolitanism would benefit from retrieving what has been repressed in the
West. Nandys cosmopolitanism critiques the prevalent ones because, for him, the present concept of
cosmopolitanism considers Western culture to be definitionally universal and therefore cosmopolitan
(146). What is needed urgently is to locate and retrieve the suffering (i.e., the repressed) in the West itself.

Page | 33
Pramod K. Nayar*
On Self-Critique
Nandy argues: It is a matter of admitting that while each civilization must find its own authentic vision of
the future and its own authenticity in future, neither is conceivable without admitting the experience of cosuffering which has now brought some of the major civilizations of the world close to each other. It is this
co-suffering which makes the idea of cultural closeness something than the chilling concept of One World
which nineteenth-century European optimism popularized and promoted to the status of a dogma. (468)
Nandy has always argued for reflexive, self-critical cultures. Here he sees this act of self-criticism as one
that first acknowledges that no civilization or culture has a monopoly of/over suffering and second,
acknowledging suffering could become the means of critical scrutiny both within and outside ones culture.
Nandy continues: Oppression is ultimately a matter of definition, and its perception is the product of a
world-view (442). Continuing his concern with suffering, utopianism and the language of suffering,
Nandy writes: The experience of suffering of some Third World societies has added a new dimension to
utopianism by sensing and resisting the oppression which comes as history. By history as oppression I
mean not only the limit which our past always seems to impose on our visions of the future but also the use
of a linear, progressive, cumulative, deterministic concept of history to suppress alternative worldviews, alternative utopias and even alternative self-concepts the peripheries of the world often feel that
they are victimized not merely by partial, biased or ethnocentric history, but by the idea of history itself
The burden of history is the burden of such memories and anti-memories. (461-2)
Nandy, we are now certain, is concerned not only with suffering as content of a possible utopianism, but
with the languages in which suffering is articulated. His concern is with memories as burden.
Re-packing Nandy
Thus far I have unpacked particular elements in Nandys work. The goods are now in some form of ordered
disarray. In the remainder of this essay, I shall re-pack Nandy. The idea is to show how Nandys thoughts
can be seen as a precursor to and in many cases, an advance (in advance) on various contemporary issues
in thinking on cosmopolitanism.
R. Radhakrishnan is quick to recognise the significance of Nandys moves here. Radhakrishnan proposes
that Nandy is suggesting an entirely different content for third world utopias: one based on suffering
[Radhakrishnan 2003: 97]. Radhakrishnan points out that Nandy is arguing a case for seeing suffering as a
universal and omni-locational phenomenon. Nandys Third World, argues Radhakrishnan, is an
imaginative topos that seeks to bring about reciprocal recognition between vectors of oppression that are
external and those that are internal (98-9).
If I am reading Nandy right (and if there is a right way of reading Nandy), his vision of cosmopolitanism is
one where First and Third Worlds can be allies in the battle against suffering. This is a cosmopolitanism
that is more than the banal cosmopolitanism (I adapt the notion from Beck 2002) of today and one based
Page | 34
on co-suffering. This take on cosmopolitanism, I feel (and I use the term feel for strategic reasons that will
become clearer later), is an important ethical turn.
As we have seen above in the unpacking of Nandy, he breaks down the opposition between past and
present, the West and the non-West when he brings in suffering as critique, point of view and politics. By
proposing that the Third World become a point of articulation of the suffering even within the First World
in what he terms civilization allies in the battle against institutional and man-made suffering, Nandy
cleverly deconstructs the binary of the suffering Third World and the humanitarian First World. Elsewhere
Nandy (1996) had already pointed to the paradoxes of human rights discourses which presuppose particular
structures of Third World societies: full of suffering that the First World has to alleviate.
I am also interested in the notion of utopia as a working through of suffering because it suggests a perpetual
effort that is future directed. A utopia, by definition cannot be achieved, it is always deferred because once
it is achieved it becomes paradise. I am not sure that Nandy would like the tag of being a poststructuralist
he is reasonably harsh on these things but it seems to me, his view of utopia as a language and as process
marks a theme of deference. Utopias consist in the civilisational dialogue a, a dialogue that is unfinalizable,
just as a utopia is always unfinalizable.
Nandys utopia is focused mainly on the working out of a scheme, a plan for alleviating suffering. Thus it is
not a state but a process. More importantly, extending Nandys arguments about myths and allegories
about the future, it is a promise. Like a utopia, a promise is always a process, one cannot fulfill a promise
because then it is not a promise any more (etymologically, promise is from pro, meaning before and
mittere meaning to send and is connected to mission). A promise is always in and addressed to the
future, to be worked at. Nandys conceptualization of the utopia becomes, in other words, a promise to
work at suffering, always, unrelentingly, and never finalizing the end of suffering. It is this promise of
alleviating suffering that makes a utopia a utopia to come that must be constantly prepared for.
Nandys deconstruction of the binaries of West and non-West by bringing suffering in as a marker or point
of critique is a crucial move one that offers an affective cosmopolitanism.
Nandys key move is, therefore, to locate suffering as the place holder in all definitions and politics of
cultural critique, utopianism and cosmopolitanism. This is an important move because it does away or at
least shelves temporarily issues of development, modernity and others in favour of oppression and
suffering. It also marks an ethical turn where regarding the pain of Others (as Susan Sontag termed it,
2002) constitutes an appeal to something more than individualism or even national identity. The ability to
perceive and respond to the suffering of the Other is an important political move because it generates a
political order of a different kind, one based on the mutual recognition of suffering rather than other
cultural trends or features.

Pramod K. Nayar*
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (2004) have argued that life narratives of and story telling by the
oppressed have three main consequences: affect, activism and awareness. They build solidarities through
the charged content of their life narratives, generate among their readers an awareness of the hidden history
of nation states the Holocaust, the Partition, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Argentinian disappeared the list is
Page | 35
endless. Nandy is also, in similar fashion proposing an ethics of recognition of suffering, whether in First or
Third Worlds.
How does one relate to and recognize the suffering of the Other in what Nandy has termed an intercivilisational perspective on oppression? While Nandy does not seek to provide either a psychological or
cognitive answer to this problem, I believe there is a valuable insight here.
Nandys arguments on suffering and utopianism are replete with repeated references to perspectives and
visions (as the passages quoted above demonstrate). Nandys arguments about perspective, vision and the
language of utopia also emphasizes questions of history and narrative. This emphasis is also an emphasis
on imagination.
Suffering is a source of critical knowledge. Listening to atrocity narratives or being alert to ones cultures
internal oppressions as well as another cultures suffering is to develop a moral imagination or what
Nandy might term an inter-civilizational perspective. I appropriate the term moral imagination from
Thomas Laqueur (2001), fully aware that it sounds like a European Enlightenment driven liberal
humanism. Thomas Laqueurs moral imagination is the expansion of the capacity to feel the exigency of
wrongs suffered by strangers at a distance [Laqueur 134].
Perspective is to be able, when called upon, to imagine distant suffering. What we have here in the intercivilizational perspective is the global circulation of local wrongs. Narratives such as truth commissions
and atrocity memoirs have a major role to play in the creation of this inter-civilizational perspective and
moral imagination. When Nandy speaks of a utopianism that is a communication, a vision that speaks to
the future (the definitions I began with), he is speaking, indeed of a narrative basis for the ethics of
recognition.
The ethics of recognition comes to us when we discover, in the pages of the news paper, on websites and
the television screen, the space of appearance as media theorist Roger Silverstone phrased it (2007). It is
where the Other and the Others suffering appears to us. This recognition is also an act of committing to
memory, to the archive of suffering.
In an interview Nandy, while responding to Vinay Lals comment on the Holocaust, had argued that the
violence of Auschwitz [had] been captured though modern systems of knowledge. He had then spoken
of the need to construct the violence of partition in a different way (2000: 56). This argument is the
important anterior moment to more recent arguments and I want to situate Nandy at the head of a new
debate on cosmopolitanism.
Ulrich Beck speaks of cosmopolitan memory using the example of the Holocaust (2002). A cosmopolitan
memory, of which the transnationalisation of the Holocaust [Beck 20] is an example, is a global history
of suffering and trauma. Beck argues that such a cosmopolitan memory can energise thinking about a
shared collective future, which contradicts a nation-based memory of the past (27). Nandy is speaking of
suffering as providing the basis of particular forms of archiving but also of critical knowledge. One can
generate civilisational allies on the basis of this shared recognition of suffering and therefore, envision a
different future based on this recognition. Becks new cosmopolitanism is, as I see it, is one that Nandy
anticipates in his vision of a utopia based on the recognition of co-suffering. Nandys inter-civilisational
perspective on suffering comes close to Becks formulation.
This construction of civilisational allies requires and demands a particular form of response.
Page | 36
Radhakrishnan, as I cited before, sees an affective and agential consequence of Nandys notion of a
suffering-based utopianism. Affect is the basis of an empathetic identification with the Other. Dominick La
Capra studying trauma and Holocaust representation proposes that consumers of trauma narratives what
he calls secondary witnesses experience an empathetic unsettlement. This is not a standing-in for the
victim but rather a recognition of the sheer singularity of the Others suffering. We do not incorporate the
other into ourselves, but experience and transmit an unsettlement that manifests empathy (but not full
identification) with the victim [La Capra 1999: 699].
Affect and empathy is what Nandy is also, I propose, getting at when he speaks of perspective. Nandy
does not at any time seek a synthesis which would constitute precisely what La Capra warns us against, a
full identification with the victim. Nandy writes in Towards a Third World Utopia: inter-civilizational
perspective on oppression:
Ultimately it is not a matter of synthesizing or aggregating different civilizational visions of the future.
Rather, it is a matter of admitting that while each civilization must find its own authentic vision of the
future and its own authenticity in future, neither is conceivable without admitting the experience of cosuffering which has not brought some of the major civilizations of the world close to each other. (468)
Affect is opening up to the suffering of the Other. Nandys argument prefigures the return to affect in
Martha Nussbaum (2001), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and Leela Gandhi in recent times . Indeed
Leela Gandhi sees affect as intrinsically connected to a utopic vision under what she terms the sign of
friendship (20). This is what I call affective cosmopolitanism a form of cosmopolitan thought that
builds on affect, empathy and an ethics of recognition of the Others suffering. Affective cosmopolitanism,
as I see it in Nandys works, links civilizations on the basis of their respective sufferings, but provides the
platform from which the struggle against institutional and manmade suffering anywhere in the world can
be launched. It is a whole new vision of globalization itself, and is a necessary corrective to the technocapitalist one. A history of global trauma constitutes a means of communicating an alternative vision of the
future. If utopia, as Nandy proposes, is an act of communicating a vision, a language, then the time is ripe
when this must be the language of suffering rather than one of development and progress. This is a shared
language an inter-civilizational perspective on trauma, suffering and atrocity. It generates a
cosmopolitan memory, a transnationalization of suffering that can give us an affective cosmopolitanism
where we recognize the Others suffering.
Affective cosmopolitanism is perhaps the antinomy of Nandys modernity. How does one move beyond the
sheer singularity of internal (shall we say it, postcolonial) and respond to the external suffering? Nandys
persistent insistence on native forms of knowledge and critical thinking has always been informed by EuroAmerican parallels, opposition and reception. We do not have to talk through the West, as Nandy puts it
(1998: 144), but we talk with it because we talk with the Wests own repressed. Affective cosmopolitanism
is perhaps an antinomy because it moves towards a strange cosmopolitan nativism (Olaniyan 2001): a
commitment to native forms of knowing and thinking and internal suffering, while simultaneously locating
it within a transnational, translocal and global context of critical knowledge produced from/with suffering.
Native suffering battling a global structure of neo-colonization (the charming side of globalization) is one
judgment, approach and form of critical knowledge. Its antinomic pair is the equally valid and powerful
awareness of a global context, of Euro-American suffering and the Wests repressed.
Affective cosmopolitanism is the new ethical or cosmopolitan nativist turn to cultural dialogue. It is an
Page | 37
act of absolute hospitality (without asking the name or origin of the sufferer) and welcome extended to
the suffering Other. To be able to listen, to be empathetic is to see the global writ locally, and vice versa. To
be at once local and global, an antinomy of self-reflexivity, critical knowledge and thought. This is the
strange destination of Ashis Nandy not ever directed solely at the native or the foreign but at both.
Nandys destination the utopia of suffering is a disruption of linear, vectoral destination. We could, after
discovering his affective cosmopolitanism, his cosmopolitan nativism, call it not simply in Vinay Lals
terms, a strange destination. Instead, Nandys is what Jacques Derrida termed clandestination [Derrida
1992: 350].
Nandys cosmopolitan vision and utopianism, to sum up, is the anterior moment to the return to affect in
contemporary social theory and anticipates a whole new form thus based on (i) suffering, (ii) affect, (iii)
empathy (iv) an ethics of recognition. The affective cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitan nativist is here. And
one of his names is Ashis Nandy.
Pramod K. Nayar*

... a version of democratic theory, and institutions of democratic practice, that would call for and help to nurture a
form of civic identity - individual and collective - committed to a work of mourning over the historical and
enduring traumas surrounding racial discrimination and violence in the United States. By a reading of
psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory, I show that mourning should be considered
less as a limited response to particular loss - one that will resolve itself after a certain lapse of time - than as a
process of identity formation through recognition of, and reflection on, formative traumas in the democratic polity.
Using the work of Melanie Klein in particular, I argue that the work of mourning not only implies the working
through of mundane losses and traumas, but the development of a certain identity (in what Klein calls the
depressive position) that is sensitive to the larger scenes of persecution and v iolence that shape the social and
political landscape.
Finally, mourning is not limited to our natural and limited responses to intimate object loss. For Klein, mourning is
not only a method of identifying with the lost other, but is also partly about losing certain strategies for living in and
understanding the world. Mourning involves giving up not only the object that has been lost, but also letting go of
the defenses and fantasies that alleviate our anxiety over this very loss and that keep us from the splintering and
shattering activity of reflecting on and living with trauma. The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of
reconceptualization and/as a process of identity achievement - a means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and
instaurating a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect, the work of mourning is
not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an essential part of democratic life today.
Page | 38


R. P. Ben Dedek

Arif Dirlik
.

Page | 39

and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for
the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money,


and Global Sovereignties (review) Matthew M. Heaton
Psychoanalysis has been one of the two systems of thought to define the long twentieth century, the other one
being Marxism, declares Mario Ben Plotkin in the opening salvo of his chapter in this refreshing and provocative
volume of essays (p. 113). Like Marxism, psychoanalysis carries with it a universalist ideology, an underlying belief
that somehow, some way, we are all the same. However, in both systems of thought, that underlying similarity is cut
by gradations of difference hierarchies of development, evolution, progressthat are inextricable
from the context of European colonial domination of much of the globe in the first half of the century and the
legacies of that domination in the second half.
Page | 40
Idowu William
In his moving essay "Towards a Third World Utopia," Ashis Nandy makes a concerted effort at realizing the Third
World both as perspective and as the possibility of a different vision and content. To quote Nandy: "Thus, no utopia
can be without an implicit or explicit theory of suffering. This is especially so in the peripheries of the world,
euphemistically called the third world (21). Nandy goes on to say that "to have a meaningful life in the minds of
men, such a utopia must start with the issue of man-made suffering, which has given the third world both its name
and uniqueness" (Traditions 21). Nandy affirms that his essay is "guided by the belief that the only way the third
world can transcend the sloganeering of its well-wishers is, first, by becoming a collective representation of the
victims of man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times; second, by internalizing or owning up
to the outside forces of oppression and then coping with them as inner vectors; and third, by recognizing the
oppressed or marginalized selves of the first and the second worlds as civilizational allies in the battle against
institutionalized suffering" (21).

What makes a film an African film. In the end,
we have to agree with Anne Jrgensen (2001, p. 119) that African film is a complex field of study
in which narrative models, popular issues and modes of production vary and change.
There are also those who ponder on the need to acknowledge the cultural and personal gains of the contact with
modern languages. This is the case, for example, of Abiola Ireles famous In Praise of Alienation, whose main
arguments I would like to recall. In his view, Africans are profoundly ambivalent in relation to Europe, being
Page | 41
simultaneously resentful of the alienation caused by colonialismand therefore willing to recover a lost African
identityand incurably affected by European modernity and by what is usually called Western culture.
For Irele, it is crucial that Africans overcome this ambivalence by replacing that pathological alienation with a
positive one. In other words, the negative alienation provoked by colonialism should be transcended not through a
return to tradition, but through a total capitulation to European modernity: In the historical context of present
African development, we may now ask, Alienation for what, and in what direction? I will answer that question
unequivocally: as a matter of practical necessity, we have no choice but in the direction of Western culture and
civilization (215).
African nationalism and the making of Africans

African nationalism was the laboratory within which African identities were created. The process of creating a
common African identity had to contend with the historical realities on the ground and try to homogenise ethnic,
racial and religious differences.
Do Africans exist? Genealogies and paradoxes
of African identities and the discourses of nativism and xenophobia
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
To lose ones culture is therefore like losing memory. This is the situation,
which most Africans find themselves today. . . the African today is caught between
a past s/he cannot recall, a present s/he is ill-equipped to understand and a future,
s/he cannot contemplate. Chis Okechukwu Uroh
idowu Post-colonialism entails, in a practical way, series of intermingling dilemmas with respect to the quest and
nature of African identity. Entailed in post-colonial construction of African identity is the normativity of change.
This is understandable since the post-colonial is begotten of the colonial, thus making a critical account of the notion
of change a necessary feature of post-colonial construction of identity. Endorsing change and its inevitability is thus
one of the several challenges of identity in post-colonial discourses on identity.
One of the problems of post-colonial configuration of identity is to assume the deadness of the earlier while
celebrating the birth of the now. Post-colonialism is trenchantly an engagement or exercise in extension. As Simon
Gikandi (1996, p. 15) puts it, post-colonialism is one way of recognizing how decolonised situations are marked by
the trace of the imperial pasts they try to disavow . . . a code for the state of undecidability in which the culture of
colonialism continues to resonate in what was supposed to be its negation.
Privileging the method of anamnesis (unforgetting) as a postcolonial method, she argues that the forgotten past must
continuously be revoked to first resuscitate it and then to show how their erasure from consciousness does not render
them incapable of influencing our present through the unconscious. Under the bedrock of conscious memory and the
easily visible past lies the submerged unconscious wherein lie residues of memory causing seemingly inexplicable
symptoms in everyday life. (9) She elaborates, that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity is ultimately
vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own unconsidered and unresolved past. Its convalescence is unnecessarily
prolonged on account.
the development of the African continents identity complexion and meaning of Africanness.
The slave trade not only led to the formation of a Diaspora in the Americas but also to the formation of whole states
composed of Africans transposed to other parts of the world such as Haiti and Jamaica. The formation of African
Page | 42
Diasporas led to the popularisation of the name Africa and

the increasing racialisation of African identity
As a continent, Africa has a chequered history of formation. Its name is an external label. There is now consensus
that the name started to be used during Roman times with specific reference to North Africa before it was extended
to the whole continent at the end of the first century before the current era. Zeleza (2006a, p. 15) argued that its
cartographic application was both gradual and contradictory as it became divorced from its original North African
coding to be used with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa. Thus the African continent as a geographical space,
representation, and historical phenomenon is an invention and an idea. Valentin Mudimbe (1988) interrogated the
processes that were at work in the construction of Africa and its representation through Eurocentric categories and
conceptual systems ranging from anthropological definitions of Africa and missionary activities to Western
philosophical social engineering. Mudimbe (1994) revealed how navigators, traders, travellers, colonialists,
missionaries and colonial anthropology combined in representing and shaping the idea and meaning of Africa and
being African.
Idowu William
For many Africans, a very good way of looking at the idea of African identity clusters around the readiness to
defend willingly African values and African culture in a world that is reeling under the influence of globalization
and modernization. The above tallies with the innocuous but dangerous description of Africathat which captures
the essence of primitivism. On a critical note, primitivism has a peculiar double meaning. The conception of
primitivism in one sense is innocent: Africa is primitive because it is the land of genuine beings, unspoiled,
original, unadulterated and close to life. But the other aspect of the meaning of primitivism is demeaning and self
defeating: those held to be genuine are so because they are starkly underdeveloped, and according to Walter Rodney
(1972), the underdevelopment of Africa was the other and necessary side of western development into industrial and
modern society.
Idowu William
By a reading of psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory, I show that mourning should
be considered less as a limited response to particular lossone that will resolve itself after a certain lapse of time
than as a process of identity formation through recognition of, and reflection on, formative traumas in the
democratic polity
a version of democratic theory, and institutions of democratic practice, that would call for and help to nurture a
form of civic identity individual and collectivecommitted to a work of mourning over the historical and
enduring traumas surrounding racial discrimination and violence .
Page | 43
Rushdies Modernism:
the immigrant experience in the contemporary world, and its consequent link
with dominant modes of thought and writing
immigrant experience in the contemporary world, and its consequent link with the dominant modes of
thought and writing of the day, which Rushdie describes as modernism
This is an extract from Imaginary Homelands,' the article in which Rushdie elaborates on the idea of the
universality and relevance of the immigrant experience in the contemporary world, and its consequent link with the
dominant modes of thought and writing of the day, which Rushdie describes as modernism.
Gn Orgun on Mukherjee and Rushdie in Through Travelled Eyes
After describing the psychosocial implications of migrating from the colony to the metropolis, he states that 'in
varying degrees, the normal role for the modem creative writer is to be an exile... Deracination has become almost a
prerequisite of intellectual distinction' (p. 13). This is a common enough observation, made over and over again by
an exiled writer like Rushdie, who proposed migration as a 'metaphor for all humanity, ' and suggested that the triple
uprooting from home, language and culture resulted in the immigrants and the immigrant writers having 'modernism
forced upon' them. '.

Transculturalism, places the concept of culture at the center of a redefinition of the nation-state or even the
disappearance of the nation-state. This process of recognizing oneself in the other leads inevitably to a cosmopolitan
citizenship. This citizenship, independent of political structures and institutions, develops each individual in the
understanding that ones culture is multiple, mtis and that each human experience and existence is due to the
contact with other, who in reality is like, oneself.
that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own unconsidered
and unresolved past. Its convalescence is unnecessarily prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and
recognize its continuity with the pernicious malaise of colonization. (7)
It creates an inexplicable longing, a puzzling circulation of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression (11).
On The Colonial/Post-Colonial Subject. Postcolonial identity in a globalizing India by Sangeet Kumar on
Albert Memmi
Idowu William

Page | 44
the postcolonial artist
as cosmopolitan is priest.

As Butler argues, the search for authenticity begins as a performance,

a need to belong, and transitions into a performative declaration of self.
what is meant by the appellation African identity?
Can identity be contextualized? What context explains African identity? What is really African
in any identity? Is the word Africa itself subject to conceptualization? In what do we situate African identity? Is
African identity always the same, changing or becoming? To whom is the conceptualization of African identity
important and significant? Is it to the African or non-African? But then, why would a conceptualization
of the nature of African identity be important to the African himself or to those who are not?
What is the source of the importance and the quest for African identity?
As I hope this discussion will show, despite his claims, Achebe is still very much imprisoned in the crossroads of
two cultures, not so much as a victim of the colonial and post-colonial predicament, but as a representative of what
Kwame Appiah has called a comprador intelligentsia, that is, a relatively small, Western-style, Westerntrained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the
periphery (62): in the West they are known through the Africa they offer, their compatriots know them both
through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and
for Africa (63).
Page | 45

What makes a film an African film. In the end,
we have to agree with Anne Jrgensen (2001, p. 119) that African film is a complex field of study
in which narrative models, popular issues and modes of production vary and change.

Idowu William

as cosmopolitan is priest
citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles
nothing so much as the worldliness of a nomad.
To lose ones culture is therefore like losing memory. This is the situation,
which most Africans find themselves today. . . the African today is caught between
Page | 46
a past s/he cannot recall, a present s/he is ill-equipped to understand and a future,
s/he cannot contemplate. Chis Okechukwu Uroh
For many Africans, a very good way of looking at the idea of African identity clusters around the readiness to
defend willingly African values and African culture in a world that is reeling under the influence of globalization
and modernization.
The above tallies with the innocuous but dangerous description of Africa
- that which captures the essence of primitivism.
Idowu William

a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect,
the work of mourning is not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is
an essential part of democratic life today.
mourning is not limited to our natural and limited responses to intimate object loss. For Klein, mourning is
also partly about losing certain strategies for living in and understanding the world. . The work of mourning,
therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization and/as a process of identity achievementa means of mitigating
cognitive dogmatism and instaurating a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect,
the work of mourning is not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an essential part of democratic
life today.
a version of democratic theory, and institutions of democratic practice, that would call for and help to nurture a
form of civic identity individual and collectivecommitted to a work of mourning over the historical and
enduring traumas surrounding racial discrimination and violence ... By a reading of psychoanalytic theory in
conversation with political and social theory, I show that mourning should be considered less as a limited response
to particular lossone that will resolve itself after a certain lapse of timethan as a process of identity formation
through recognition of, and reflection on, formative traumas in the democratic polity. Using the work of Melanie
Klein in particular, I argue that the work of mourning not only implies the working through of mundane losses and
traumas, but the development of a certain identity (in what Klein calls the depressive position) that is sensitive to
the larger scenes of persecution and violence that shape the social and political landscape.


Before the mid-eighteenth century, approximately, the practice of utopists,
following Plato, was to present their imaginary societies like Athena, sprung fully formed from the brow of their
creator, perfected in every detail.
But the city was, from the beginning, related to the newly perceived cosmic order: the sun, the moon, the planets, the
Page | 47
lightning, the storm wind. In short, as Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen pointed out a century ago, the city was
primarily a religious phenomenon: it was the home of a god, and even the city wall points to this super-human
origin;
This cosmic orientation, these mythic-religious claims, this royal preemption of the powers and functions of the
community are what transformed the mere village or town into a city: something "out of this world," the home of a
god. the city itself was transmogrified into an ideal form a glimpse of eternal order, a visible heaven on earth, a
seat of the life abundant in other words, utopia.

Pramod K. Nayar

Thomas Pangle.
Diogenes the Cynic, "when he was asked where he came from, would say, 'I am a citizen of the world.'"41 But
Diogenes fancied himself citiless, homeless, deprived of a fatherland, and it is not easy to see where his
commitment to world-citizenship goes beyond this rejection of more local citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help
people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so much as the worldliness of a nomad.
Anaxagoras allegedly expressed a kind of world-citizenship differently: And finally he retired and concerned
himself with the investigation of nature without paying any mind to politics. When someone asked, 'Does your
fatherland mean nothing to you?,' he replied, 'Hush! My fatherland is very important to me,' as he pointed to the
heavens. Anaxagoras.
the wise man becomes the true friend of the gods, and their only true priest,
the knower of the proper sacrifices, to whom the gods communicate divinations of the future
through dreams and scientific auguries. Socratic Cosmopolitanism:
Thomas Pangle
and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god.
By substituting conscription and communism for the later
institutions of the market, wage labor,
Page | 48
the importance of blood in sacrifice.
It seems the purpose of a religious sacrifice is to sanctify the taking of a life, usually marked by the spilling of the
victim's blood, as is the case with animals and humans. It is a ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The
blood is a required 'food' for the gods. Being not of human flesh, they require the very life-force of humans to
nourish and appease them. Sacrificial blood has divine powers which can sanctify mortals and nourish deities.
cosmopolitanism. we need new priests
imagine theres no country: to have a nation is to have an altar for sacrifice,
and so is idenity and belonging. the new postcolonial cosmopoltn
Thomas Pangle.
S
ocratic Cosmopolitanism:
Thomas Pangle.
Diogenes the Cynic, "when he was asked where he came from, would say, 'I am a citizen of the world.'"41 But
Diogenes fancied himself citiless, homeless, deprived of a fatherland, and it is not easy to see where his
commitment to world-citizenship goes beyond this rejection of more local citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help
people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so much as the worldliness of a nomad.
Anaxagoras allegedly expressed a kind of world-citizenship differently: And finally he retired and concerned
himself with the investigation of nature without paying any mind to politics. When someone asked, 'Does your
fatherland mean nothing to you?,' he replied, 'Hush! My fatherland is very important to me,' as he pointed to the
heavens. Anaxagoras.

as cosmopolitan is priest.
Page | 49
colonialism.
Eric Brown

R. P. Ben Dedek

We need new priests

Page | 50
imagine theres no country:
the artist as priest
on imaginary homelands, sacrifice, representation,
split-identity and multicultural trauma.

Cosmos: Making Up Worlds

A hasty review of cosmopolitanism might begin with Diogenes of Sinope's misanthropy (for an in-depth study of
cosmopolitanism that focuses on the Enlightenment, but also touches on the Ancient Greeks, see Schlereth). Living
in a barrel on the streets and in exile, this anticonventionialist responded to Alexander Great's inquiry into his origins
with the following: kosmopolites.
Robbins's explanation of cosmopolitanism rests on his reversion to the "original" meaning of cosmos,
that is "order" or "adornment" as in "cosmetics" ("Secular" 188). He then associates the cosmos in cosmopolitanism
with the act of making up the world rather than the world itself conceived as a totality. The making-up strategy thus
insists on the various parts as much as it does on the totality.

Eric Brown
the title 'polis' to no ordinary human community.5

Page | 51
But according to the Stoics, the cosmos as a whole is put in order by right reason,
and it is a place where human beings live. So the cosmos as a whole
does satisfy the definition of 'polis'.
This is the Stoic doctrine of the cosmopolis.6 Because it rests on normative ideals that far outstrip what ordinary
practice manages to satisfy, one might well assume that the Stoic who strives to live as a citizen of the cosmopolis
would have to turn away from ordinary politics. On this assumption, "living as a citizen of the cosmos" would be
nothing more than a metaphor for living in agreement with the right reason that pervades nature - just a metaphor for
living a good human life as Stoicism understands it. Seneca interprets the doctrine of the cosmopolis in this way
when he insists, in De Otio, that the original Greek Stoics justified a life of withdrawal from political engagement on
the grounds that no extant city satisfies the Stoic standards of a true political community.7
suffering, though exemplified in a certain way by the Third World, is a universal and omni-locational
Stoic Balbus,
in the dialogue On the Nature of the Gods: "The world is as it were the common home

Page | 52
Thomas Pangle.
Thomas Pangle.

sedimented object with permanent features than as an ever-changing and
inherently unstable entity-in-becoming.
This dissertation argues for a version of democratic theory, and institutions of democratic practice, that would call
for and help to nurture a form of civic identity individual and collectivecommitted to a work of mourning
over the historical and enduring traumas surrounding racial discrimination and violence in the United States. By a
reading of psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory, I show that mourning should be
considered less as a limited response to particular lossone that will resolve itself after a certain lapse of time
democratic polity. Using the work of Melanie Klein in particular, I argue that the work of mourning not only implies
the working through of mundane losses and traumas, but the development of a certain identity (in what Klein calls
the depressive position) that is sensitive to the larger scenes of persecution and violence that shape the social and
political landscape.
Finally, mourning is not limited to our natural and limited responses to intimate object loss. For Klein, mourning is
not only a method of identifying with the lost other, but is also partly about losing certain strategies for living in and
understanding the world. Mourning involves giving up not only the object that has been lost, but also letting go of
the defenses and fantasies that alleviate our anxiety over this very loss and that keep us from the splintering and
shattering activity of reflecting on and living with trauma. The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of
reconceptualization and/as a process of identity achievementa means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and
instaurating a capacity for facing history and our selves in a healthier way. In this respect, the work of mourning is
not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is an essential part of democratic life today.


Pramod K. Nayar
Page | 53
model, and thereby perpetuate the terrain of imbalance and inequity (see Guinier), Nandy's utopianism is directed at
Page | 54
democratic polity
colonialism.
Eric Brown
R. P. Ben Dedek
Page | 55
The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization and/as a process of identity achievement
a means of mitigating cognitive dogmatism and instaurating a capacity for facing history and our selves in a
healthier way. In this respect, the work of mourning is not only a broader phenomenon than it first appears, but it is
an essential part of democratic life today

we need new priests.

the global village and the quest for utopia.
Cosmopolitics, on this view, is closely associated with a series of questions relating to the rights of the foreigner,
immigrant, exiled, deported, stateless or displaced person. As we have already seen, in his Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant appears to extend cosmopolitan law to encompass universal hospitality without
limit on account of communal possession of the earths surface. However, in Perpetual Peace, Kant tempers this by
stipulating: the law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.
It would necessitate the incorporation of vital international symbolism into our civil religion, or, perhaps a better
way of putting it, it would result in American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the
world. It is useless to speculate on the form such a civil religion might take, though it obviously would draw on
religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone. Fortunately, since the American civil religion is not
the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and
universal reality, the reorganization entailed by such a new situation need not disrupt the American civil religion's
continuity. A world civil religion could be accepted as a fulfillment and not as a denial of American civil religion.
Indeed, such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civil religion from the beginning. To deny
such an outcome would be to deny the meaning of America itself.
Towards a Third World Utopia: inter-civilizational perspective on oppression
Ashish Nand
Page | 56
Ashish Nandy
Ashish Nandys utopia is based on a particular view of cosmopolitanism one that acknowledges and acts
upon suffering as a global feature irrespective of geographical and historical location. Nandys proposed
response to this recognition of suffering is primarily affective. This recognition leads to a politics, and a
vision that her is termed affective cosmopolitanism. Nandys affective cosmopolitanism constitutes, it
is argued, the opening moments of new debates in cosmopolitanism.
the world, euphemistically called the third world . "to have a meaningful life in the minds of men, such a utopia
must start with the issue of man-made suffering, which has given the third world both its name and uniqueness".
Pramod K. Nayar

Thomas Pangle.

Pramod K. Nayar*
Pramod K. Nayar
Page | 57

Pramod K. Nayar*
democratic polity
Page | 58

Pramod K. Nayar
Page | 59
By a reading of psychoanalytic theory in conversation with political and social theory,

I show that mourning should be considered less as a limited response to particular lo
All utopias and visions of the future are a language.
Whether majestic, tame, or down-to-earth, they are an attempt to communicate
with the present in terms of the myths and allegories of the future
Ashis Nandy
democratic polity

"The world is as it were the common home

On Cosmopolitanism.
Nandy proposes that a new cosmopolitanism would benefit from retrieving what has been
repressed in the West. Nandys cosmopolitanism critiques the prevalent ones because, for him, the present
concept of cosmopolitanism considers Western culture to be definitionally universal and therefore
cosmopolitan (146). What is needed urgently is to locate and retrieve the suffering (i.e., the repressed) in
the West itself.
On Self-Critique
Nandy argues: It is a matter of admitting that while each civilization must find its own authentic
vision of the future and its own authenticity in future, neither is conceivable without admitting the
experience of co-suffering which has now brought some of the major civilizations of the world close to
each other. It is this co-suffering which makes the idea of cultural closeness something than the chilling
Page | 60
concept of One World which nineteenth-century European optimism popularized and promoted to the status
of a dogma. (468)
Nandy has always argued for reflexive, self-critical cultures. Here he sees this act of self-criticism as one
that first acknowledges that no civilization or culture has a monopoly of/over suffering and second,
acknowledging suffering could become the means of critical scrutiny both within and outside ones culture.


Pramod K. Nayar

Thomas Pangle.

The first utopias we know were fabricated in Greece; In return, every member of the community was obliged to
Like kingship, the city was "lowered
down from heaven and cut to a heavenly pattern;
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared
morality. Cosmopolitanism may entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to more inclusive
moral, economic, and/or political relationships between nations or individuals of different nations. A person who
adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan or cosmopolite.[1]
Cosmopolitanism can be traced back to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412 B.C.), the founding father of the Cynic
movement in Ancient Greece. Of Diogenes it is said: "Asked where he came from, he answered: 'I am a citizen of
the world (kosmopolits)'".[3] This was a ground-breaking concept, because the broadest basis of social identity in
Greece at that time was either the individual city-state or the Greeks (Hellenes) as a group. The Stoics, who later
took Diogenes' idea and developed it into a full blown concept, typically stressed that each human being "dwells [...]
Page | 61
in two communities the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration".[4] A
common way to understand Stoic cosmopolitanism is through Hierocles' circle model of identity that states that we
should regard ourselves as concentric circles, the first one around the self, next immediate family, extended family,
local group, citizens, countrymen, humanity. Within these circles human beings feel a sense of "affinity" or
"endearment" towards others, which the Stoics termed Oikeisis. The task of world citizens becomes then to "draw
the circles somehow towards the centre, making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so forth." [5]
Cosmopolitanism. Wikipedia.
Thomas Pangle.
the wise man becomes the true friend of the gods, and their only true priest,
the knower of the proper sacrifices, to whom the gods communicate divinations of the future
through dreams and scientific auguries,

Pramod K. Nayar

We Need New Priests

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

We Need New Priests

Uploaded by

Copyright:

The African today is caught between a past s/he cannot recall, a present s/he is ill-equipped

to understand and a future s/he cannot contemplate. Chis Okechukwu Uroh.

brave new world;

we need new priests.

cosmopolitan is the new indigenous

proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition

the interpretation of trauma and sovereignty in the postcolonial era

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless,

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards a Multiverse of Transformations

Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine

The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state

Colonial Intersections and the Ideology of Cosmopolitanism

Alain Touraine. Society as Utopia.

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Introducing Daoism. Cosmos, Gods, and Governance. Livia Kohn

Cosmopolitanism is a conception of multiculturalism as maximum freedom, for minority as well as majority

cosmopolitanism is, in identity terms, betwixt and between

Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business.

"disposing of dangerous African employees."

The Trauma of a Diminished Existence: Chinua Achebe Revisited

Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma,

psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma and sovereignty in the postcolonial era

Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition

British ethnopsychiatrists were watching a world being born,

Multiculturalism or Transculturalism: Towards a Cosmopolitan Citizenship.

Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine

Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine

Alain Touraine. Society as Utopia.

Lewis Mumford. Utopia,

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state

when he was asked where you come from?

On this account, postmodern consumers live as tourist citizens who delight

The fundamental fact

The Language Question and the Place of Education: Contrasting Views

Recent post-colonial discourses are replete with controversies over

There would be no man or liberty, no history or individual" (12).

we need new priests:

Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma,

we need new priests:

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Sources in the history of colonial psychiatry reveal a great deal about

"disposing of dangerous African employees."

British ethnopsychiatrists were watching a world being born,

proximity to the colonial administration--more than any natural predisposition

The fundamental fact

The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state

Cosmopolitanism is a conception of multiculturalism as maximum freedom, for minority as well as majority

The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state

Alain Touraine. Society as Utopia.

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards a Multiverse of Transformations

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Mourning in America: Racial Trauma and the Democratic Work of Mourning

Cosmopolitanism is a conception of multiculturalism as maximum freedom, for minority as well as majority

to have believed that all effective politics is necessarily local.

Alain Touraine. Society as Utopia.

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

The work of mourning, therefore, is partly a work of reconceptualization

On Ashis Nandys Suffering, Utopia and Comopolitanism.

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

On Ashis Nandys Utopia. Affective Cosmopolitanism

Mourning in America: Racial Trauma and the Democratic Work of Mourning