This chapter examines some cultural texts of cosmopolitanism, those explorations in sociality and hostipitality (Derrida 2002, 156) that juxtapose claims to humanity with the constraints of subaltern abjection and with the caution that imagining the stranger differs from imagining oneself as stranger and from being interpellated as stranger in the place one considers home. The phrase “vernacular cosmopolitanism” sounds like an oxymoron and reflects this contradictory dynamics. In anthropologist Pnina Werbner's explanation:

As stated in the introduction, Sheldon Pollock notes the ways in which it references the privileged world of the Greek polis as well as the Roman verna or house- born slave (2002). Likewise, Homi Bhabha's invention of the phrase also drew attention to its contradictory nature (2002, 25) and to the idea that it was marked by repetition rather than teleology (1996). It is a dynamics present as well in Paul Gilroy's tracing of cosmopolitanism back to Montesquieu's eighteenth- century satiric text Persian Letters (Gilroy 2005). Because it draws attention to the singular within the plural (Nancy 2000) and to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism is, I believe, a useful approach in this transnational, globalized age.

For example, many current debates on cosmopolitanism revolve around the tendency to view universal human rights as being in tension with the sovereignty of nation- states, and Immanuel Kant is, for example, invoked on both sides of this argument. In Another Cosmopolitanism, Seyla Benhabib argues that Kant's significance lies not so much in his doctrine of universal hospitality (which never includes rights to citizenship) as in the ways in which his three articles on definitive peace are articulated together (2006, 148). In consequence, “The discourse of hospitality moves from the language of morals to that of juridical rights […] legal cosmopolitanism, according to which the individual is not only a moral being who is a member of a universal moral community but is also a person entitled to a certain status in a world civil society” (149).