This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

Chapter 4 first tackles the early reception of the concept of Weltliteratur in German criticism. I argue that these discussions, informed by the emergent economic and cultural nationalism of the 1830s-40s, offered a protectionist critique of free trade cosmopolitanism. Based on the conviction that untrammelled exchange assisted the exploitation of less developed trading partners, protectionists such as Friedrich List agitated for the temporary restriction of imports in support of domestic productive forces. Echoing these doctrines, world literature was associated with an overgrown translation industry that advanced the expansion of already hegemonic foreign literatures, wiping out demand for home-grown products in budding national markets. This combination of commercial self-protection and cultural self-defence was taken up in wider regions of East-Central Europe, especially in Hungary. The second part of the chapter discusses the shifting positions of world literature in Hungarian criticism between the 1840s and 1860s, as represented by the work of János Erdélyi and Hugó von Meltzl and their alternate strategies of self-assertion and self-expansion from a minor-marginal position.

This chapter begins with the description of Australian poets as expatriates from the beginning of settlement. It argues that a perceived colonial provincialism and the smallness of the Australian market led to several well-known novelists pursuing their career abroad. The reasons for poets leaving Australia have been far more varied. Australian expatriate poets have been both short-term and long-term inhabitants of countries such as Paraguay (Mary Gilmore), England (W. J. Turner, Peter Porter, Clive James, Katherine Gallagher) and the United States (E. G. Moll, Keith Harrison, Ray Matthew, Kevin Roberts, Gail Holst-Warhaft). The chapter considers the influence of music on Porter’s poetry and his poetic meditations on death. It discusses the pursuit of an academic career by Harrison and his writing of particular locations and family relationships. Relatedly, it considers Gallagher’s remembrance of Australia and exploration of family and regeneration through the garden and its flowers. The chapter also appraises the erudition of James and his tribute and critiques of fellow poets. Lastly, the chapter charts the demise of the need for expatriatism in light of advances in travel and digital communication, while outlining the existence of a contemporary diaspora of Australian poets in many countries.

This chapter considers the increased opportunities for women writers to travel and relocate in the early to mid twentieth century. It analyses the possible impact that living in Australia could have on their writing but also how increased mobility generated a sense of independence that led to an experimentation with form. It would also embolden some to protest against social injustice, as well as enable more unconventional life paths. The chapter also considers how these writers navigated a sense of displacement and liminality in their writing. Lastly, it demonstrates how national categories were delimiting for these writers’ careers and had a negative effect on the later reception of their work.

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

Chapter 5 begins with a trans-colonial view of the settler empire in the 1870s as a critical decade of consolidating settler sovereignty. At this point of the nineteenth century, the contradictions of imperial liberalism were more clearly evident around the British Empire. British subjecthood was still projected as the glue to imperial citizenship, and the liberal values of freedom and justice still figured as distinctive British virtues. But Britishness itself was increasingly conceived as a racial rather than legal category, especially in the self-governing settler states. Against this backdrop of political shift in the empire, Chapter 5 addresses how Chinese settlers in the Australian colonies practiced everyday citizenship through good neighbourly relations, participation in the public sphere, and interracial domesticity. Some Chinese settlers were British subjects, reflecting the expanding boundaries of British subjecthood in the nineteenth-century empire. However, British subjecthood was not a precondition for everyday citizenship as a practice that was capable of encompassing different peoples and cultures.

Premised on the assumption that Afropolitan immobilities are as central to Afropolitanism as the forms of liquid flows and circulations that scholarship on Afropolitanism tends to focalize, this chapter uses modes of spatial and digital immobility in the production of Afropolitan subjectivities to read mainly anglophone Afropolitan literatures. Drawing on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, with occasional references to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Teju Cole’s Open City, the essay lingers on how the mobilities of Afropolitan cultural productions are intimately connected to symbolic and concrete geographies of stasis and technologies of nonmovement. Although Afropolitanism is often discussed as exhibiting affinities with the earlier Pan-Africanism, its ontological poetics similarly connects to digital cosmopolitanism, the condition of digital connectivity that centers the multiple roots and routes of global subjects whose cosmopolitanism is often entangled with forms of immobility and the quotidian use of digital social networks.

In the early twentieth century, Black American theatre pioneers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook sought to redefine the stereotypical minstrel figure for white audiences. Their efforts gave rise to the ‘coon’ character, a complex representation of Black urban life that challenged traditional norms while perpetuating some harmful stereotypes. This figure played a significant role in global modernism and shaped discussions about race, appearing in works by Eugene O’Neill and Jean Genet. By the 1960s, Black American artists felt the need to reimagine the ‘coon’ character to align with a more radical political agenda, reflecting the evolving social and cultural landscape that included the advent of Black radical politics and postcolonial thought. The new figure that emerged directly challenged political disenfranchisement and cultural appropriation, creating a theatre that was far more confrontational in its exploration of race.

In this chapter, the contrast between two models of expatriate masculinity developed earlier is brought to a head, with a fresh twist on the history of masculine identity. In retirement William Cooper indulged his passion for global wanderlust at the expense of his family, whereas Edgar Wilson happily abandoned his expatriate frustrations for a conventional model of settled suburban domesticity with his wife in England, spurning the mobile attractions of the cosmopolitanism they had long nurtured, but with Winifred continuing to exercise her public activism and independence. Ironically, the domestic model, rather than William’s continuing mobility, was most closely associated with the lower middle class, recalling Edgar’s origins and early white-collar labours. The disparity is underlined by a tragic account of William’s last years, interned by the Nazis in wartime Paris after an ill-advised excursion across France. Wartime domesticity for Edgar and Winifred was a struggle, only relieved by a comfortable inheritance from William. Winifred’s Will reflected her long commitment to chosen causes like the Mothers’ Union, a statement of her lifetime priorities.

Chapter 23 stresses that four sets of ideas need to be added to the principles and the topics of focus mentioned in Chapter 22. First, neither international order nor national order can be sustainable if the contradiction that exists today between, on the one hand, the celebration of human rights and, on the other hand, the tendency to treat individuals as disposable, deepens or simply persists. Second, the global justice agenda cannot credibly claim to be feasible if it does not factor in the views of the rest of the world. It is imperative to integrate what the non-West thinks. The ownership of a global agenda cannot be lopsided. Third, a cosmopolitan approach does not have to call for the removal or elimination of the state and sovereignty; rather, it is their reconceptualization and the application of this reconceptualization that are recommended. Fourth, institutional innovation will help implement this agenda.

Marcus Aurelius addresses himself as sociable by nature, as someone made to belong to a political community, and as a citizen of the cosmos. The good life for him consists in obeying the gods and cooperating with his fellow citizens in service of the common interest. His fellow citizens are all beings endowed with reason, and as a human he cares for all other people, whoever they may be. The Meditations demonstrate detailed knowledge and agreement with the conceptual foundations of Stoic cosmopolitanism, but specific approaches can be identified. Marcus underscores the organismic and egalitarian nature of the cosmic community and often gives a functional account of his status as a part of the cosmos, while at the same time also suggesting a hierarchical account of degrees of sociability. His rule as emperor he conceives as a personal challenge to live up to the model of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, also sharing the latter’s conservativism and traditionalism. Marcus’ Stoicism is more apparent in his quest for sincere and truly loving sociability, a striving that finds its limits in the aversion and disappointment Marcus often seems to experience with regard to those around him.

The global imaginary from which cosmopolitanism derives its ideological power has become increasingly dominant. This has set up contradictory responses. Cosmopolitanism is both a core expression and a casualty of our modern/postmodern times. On the one hand, there is a tendency for the intellectually trained to believe that good cosmopolitanism is a necessity in a globalising world. For those people, it does not make sense that positive global exchange between people concerned about fairness and justice should have its nationalist, realist, and provincial critics. On the other hand, there are those who associate cosmopolitanism variously with the abstract emptiness of disembodied globalisation (communitarians), the rapacious consequences of capitalist globalisation (alter-globalism activists), or the assault on certain sections of the national body (right-wing populists). Responding to this tension, this chapter defends a philosophy and ideology that are commonly held while critically and radically reworking its often-assumed precepts, agreeing at least with communitarian and alter-globalist distancing of the easy forms of cosmopolitanism.