Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time
Bruce Robbins
When Assia Djebar ([1985] 1993) recounted the nineteenth-century French conquest of Algeria, was she obliged to recognize earlier Algerian Arabs by Ottomans? Are we sure that this should not also count as colonialism? Was obliged, going even further back, Berbers? Would too have be called an imperial conquest? The moment seems come when such awkward discipline-stretching issues are unavoidable. cosmopolitanism with which familiar is geographical – impulse undo centuries Eurocentrism factoring in cultures and viewpoints from outside Europe its settler colonies. But entails a temporal less expansion back time take cultural texts, events moments, like classical canons China India or premodern empires, merely non-European but untethered usual relation unequal power. This essay explores some alternative mutually exclusive descriptions move into deep time. Is it depoliticizing shift postcolonial ‘world literature’? A necessary recalibration moral balance between ‘our’ ‘their’ imperialisms? return ‘grand narrative’ name ecology, ‘new’ materialism, evolutionary science? rehabilitation European identity modernity?
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies