NAAS conference 2009 > About the conference

About the biannual conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies

COSMOPOLITAN AMERICA?: THE UNITED STATES IN TRANSITION

In "Trans-national America" (1916), Randolph Bourne celebrated the United States as a "cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures," and concluded that "[a]ny movement which attempts to thwart this weaving" together of foreign cultures "is false to this cosmopolitan vision."

Bourne's essay has been rediscovered in recent years due to the "transnational turn" in American studies; however, his use of the term "cosmopolitan" has received less attention. Yet there are clear signs that, like transnationalism, cosmopolitanism is achieving renewed prominence in scholarship both within and beyond American studies.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) recasts long-standing philosophical ideas of cosmopolitanism to provide an alternative to contested ideas of "globalization" and "multiculturalism"; Appiah posits a "partial cosmopolitanism" that enables people to combine a global, ethical outlook with "the partialities of kinfolk and community."

In African American studies, Brent Hayes Edwards has traced the cosmopolitan dimensions of "black internationalism." In U.S. literary studies, Tom Lutz has recast established ideas of regionalism to make the case for "cosmopolitan vistas," while Leigh Anne Duck has argued that U.S. southern literature exhibits "provincial cosmopolitanism." In the field of history, David Hollinger makes the case for a cosmopolitan, postethnic America that promises to be ethnically less circumscribed than multicultural America.

However, the work of other scholars suggests that Bourne's vision of the United States as a "unique," even exceptional, "cosmopolitan enterprise" no longer holds. For example, Parag Khanna argues that the United States of Europe has eclipsed the United States of America by "transforming Europe's identities from tribal to cosmopolitan." Ian Tyrrell suggests that a cosmopolitan, transnational view of history spells the death-knell of American exceptionalism. Meanwhile Todd Gitlin and Richard Rorty have warned of the "dangers" and limits of cosmopolitanism, advocating instead a revised form of patriotism.

The 2009 NAAS conference organizers have invited scholars from all areas of American studies and related subjects to join us in contemplating the conundrum of cosmopolitanism.

• Is the United States in transition to - or away from-Randolph Bourne's "cosmopolitan vision"?
• Is cosmopolitanism actually desirable, or might patriotism be preferable?
• Is cosmopolitanism a viable alternative to "the clash of civilizations"?
• How does cosmopolitanism relate to U.S. foreign policy?
• Is U.S. foreign policy moving in a more cosmopolitan direction?
• Does the 2008 presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the biracial son of a Kansas mother and a Kenyan father, suggest a (re)emergent cosmopolitan America?
• Does Congressional resistance to the McCain-Kennedy immigration act suggest the limits of U.S. cosmopolitanism?
• Has the influx of Hispanic and other non-white immigrants to the South generated a new form of regional or provincial cosmopolitanism?
• Does the prominence of writers such as Junot Dìaz, Francisco Goldman and Jamaica Kincaid - or the focus on border regions and bilingualism in the works of older writers like Cormac McCarthy - suggest a cosmopolitan turn in contemporary "American" literature?

The NAAS 2009 organizing committee is:

• Dr. Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen)
• Dr. Jørn Brøndal (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
• Dr. Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt (University of Copenhagen)
• Dr. Anne Dvinge (University of Copenhagen)
• Prof. David Nye (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
• Dr. Carl Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School)
• Dr. Vibeke Schou-Tjalve (Danish Institute for Military Studies, Copenhagen)