Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture

Cosmopolitanism is back. A quarter century ago, the word described an aesthetic stance; today, the term is rich with political meaning. The cosmopolitan-the "citizen of the world"-is unconstrained by national boundaries. Today, the idea of the cosmopolitan is changing as the world changes: the rise of international capital, the alteration of borders, local and transnational demands for autonomy are all making cosmopolitanism a key concept in the study of people and language, writing, and space.Cosmopolitan Geographiesconsiders the struggles at the heart of the subject-inclusion vs. exclusion, nation vs. world, globalization vs. local economy-not only in our own time but across centuries.Cosmopolitan Geographiesasks whether in our rush to globalization we can sustain the geo-cultural ideal of cosmopolitan identity.