Locating Transnational Ideals [Paperback]

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By locating, the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term transnational, which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical locating implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Locating Transnational Ideals, Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio Part I: Defining the Transnational and the Cosmopolitan1Globalization, Transnation and Utopia, Bill Ashcroft 2: Politics or Ethics? On Cosmopolitanism, Timothy Brennan 3: The Ethics of a Critical Cosmopolitanism for the Twenty-First Century, Heinz Antor 4: Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism, Laura Doyle 5: Toward a Non-Cynical Universalism, Keya Ganguly Part II: Historicizing the Transnational and the Cosmopolitan6: The Fascination of Living Together in a Civilized Way or Nations and Cosmopolitanism in Mores Utopia (1516) and Ribeiros Wild Utopia (1982), Hans Ulrich Seeber 7: Cultural Nationalism Reconsidered: Ossian in Postcolonial Perspectives, Tobias D?ring 8: Hard and Soft Cosmopolitanism: The Eighteenth Century and After, Walter Goebel 9: Exhibiting Difference: The Museum as a Guide to Spectatorship, Renate Brosch 10: The First Coll<