The Cosmopolitanism

This article argues that the field of Victorian cosmopolitanisms has largely neglected accounts of migrants, exiles, and nomads in explorations of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan world of empires. A focus on these hypermobile figures draws attention to the ways in which mobility, in all forms, disrupts our understandings of place, home, and world as they are conceived in cosmopolitan thought. These examples of displaced subjectivities reveal how cosmopolitanism travels along space, disregarding borders of region, nation, or empire and conjuring new ideas about how we belong to the world. By thinking about how different cosmopolitanisms contend or coexist with one another, the article reconsiders a question that persistently reappears in debates about cosmopolitanism across time and space: Is it an ideal of sameness and commonality or an orientation toward difference and plurality?