Cosmopolitanism shares with all varieties of universalism a profound suspicion of enclosures, but cosmopolitanism is defined by an additional element not essential to universalism itself: recognition, acceptance, and eager exploration of diversity. Cosmopolitanism urges each individual and collective unit to absorb as much varied experience as it can, while retaining its capacity to advance its aims effectively. For cosmopolitans, the diversity of humankind is a fact; for universalists, it is a potential problem.33
I’d go further: cosmopolitanism conceives of difference, not as a problem to be solved (as it is for Emerson or Rawls), but rather as an opportunity to be embraced.
Multiculturalism, of course, is a response to universalism that ostensibly privileges the claims of difference over those of universalism. If multiculturalism responds, as Glazer suggests, to the “universalistic demand” that “all groups should be recognized,” it does so by stressing toleration and pluralism. Hollinger argues that, as institutionalized in the United States, multiculturalism promotes the goal of cultural diversity by advocating a pluralism that “respects inherited boundaries and locates individuals within one or another of a series of ethno-racial groups to be protected and preserved.” According to Hollinger, this kind of pluralism “differs from cosmopolitanism in the degree to which it endows with privilege particular groups, especially the communities that are well established at whatever time the ideal of pluralism is invoked.”34 In other words, the logic of contemporary multiculturalism goes something like this: I like my culture (because it’s mine), but I respect yours. I want you to respect mine. I prefer mine (because it’s mine), and I imagine that you prefer yours (because it’s yours). I really can’t comment on your culture, because I don’t belong to it. I cherish my long-standing practices and values, and out of respect I’ll refrain from commenting on your long-standing practices and values. If I happen to find some of your long-standing practices and values distasteful or even repugnant—well, we’ll just agree to disagree. Even if, for example, one of those practices is slavery.
You would be hard pressed to find a multiculturalist who would actually suggest that slavery might be tolerated in certain cultural contexts, but such a position is simply the logical endpoint of the idea that we cannot make moral judgments about other cultures’ practices without engaging in cultural imperialism and domination. As a result, multiculturalists are often skittish about making judgments across cultural boundaries. Hollinger describes contemporary multiculturalism as a “bargain” in which different cultural groups agree: “You keep the acids of your modernity out of my culture, and I’ll keep the acids of mine away from yours.”35
Emergent writers realize that such a bargain is not only undesirable but also untenable. Contemporary emergent writing sets itself against the idea of cultural purity that lies behind contemporary U.S. multiculturalism and identity politics. Emergent writing demonstrates the power of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination.” Cultures, in Appiah’s account, never tend toward purity: they tend toward change, toward mixing and miscegenation, toward an “endless process of imitation and revision.”36 To keep a culture “pure” requires the vigilant policing often associated with fundamentalist regimes or xenophobic political parties. Like Williams’s account of the interaction of dominant, residual, and emergent cultures, Appiah’s description of culture is about “conversation across boundaries.” Such conversations, Appiah writes, “can be delightful, or just vexing: what they mainly are, though, is inevitable.”37
Studying emergent literatures inevitably leads one to study the dynamics of cosmopolitanism. Like cosmopolitan theorists, emergent writers are committed to difficult conversations in which fundamental values are subject to examination and questioning. In a variety of ways, sometimes through style or form, sometimes through subject, emergent literatures bring us face-to-face with difference and then even closer—perhaps we might say, mind-to-mind. They ask us to think, “What if?”—to engage in thought experiments in which we experience difference. In this way, emergent literatures promote a cosmopolitan perspective. And they suggest, perhaps, that in this respect the idea of the emergent is ultimately most useful as a heuristic tool through which to understand the cosmopolitan dynamics of the literary impulse itself.
1
From Marginal to Emergent
Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), has a problem. Named for the great poet of American individualism and steeped in American cultural history, Wittman wants to be a latter-day Jack Kerouac, but to his chagrin, he comes to realize that the real Kerouac would never have seen him as a protégé. To Kerouac, Wittman could only have been another Victor Wong, preserved for posterity in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) as “little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.”1 Wittman wants to be an American Artist—he wants to carve a place for himself in American cultural history—but finds that first he must disengage himself from the subordinate place that American culture has made for him on the basis of his ethnicity.
Wittman’s manic narrative registers the pain of being caught between two cultures, of being increasingly drawn away from the Chinese culture of his ancestors, which he admires, by the dominant, mainstream culture of Whitman, Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and UC Berkeley, which he also admires. Wittman wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” but to do so he must prevent his Chinese inheritance from being transformed into a safely exotic form of cultural residue: he must prevent the “Chinese” from being marginalized by the “American.” Wittman’s goal is to create a form of public art that can redefine what it means to be “Chinese American”—redefine it for himself, his community, and the larger culture of which both he and his community are a part. In the course of the novel, Wittman discovers that his cultural identity is necessarily hybrid, and he suspects that every American identity is, in fact, necessarily hybrid, though mainstream U.S. culture has worked hard to deny that fact. Tripmaster Monkey thus dramatizes the predicament faced by all U.S. late-twentieth-century minority cultures, whether oriented around ethnicity or around sexuality: how to transform themselves from marginal cultures into emergent cultures capable of challenging and reforming the mainstream.
This transformation depends in large on a shift in perspective. Part of what it means to be emergent is to associate yourself with the idea of the new. Remember that Raymond Williams, in his original theorization of the idea of the emergent, identifies it as the site or set of sites where “new meanings and values new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.”2 This newness, however, is a matter of perspective: what is new is what looks new from the vantage point of the dominant. So it should not surprise us to discover that some cultural forms that we might designate as emergent are, in fact, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years old. For example, elements of homosexual experience played an important role in the cultures of classical Greece and Rome and of medieval Islam,3 but gay and lesbian culture remains in an emergent and oppositional position in the United States today, as the continuing resistance in many parts of the country to the idea of “gay marriage” demonstrates.4 “The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love,” writes Paul Monette in his memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992): “It has always been thus, the history written by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there…. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half.”5 We find a similar assault upon a minority’s sense of community in a moment from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) when the narrator describes the character Auntie’s world-view: “An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years from the oldest times, when the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were;