front cover of Consuming Modernity
Consuming Modernity
Public Culture in a South Asian World
Carol A. Breckenridge
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

front cover of Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism
Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
As the final installment of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet, Cosmopolitanism assesses the pasts and possible futures of cosmopolitanism—or ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society. With contributions from distinguished scholars in disciplines such as literary studies, art history, South Asian studies, and anthropology, this volume recenters the history and theory of translocal political aspirations and cultural ideas from the usual Western vantage point to areas outside Europe, such as South Asia, China, and Africa.
By examining new archives, proposing new theoretical formulations, and suggesting new possibilities of political practice, the contributors critically probe the concept of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism may be taken to promise a form of supraregional political solidarity, but on the other, these essays argue, it may erode precisely those intimate cultural differences that derive their meaning from particular places and traditions. Given that most cosmopolitan political formations—from the Roman empire and European imperialism to contemporary globalization—have been coercive and unequal, can there be a noncoercive and egalitarian cosmopolitan politics? Finally, the volume asks whether cosmopolitanism can promise any universalism that is not the unwarranted generalization of some Western particular.

Contributors. Ackbar Abbas, Arjun Appadurai, Homi K. Bhabha, T. K. Biaya, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ousame Ndiaye Dago, Mamadou Diouf, Wu Hung, Walter D. Mignolo, Sheldon Pollock, Steven Randall

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front cover of Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism
Millennial Quartet IV, Volume 12
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Duke University Press
This final installment of the Millennial Quartet addresses the question of whether cosmopolitanism—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society—is simply the universalism of a Western particular. Assembling scholars from an array of disciplines including English literature and language, romance languages, art history, South Asian studies, and anthropology, this special issue of Public Culture recenters the theory and history of translocal political aspirations and cultural ideas from the traditional Western vantage point to areas outside Europe, such as South Asia, China, and Africa. By examining new archives, framing new theoretical formulations, and suggesting new possibilities of political practice, these essays stretch the term cosmopolitanism to new definitions. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism may be taken to promise a form of supraregional political solidarity, but on the other, it may erode precisely those cultural differences that derive their meaning from a particular place and tradition. Given that most cosmopolitan political formations, from the Roman imperium to European imperialism to contemporary globalization, have been coercive and unequal, can there be a noncoercive and egalitarian cosmopolitan politics? At the most elevated level of conceptualization, while cosmopolitanism may promise a universalism of knowledge, it more typically represents an unwarranted generalization of a European idea or practice.
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front cover of The Critical Limits of Embodiment
The Critical Limits of Embodiment
Reflections on Disability Criticism, Volume 13
Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler, eds.
Duke University Press
Disability studies, a new field of inquiry in the human sciences, has the potential to unsettle many basic assumptions about the body, citizenship, capital, and beauty. This special issue of Public Culture explores disability criticism, an emergent subfield within disability studies.
The articles in this collection build on recent work in the larger arena of disability studies and address such subjects as the hegemony of the concept of normalcy, the idea of the able body, and the constitutive place of disability in ethics, liberalism, and capitalism. The Critical Limits of Embodiment examines the commonsense foundations of disability studies, which tend to universalize Western norms and assumptions in which the normal is foregrounded and the able body forms the basis for the universal liberal subject. The broad geographic scope of these essays constitutes one of their greatest contributions to the field. In order to query the body-related universalisms of Western thought, the issue seeks to be self-conscious about cultural locations.
The volume examines the figure of the disabled in the cultural imaginaries of a variety of historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts including literature, anthropology, philosophy, and art history.

Contributors. Renu Addlakha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Veena Das, Faye Ginsburg, Wu Hung, Eva Kittay, Celeste Langan, David Mitchell, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Sharon Snyder, Candace Vogler, Hank Vogler

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