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ldquoBreaking Free from Epistemic Enclosuresrdquo

Re-imagining ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

in Discourses of Cosmopolitanism1

Kudzai P MaterekeUniversity of New South Wales

Abstract

This paper urges readers to rethink the notions ldquomobilityrdquo and ldquotravelrdquo with an eye to how they may help us craft a more supple discourse of cosmopolitanism The majority of cosmopolitanism discourses privilege mobility and travel experiences of subjects in the metropolis and sideline and downplay those of the postcolonial (and especially rural) subjects The paper attempts to broaden the discourses of cosmopolitanism by a critical interrogation of Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal and its implications for postcolonial societies It identifies a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo of cosmopolitanism that is largely ignored in mainstream analyses This moment can be glimpsed by exploring two narratives of rural villagers who break free from their epistemic enclosures This moment can only be fully appreciated by deploying broader conceptions of ldquomobilityrdquo and ldquotravelrdquo which capture not only these conceptsrsquo corporeal connotations but their imaginative and virtual connotations as well

Keywordscoloniality of power cosmopolitanism Kant mobility postcolonial theory travel

Introduction

In drawing the distinctions between the nineteenth-century British aristocracy and gentry and the majority of the rural population the British historian John Barrell highlighted how the latter had unique experiences of mobility

[Mobility] meant that the aristocracy and gentry were not unlike the majority of the rural population irrevocably involved so to speak bound up in any

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Kudzai P Matereke

particular locality which they had no time no money and no reason ever to leave It meant also that they had experience of more landscapes than one in more geographical regions than one and even if they did not travel much they were accustomed by their culture to the notion of mobility and could easily imagine other landscapes2

Barrellrsquos characterization of the aristocracy and gentry foregrounds how the practice of ldquocomparing landscapes with each other and with the lsquoidealrsquordquo3 translates to the enlargement of the epistemic horizons of the aristocracy This paper follows this strand of thought by urging the need to rethink how travel and mobility are variously experienced and how they might be reappropriated into the discourses of cosmopolitanism Such reformulation is necessary if we are to locate and redeem the lost (or silent) voices and experiences of the postcolonial world Most discourses of cosmopolitanism have privileged the travel and mobility experiences of the metropolis and sidelined the significance of the postcolony especially its rural precincts This dismaying development also raises questions about the imbalance of power and the proliferation of hegemonic practices between the global North and South Mobility and travel are key concepts that have tended to support the characterization of the Northrsquos citizens and metropolises as possessing cosmopolitan virtues and conversely those of the global South as lacking them This perceived lack thus justifies a continuing paternalism of the Global North and calls for the assimilation of the Global South to a Eurocentric cosmopolitan ideal It is this perceived lack of cosmopolitan virtues in the Global South that this essay challenges

I use the binary designation ldquoNorthSouthrdquo not as a reference to simple geographic location Rather I follow the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos who uses ldquoSouthrdquo as a ldquometaphor for human suffering under global capitalismrdquo4 I also follow the Mexican political philosopher Enrique Dussel who mounts a critique of Eurocentrism and modernity in which he argues that modernity is a European phenomenon that is ldquoconstituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate contentrdquo According to Dussel that modernity ldquoappears when Europe affirms itself as the lsquocenterrsquo of a World History that it inaugurates [and] the lsquoperipheryrsquo that surrounds this centre is consequently part of its self-definitionrdquo5 Dusselrsquos critique seeks to highlight how Europersquos modernity entailed ldquothe unfolding of new possibilities derived from its centrality in a world history and the constitution of all other cultures as its peripheryrdquo and also how amongst other cultures ldquomodern European ethnocentrism is the only one that might pretend to claim universality for itselfrdquo6 Hence what made possible the birth of modernity was Europersquos ability to position itself against the Other and to constitute its own identity ldquoas a unified ego exploring conquering colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itselfrdquo7 This positionality is what I mean by the ldquoNorthrdquo

bull 7

My use of the binary categories NorthSouth and centreperiphery does not ignore the laudable criticism that the categories are steeped in ldquoEuropean diffusionismrdquo that is the process by which European modernity developed in other parts of the world from centre to peripheries Diffusionism as a theory overlooks the diversity of any location as well as the stratifications built into all societies and indeed how the WestEurope borrowed from other civilizations8 The field of postcolonial studies has also shown how the binary categories are too limiting as they obscure the porousness and fluidity of South and North While sharing a guarded suspicion that the designations can obscure or ignore diversity and also downplay inter-civilizational encounters and borrowings I also argue that the binaries are unavoidable tropes of understanding the world Moreover this critique can tend also to obfuscate how colonialism has constructed subalternity or driven ldquothe processes of peripheralizationrdquo9 In this vein I reappropriate Sandra Hardingrsquos warning that moving away from such binaries before fully appreciating their persisting legacy falls more under the category of racist and imperial denial than of a progressive project contributing to the dismantling of that legacy10 Hence I maintain that though the binary categories may be limiting because they downplay the interconnectedness of the world North and South still wield a descriptive efficacy for my purposes here

This paper joins debates surrounding postcolonial theory and what the Peruvian sociologist Aniacutebal Quijano terms the ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo meaning the political and economic structures and systems of representation that animate and preserve colonialisms past and present11 As Homi Bhabha argues ldquopostcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world orderrdquo and it intervenes ldquoin those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic lsquonormalityrsquo to the uneven development and the differential often disadvantaged histories of nations races communities peoplesrdquo12 Bhabharsquos position resonates with Couze Vennrsquos and Rita Abrahamsenrsquos understandings of postcolonial theory For Venn postcolonial critique ldquocontinues and seeks to complete the work of decolonizationrdquo by developing ldquoan oppositional analytical standpoint that targets the conditions the narratives the relations of power that in their combined effects support the iniquitous forms of sociality and the varieties of pauperizations that characterize the current world orderrdquo13 For Abrahamsen one of the central issues in postcolonialism is to clarify the ldquoconceptualization of power and the recognition of the relationship between power discourse and political institutions and practicesrdquo14 The notion of ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo espouses a Foucauldian strand of thought insofar as it seeks to highlight the inextricable relations between

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

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Kudzai P Matereke

knowledge and power It furthermore co-opts world-systems theory from the social sciences in an attempt to demonstrate the coevality of modernity and coloniality and also how a unitary system of power and knowledge plays a significant role of constituting them If colonialism is the imposition of colonial dominance over territories and populations then at the core of the debates of coloniality of power is the interrogation of how knowledge is organized how the identities of the colonized have been and continue to be constituted and how the structures of domination persist in contemporary times Of course colonial and postcolonial domination has been and remains deeply bound up with practices and structures of mobility and travelmdashindeed the entire colonial project is enabled by the physical mobility of the colonizersmdashas both are effects of power

How have the citizens in the South responded to the asymmetries of power in the global order The sociologist Ramoacuten Grosfoguel argues that currently there is a predilection for representations of colonialism as over This has given rise to the mythology of so-called decolonization which obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonialracial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today15 Grosfoguel uses the term ldquoglobal colonialityrdquo to describe how peripheral nation-states even in the absence of colonial administration still remain under the influence of the regimes of global capital overseen by international financial institutions and advanced economies Thus the notion of global coloniality highlights how ldquothe lsquocolonialrsquo axis between EuropeansEuro-Americans and non-Europeans is inscribed not only in relations of domination between metropolitan and peripheral states but in the production of subjectivities and knowledgesrdquo16 The daily struggles of citizens in the postcolonial world against those relations of domination and against the poverty bequeathed by those relations need to be foregrounded This paper seeks to make a contribution toward that end by focusing on how a variety of mobility and travel experiences can empower postcolonial subjects generating a cosmopolitanism of a more supple type than is currently deployed in most Eurocentric discourses

By critiquing some of the constructions of cosmopolitanism that have privileged certain practices and locations over others we may begin to articulate new versions of cosmopolitanism that account for the transformation of lives17 As we bring into purview some of the specific travel and mobility practices of postcolonial subjects I follow the literary scholar Vinay Dharwadkerrsquos call for an overall framework that rejects the tendency ldquoto examine cosmopolitanism and its conjuncts in a dehistoricized and delocalized lsquoideological spacersquo on the grounds that such an abstraction from specificity amounts to lsquodecontaminatingrsquo cosmopolitanism of its intrication in time space and culture and thereby rendering it merely portable across frames of referencerdquo18 By describing some specific

bull 9 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

narratives from rural precincts of the Global South this paper calls for the recognition of the experiences as avowedly cosmopolitan

Kant and the Dominant Prisms of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has a long and winding history that stretches from the ancient Cynics and the Stoics and it has taken different forms and guises and reappeared more powerfully during the phase of Enlightenment universalism As noted by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held Kant is the first philosopher to provide a thoroughgoing discussion of the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism and then to apply these principles to the international concerns of his time19 For this reason the large body of literature available either follows Kant or reacts to him Kantrsquos political philosophy provides an elaborate version of cosmopolitanism as a means to perpetual peace Disenchanted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had brought about a competitive world community of nations Kant saw the Westphalian world order as the epitome of Hobbesrsquo warlike state of nature and ultimately humanityrsquos graveyard20 In opposition he envisaged the cosmopolitan project as a legal and political infrastructure that would allow humanityrsquos mutual co-existence A republic or ldquoleague of nationsrdquo would guarantee perpetual peace under certain conditions first at a national level the state should espouse a republican constitution and individuals should have political rights second at an inter-state level nationsrsquo rights should be ensured by a federation of free and equal states and third cosmopolitan right should allow citizens to traverse territories under conditions of universal hospitality From ldquocosmopolitan rightrdquo Kant derived the civil and political freedoms of all people Political right conceives individual citizens as the units of difference while cosmopolitan right conceives the units of difference as the racially and culturally distinct nations and peoples Kant conceives being a citizen of a universal state of mankind as by extension having ldquothat right to the earthrsquos surfacerdquo21 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan right is undergirded by a notion of hospitality whose concern is ldquothe right of the strangerrdquo not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone elsersquos territory so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place in which he happens to be22 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project is premised on mobility Given the time at which Kant articulated his cosmopolitan project as well as Kantrsquos own limited horizons (he rarely left Koumlnigsberg) it can be argued that he envisaged the cosmopolitan as the European traveler merchant or explorer who hailed from the metropolis and descended to the enclaves of the new colonies rather than the other way round

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Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

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Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

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Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

6 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

particular locality which they had no time no money and no reason ever to leave It meant also that they had experience of more landscapes than one in more geographical regions than one and even if they did not travel much they were accustomed by their culture to the notion of mobility and could easily imagine other landscapes2

Barrellrsquos characterization of the aristocracy and gentry foregrounds how the practice of ldquocomparing landscapes with each other and with the lsquoidealrsquordquo3 translates to the enlargement of the epistemic horizons of the aristocracy This paper follows this strand of thought by urging the need to rethink how travel and mobility are variously experienced and how they might be reappropriated into the discourses of cosmopolitanism Such reformulation is necessary if we are to locate and redeem the lost (or silent) voices and experiences of the postcolonial world Most discourses of cosmopolitanism have privileged the travel and mobility experiences of the metropolis and sidelined the significance of the postcolony especially its rural precincts This dismaying development also raises questions about the imbalance of power and the proliferation of hegemonic practices between the global North and South Mobility and travel are key concepts that have tended to support the characterization of the Northrsquos citizens and metropolises as possessing cosmopolitan virtues and conversely those of the global South as lacking them This perceived lack thus justifies a continuing paternalism of the Global North and calls for the assimilation of the Global South to a Eurocentric cosmopolitan ideal It is this perceived lack of cosmopolitan virtues in the Global South that this essay challenges

I use the binary designation ldquoNorthSouthrdquo not as a reference to simple geographic location Rather I follow the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos who uses ldquoSouthrdquo as a ldquometaphor for human suffering under global capitalismrdquo4 I also follow the Mexican political philosopher Enrique Dussel who mounts a critique of Eurocentrism and modernity in which he argues that modernity is a European phenomenon that is ldquoconstituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate contentrdquo According to Dussel that modernity ldquoappears when Europe affirms itself as the lsquocenterrsquo of a World History that it inaugurates [and] the lsquoperipheryrsquo that surrounds this centre is consequently part of its self-definitionrdquo5 Dusselrsquos critique seeks to highlight how Europersquos modernity entailed ldquothe unfolding of new possibilities derived from its centrality in a world history and the constitution of all other cultures as its peripheryrdquo and also how amongst other cultures ldquomodern European ethnocentrism is the only one that might pretend to claim universality for itselfrdquo6 Hence what made possible the birth of modernity was Europersquos ability to position itself against the Other and to constitute its own identity ldquoas a unified ego exploring conquering colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itselfrdquo7 This positionality is what I mean by the ldquoNorthrdquo

bull 7

My use of the binary categories NorthSouth and centreperiphery does not ignore the laudable criticism that the categories are steeped in ldquoEuropean diffusionismrdquo that is the process by which European modernity developed in other parts of the world from centre to peripheries Diffusionism as a theory overlooks the diversity of any location as well as the stratifications built into all societies and indeed how the WestEurope borrowed from other civilizations8 The field of postcolonial studies has also shown how the binary categories are too limiting as they obscure the porousness and fluidity of South and North While sharing a guarded suspicion that the designations can obscure or ignore diversity and also downplay inter-civilizational encounters and borrowings I also argue that the binaries are unavoidable tropes of understanding the world Moreover this critique can tend also to obfuscate how colonialism has constructed subalternity or driven ldquothe processes of peripheralizationrdquo9 In this vein I reappropriate Sandra Hardingrsquos warning that moving away from such binaries before fully appreciating their persisting legacy falls more under the category of racist and imperial denial than of a progressive project contributing to the dismantling of that legacy10 Hence I maintain that though the binary categories may be limiting because they downplay the interconnectedness of the world North and South still wield a descriptive efficacy for my purposes here

This paper joins debates surrounding postcolonial theory and what the Peruvian sociologist Aniacutebal Quijano terms the ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo meaning the political and economic structures and systems of representation that animate and preserve colonialisms past and present11 As Homi Bhabha argues ldquopostcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world orderrdquo and it intervenes ldquoin those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic lsquonormalityrsquo to the uneven development and the differential often disadvantaged histories of nations races communities peoplesrdquo12 Bhabharsquos position resonates with Couze Vennrsquos and Rita Abrahamsenrsquos understandings of postcolonial theory For Venn postcolonial critique ldquocontinues and seeks to complete the work of decolonizationrdquo by developing ldquoan oppositional analytical standpoint that targets the conditions the narratives the relations of power that in their combined effects support the iniquitous forms of sociality and the varieties of pauperizations that characterize the current world orderrdquo13 For Abrahamsen one of the central issues in postcolonialism is to clarify the ldquoconceptualization of power and the recognition of the relationship between power discourse and political institutions and practicesrdquo14 The notion of ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo espouses a Foucauldian strand of thought insofar as it seeks to highlight the inextricable relations between

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

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Kudzai P Matereke

knowledge and power It furthermore co-opts world-systems theory from the social sciences in an attempt to demonstrate the coevality of modernity and coloniality and also how a unitary system of power and knowledge plays a significant role of constituting them If colonialism is the imposition of colonial dominance over territories and populations then at the core of the debates of coloniality of power is the interrogation of how knowledge is organized how the identities of the colonized have been and continue to be constituted and how the structures of domination persist in contemporary times Of course colonial and postcolonial domination has been and remains deeply bound up with practices and structures of mobility and travelmdashindeed the entire colonial project is enabled by the physical mobility of the colonizersmdashas both are effects of power

How have the citizens in the South responded to the asymmetries of power in the global order The sociologist Ramoacuten Grosfoguel argues that currently there is a predilection for representations of colonialism as over This has given rise to the mythology of so-called decolonization which obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonialracial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today15 Grosfoguel uses the term ldquoglobal colonialityrdquo to describe how peripheral nation-states even in the absence of colonial administration still remain under the influence of the regimes of global capital overseen by international financial institutions and advanced economies Thus the notion of global coloniality highlights how ldquothe lsquocolonialrsquo axis between EuropeansEuro-Americans and non-Europeans is inscribed not only in relations of domination between metropolitan and peripheral states but in the production of subjectivities and knowledgesrdquo16 The daily struggles of citizens in the postcolonial world against those relations of domination and against the poverty bequeathed by those relations need to be foregrounded This paper seeks to make a contribution toward that end by focusing on how a variety of mobility and travel experiences can empower postcolonial subjects generating a cosmopolitanism of a more supple type than is currently deployed in most Eurocentric discourses

By critiquing some of the constructions of cosmopolitanism that have privileged certain practices and locations over others we may begin to articulate new versions of cosmopolitanism that account for the transformation of lives17 As we bring into purview some of the specific travel and mobility practices of postcolonial subjects I follow the literary scholar Vinay Dharwadkerrsquos call for an overall framework that rejects the tendency ldquoto examine cosmopolitanism and its conjuncts in a dehistoricized and delocalized lsquoideological spacersquo on the grounds that such an abstraction from specificity amounts to lsquodecontaminatingrsquo cosmopolitanism of its intrication in time space and culture and thereby rendering it merely portable across frames of referencerdquo18 By describing some specific

bull 9 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

narratives from rural precincts of the Global South this paper calls for the recognition of the experiences as avowedly cosmopolitan

Kant and the Dominant Prisms of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has a long and winding history that stretches from the ancient Cynics and the Stoics and it has taken different forms and guises and reappeared more powerfully during the phase of Enlightenment universalism As noted by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held Kant is the first philosopher to provide a thoroughgoing discussion of the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism and then to apply these principles to the international concerns of his time19 For this reason the large body of literature available either follows Kant or reacts to him Kantrsquos political philosophy provides an elaborate version of cosmopolitanism as a means to perpetual peace Disenchanted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had brought about a competitive world community of nations Kant saw the Westphalian world order as the epitome of Hobbesrsquo warlike state of nature and ultimately humanityrsquos graveyard20 In opposition he envisaged the cosmopolitan project as a legal and political infrastructure that would allow humanityrsquos mutual co-existence A republic or ldquoleague of nationsrdquo would guarantee perpetual peace under certain conditions first at a national level the state should espouse a republican constitution and individuals should have political rights second at an inter-state level nationsrsquo rights should be ensured by a federation of free and equal states and third cosmopolitan right should allow citizens to traverse territories under conditions of universal hospitality From ldquocosmopolitan rightrdquo Kant derived the civil and political freedoms of all people Political right conceives individual citizens as the units of difference while cosmopolitan right conceives the units of difference as the racially and culturally distinct nations and peoples Kant conceives being a citizen of a universal state of mankind as by extension having ldquothat right to the earthrsquos surfacerdquo21 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan right is undergirded by a notion of hospitality whose concern is ldquothe right of the strangerrdquo not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone elsersquos territory so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place in which he happens to be22 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project is premised on mobility Given the time at which Kant articulated his cosmopolitan project as well as Kantrsquos own limited horizons (he rarely left Koumlnigsberg) it can be argued that he envisaged the cosmopolitan as the European traveler merchant or explorer who hailed from the metropolis and descended to the enclaves of the new colonies rather than the other way round

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Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

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Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 7

My use of the binary categories NorthSouth and centreperiphery does not ignore the laudable criticism that the categories are steeped in ldquoEuropean diffusionismrdquo that is the process by which European modernity developed in other parts of the world from centre to peripheries Diffusionism as a theory overlooks the diversity of any location as well as the stratifications built into all societies and indeed how the WestEurope borrowed from other civilizations8 The field of postcolonial studies has also shown how the binary categories are too limiting as they obscure the porousness and fluidity of South and North While sharing a guarded suspicion that the designations can obscure or ignore diversity and also downplay inter-civilizational encounters and borrowings I also argue that the binaries are unavoidable tropes of understanding the world Moreover this critique can tend also to obfuscate how colonialism has constructed subalternity or driven ldquothe processes of peripheralizationrdquo9 In this vein I reappropriate Sandra Hardingrsquos warning that moving away from such binaries before fully appreciating their persisting legacy falls more under the category of racist and imperial denial than of a progressive project contributing to the dismantling of that legacy10 Hence I maintain that though the binary categories may be limiting because they downplay the interconnectedness of the world North and South still wield a descriptive efficacy for my purposes here

This paper joins debates surrounding postcolonial theory and what the Peruvian sociologist Aniacutebal Quijano terms the ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo meaning the political and economic structures and systems of representation that animate and preserve colonialisms past and present11 As Homi Bhabha argues ldquopostcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world orderrdquo and it intervenes ldquoin those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic lsquonormalityrsquo to the uneven development and the differential often disadvantaged histories of nations races communities peoplesrdquo12 Bhabharsquos position resonates with Couze Vennrsquos and Rita Abrahamsenrsquos understandings of postcolonial theory For Venn postcolonial critique ldquocontinues and seeks to complete the work of decolonizationrdquo by developing ldquoan oppositional analytical standpoint that targets the conditions the narratives the relations of power that in their combined effects support the iniquitous forms of sociality and the varieties of pauperizations that characterize the current world orderrdquo13 For Abrahamsen one of the central issues in postcolonialism is to clarify the ldquoconceptualization of power and the recognition of the relationship between power discourse and political institutions and practicesrdquo14 The notion of ldquocoloniality of powerrdquo espouses a Foucauldian strand of thought insofar as it seeks to highlight the inextricable relations between

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

8 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

knowledge and power It furthermore co-opts world-systems theory from the social sciences in an attempt to demonstrate the coevality of modernity and coloniality and also how a unitary system of power and knowledge plays a significant role of constituting them If colonialism is the imposition of colonial dominance over territories and populations then at the core of the debates of coloniality of power is the interrogation of how knowledge is organized how the identities of the colonized have been and continue to be constituted and how the structures of domination persist in contemporary times Of course colonial and postcolonial domination has been and remains deeply bound up with practices and structures of mobility and travelmdashindeed the entire colonial project is enabled by the physical mobility of the colonizersmdashas both are effects of power

How have the citizens in the South responded to the asymmetries of power in the global order The sociologist Ramoacuten Grosfoguel argues that currently there is a predilection for representations of colonialism as over This has given rise to the mythology of so-called decolonization which obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonialracial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today15 Grosfoguel uses the term ldquoglobal colonialityrdquo to describe how peripheral nation-states even in the absence of colonial administration still remain under the influence of the regimes of global capital overseen by international financial institutions and advanced economies Thus the notion of global coloniality highlights how ldquothe lsquocolonialrsquo axis between EuropeansEuro-Americans and non-Europeans is inscribed not only in relations of domination between metropolitan and peripheral states but in the production of subjectivities and knowledgesrdquo16 The daily struggles of citizens in the postcolonial world against those relations of domination and against the poverty bequeathed by those relations need to be foregrounded This paper seeks to make a contribution toward that end by focusing on how a variety of mobility and travel experiences can empower postcolonial subjects generating a cosmopolitanism of a more supple type than is currently deployed in most Eurocentric discourses

By critiquing some of the constructions of cosmopolitanism that have privileged certain practices and locations over others we may begin to articulate new versions of cosmopolitanism that account for the transformation of lives17 As we bring into purview some of the specific travel and mobility practices of postcolonial subjects I follow the literary scholar Vinay Dharwadkerrsquos call for an overall framework that rejects the tendency ldquoto examine cosmopolitanism and its conjuncts in a dehistoricized and delocalized lsquoideological spacersquo on the grounds that such an abstraction from specificity amounts to lsquodecontaminatingrsquo cosmopolitanism of its intrication in time space and culture and thereby rendering it merely portable across frames of referencerdquo18 By describing some specific

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

narratives from rural precincts of the Global South this paper calls for the recognition of the experiences as avowedly cosmopolitan

Kant and the Dominant Prisms of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has a long and winding history that stretches from the ancient Cynics and the Stoics and it has taken different forms and guises and reappeared more powerfully during the phase of Enlightenment universalism As noted by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held Kant is the first philosopher to provide a thoroughgoing discussion of the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism and then to apply these principles to the international concerns of his time19 For this reason the large body of literature available either follows Kant or reacts to him Kantrsquos political philosophy provides an elaborate version of cosmopolitanism as a means to perpetual peace Disenchanted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had brought about a competitive world community of nations Kant saw the Westphalian world order as the epitome of Hobbesrsquo warlike state of nature and ultimately humanityrsquos graveyard20 In opposition he envisaged the cosmopolitan project as a legal and political infrastructure that would allow humanityrsquos mutual co-existence A republic or ldquoleague of nationsrdquo would guarantee perpetual peace under certain conditions first at a national level the state should espouse a republican constitution and individuals should have political rights second at an inter-state level nationsrsquo rights should be ensured by a federation of free and equal states and third cosmopolitan right should allow citizens to traverse territories under conditions of universal hospitality From ldquocosmopolitan rightrdquo Kant derived the civil and political freedoms of all people Political right conceives individual citizens as the units of difference while cosmopolitan right conceives the units of difference as the racially and culturally distinct nations and peoples Kant conceives being a citizen of a universal state of mankind as by extension having ldquothat right to the earthrsquos surfacerdquo21 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan right is undergirded by a notion of hospitality whose concern is ldquothe right of the strangerrdquo not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone elsersquos territory so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place in which he happens to be22 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project is premised on mobility Given the time at which Kant articulated his cosmopolitan project as well as Kantrsquos own limited horizons (he rarely left Koumlnigsberg) it can be argued that he envisaged the cosmopolitan as the European traveler merchant or explorer who hailed from the metropolis and descended to the enclaves of the new colonies rather than the other way round

10 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

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Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

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Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

8 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

knowledge and power It furthermore co-opts world-systems theory from the social sciences in an attempt to demonstrate the coevality of modernity and coloniality and also how a unitary system of power and knowledge plays a significant role of constituting them If colonialism is the imposition of colonial dominance over territories and populations then at the core of the debates of coloniality of power is the interrogation of how knowledge is organized how the identities of the colonized have been and continue to be constituted and how the structures of domination persist in contemporary times Of course colonial and postcolonial domination has been and remains deeply bound up with practices and structures of mobility and travelmdashindeed the entire colonial project is enabled by the physical mobility of the colonizersmdashas both are effects of power

How have the citizens in the South responded to the asymmetries of power in the global order The sociologist Ramoacuten Grosfoguel argues that currently there is a predilection for representations of colonialism as over This has given rise to the mythology of so-called decolonization which obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonialracial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today15 Grosfoguel uses the term ldquoglobal colonialityrdquo to describe how peripheral nation-states even in the absence of colonial administration still remain under the influence of the regimes of global capital overseen by international financial institutions and advanced economies Thus the notion of global coloniality highlights how ldquothe lsquocolonialrsquo axis between EuropeansEuro-Americans and non-Europeans is inscribed not only in relations of domination between metropolitan and peripheral states but in the production of subjectivities and knowledgesrdquo16 The daily struggles of citizens in the postcolonial world against those relations of domination and against the poverty bequeathed by those relations need to be foregrounded This paper seeks to make a contribution toward that end by focusing on how a variety of mobility and travel experiences can empower postcolonial subjects generating a cosmopolitanism of a more supple type than is currently deployed in most Eurocentric discourses

By critiquing some of the constructions of cosmopolitanism that have privileged certain practices and locations over others we may begin to articulate new versions of cosmopolitanism that account for the transformation of lives17 As we bring into purview some of the specific travel and mobility practices of postcolonial subjects I follow the literary scholar Vinay Dharwadkerrsquos call for an overall framework that rejects the tendency ldquoto examine cosmopolitanism and its conjuncts in a dehistoricized and delocalized lsquoideological spacersquo on the grounds that such an abstraction from specificity amounts to lsquodecontaminatingrsquo cosmopolitanism of its intrication in time space and culture and thereby rendering it merely portable across frames of referencerdquo18 By describing some specific

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

narratives from rural precincts of the Global South this paper calls for the recognition of the experiences as avowedly cosmopolitan

Kant and the Dominant Prisms of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has a long and winding history that stretches from the ancient Cynics and the Stoics and it has taken different forms and guises and reappeared more powerfully during the phase of Enlightenment universalism As noted by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held Kant is the first philosopher to provide a thoroughgoing discussion of the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism and then to apply these principles to the international concerns of his time19 For this reason the large body of literature available either follows Kant or reacts to him Kantrsquos political philosophy provides an elaborate version of cosmopolitanism as a means to perpetual peace Disenchanted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had brought about a competitive world community of nations Kant saw the Westphalian world order as the epitome of Hobbesrsquo warlike state of nature and ultimately humanityrsquos graveyard20 In opposition he envisaged the cosmopolitan project as a legal and political infrastructure that would allow humanityrsquos mutual co-existence A republic or ldquoleague of nationsrdquo would guarantee perpetual peace under certain conditions first at a national level the state should espouse a republican constitution and individuals should have political rights second at an inter-state level nationsrsquo rights should be ensured by a federation of free and equal states and third cosmopolitan right should allow citizens to traverse territories under conditions of universal hospitality From ldquocosmopolitan rightrdquo Kant derived the civil and political freedoms of all people Political right conceives individual citizens as the units of difference while cosmopolitan right conceives the units of difference as the racially and culturally distinct nations and peoples Kant conceives being a citizen of a universal state of mankind as by extension having ldquothat right to the earthrsquos surfacerdquo21 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan right is undergirded by a notion of hospitality whose concern is ldquothe right of the strangerrdquo not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone elsersquos territory so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place in which he happens to be22 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project is premised on mobility Given the time at which Kant articulated his cosmopolitan project as well as Kantrsquos own limited horizons (he rarely left Koumlnigsberg) it can be argued that he envisaged the cosmopolitan as the European traveler merchant or explorer who hailed from the metropolis and descended to the enclaves of the new colonies rather than the other way round

10 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

narratives from rural precincts of the Global South this paper calls for the recognition of the experiences as avowedly cosmopolitan

Kant and the Dominant Prisms of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism has a long and winding history that stretches from the ancient Cynics and the Stoics and it has taken different forms and guises and reappeared more powerfully during the phase of Enlightenment universalism As noted by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held Kant is the first philosopher to provide a thoroughgoing discussion of the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism and then to apply these principles to the international concerns of his time19 For this reason the large body of literature available either follows Kant or reacts to him Kantrsquos political philosophy provides an elaborate version of cosmopolitanism as a means to perpetual peace Disenchanted by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had brought about a competitive world community of nations Kant saw the Westphalian world order as the epitome of Hobbesrsquo warlike state of nature and ultimately humanityrsquos graveyard20 In opposition he envisaged the cosmopolitan project as a legal and political infrastructure that would allow humanityrsquos mutual co-existence A republic or ldquoleague of nationsrdquo would guarantee perpetual peace under certain conditions first at a national level the state should espouse a republican constitution and individuals should have political rights second at an inter-state level nationsrsquo rights should be ensured by a federation of free and equal states and third cosmopolitan right should allow citizens to traverse territories under conditions of universal hospitality From ldquocosmopolitan rightrdquo Kant derived the civil and political freedoms of all people Political right conceives individual citizens as the units of difference while cosmopolitan right conceives the units of difference as the racially and culturally distinct nations and peoples Kant conceives being a citizen of a universal state of mankind as by extension having ldquothat right to the earthrsquos surfacerdquo21 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan right is undergirded by a notion of hospitality whose concern is ldquothe right of the strangerrdquo not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone elsersquos territory so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place in which he happens to be22 Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project is premised on mobility Given the time at which Kant articulated his cosmopolitan project as well as Kantrsquos own limited horizons (he rarely left Koumlnigsberg) it can be argued that he envisaged the cosmopolitan as the European traveler merchant or explorer who hailed from the metropolis and descended to the enclaves of the new colonies rather than the other way round

10 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

10 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Kantrsquos cosmopolitan project affirms optimism in human progress and he developed the ldquoidea of historyrdquo to express the view that Nature allows humans freely to utilize their reason and exercise freedom of the will This freedom would result in the development of human rational capacities and therefore progress in the various realms of life in which reason is employed23 Kant formulated this idea alongside his notion of the natural teleology of human beings as an animal species Humans are like other species in that they act in accordance with universal laws of nature Despite this internal regularity human history progresses in very subtle and concealed ways and is characterized by empirical contingencies Thus rational enquiry has the object of making sense of how these contingencies are constituted Hence the consummation of a cosmopolitan order entailed a dialectical process at the behest of historyrsquos purposive movement

It can be argued however that Kantrsquos observation that ldquopeoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal communityrdquo24 indicates the asymmetries of power that are inherent in the cosmopolitan project Kantrsquos approach to geography and anthropology suggests how certain places and peoples need to be accelerated in this dialectical process in order to become sites and actors with moral and political agency that is to partake in historical time For Kant there is a correlation between intelligence and geographical location as climatic conditions have a strong bearing on intellectual and moral capacities Humans are a part of physical geography in that first they are one of the features of the earthrsquos surface and second they are a causal mechanism for changing the earthrsquos landscape and climate Their diversity can be categorized into nations with distinct cultures So what Kant identifies as peoplesrsquo ldquonational charactersrdquo stem from what he deems specific and naturally ordered racial and cultural traits A peoplersquos ldquonatural characterrdquo is neither acquired nor artificial but inherent ldquoin the blood mixture of the human beingrdquo25 By identifying four races (white red black and yellow) Kant concluded that different climatic conditions trigger specific predispositions while also hindering others from developing Produced by their environments people dwelling long in a specific place acquire certain moral intellectual and physical abilities In this topology of race Kant privileged the temperate world as the apogee of humanity

The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world above all the central part has a more beautiful body works harder is more jocular more controlled in his passions more intelligent than any other race of people in the world That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons26

Given that Kant answered the question ldquoWhat is Enlightenmentrdquo as consisting in having the courage to use reason scholars are left to navigate

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 11 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

the wide disparity between what he taught about politics and ethics on the one hand and his thoughts about history and anthropology especially his representations of non-Europeans as barbaric on the other In his ethics Kant taught that since morality takes the form of a categorical imperative the moral law has objective reality it ldquocan be proved through no deduction through no exertion of the theoretical speculative or empirically supposed reason and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriorirdquo27 Thus Kantian ethics renders humans (not nations) as unconditionally bound by the moral law Hence his construction of the categorical imperative and the notion of hospitality apply to all people no matter where they hailed from Yet there has persisted an unspoken racial and national hierarchy that the theory as it stands does not endorse If some human communities are by some deficiency latecomers then they come inevitably under the tutelage of those who are already in history in their process of becoming historical subjects Dipesh Chakrabartyrsquos notion of ldquothe lsquonot yetrsquo of historicismrdquo can be used here to describe how the barbaric were consigned ldquoto an imaginary waiting room of historyrdquo28 As we can see Kantrsquos ethics and his geography and anthropology stand in stark opposition29

How do we escape from the quandary If we take Kantrsquos history and anthropology seriously the implication is that the barbarian can only emerge from his parochialism and transcend the narrow confines of his traditions by espousing universal Reason This cosmopolitan ideal only masquerades as an objective ldquoview from nowhererdquo As the anthropologist Peter van der Veer conceives it cosmopolitanism is historically and culturally constituted and an inextricable part of European modernity30 The expropriation of colonies brought about what van der Veer terms ldquocolonial cosmopolitanismrdquo or ldquoa form of translation and conversion of the local into the universalrdquo31 By this formulation Kantrsquos cosmopolitan ideal implies colonialism and the concomitant tutelage of the colonized so that they make a transition from savagery into historical time We should note that the mobility of the European is the fundamental practice which makes this colonizingcolonized and tutorpupil relationship possible On the other hand we can reject Kantrsquos take on physical geography and anthropology by taking seriously his understanding of the Enlightenment project as bringing about self-determination The prescription to get rid of tutelage of others gives rise to the distinction between ldquoautonomyrdquo and ldquoheteronomyrdquo with the latter denoting an external object to which an actor conforms thus stifling her moral autonomy32 We can also rehabilitate Kantrsquos ethics by heeding the political theorist Sankar Muthursquos perceptive claim that rather than aligning themselves with the imperialism of their time eighteenth-century political thinkers were distinctly anti-colonial

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

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Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

12 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

Muthu devotes particular attention to Kant as an anti-imperial thinker According to Muthu Kantrsquos theory of virtue and freedom yields an anti-paternalist stance by according cultural agency to all societies thus making Kant averse to the idea that any society should impose its will on another33

Even if one accepts a ldquoredeemedrdquo Kant on human enlightenment the question remains as to how the postcolonial state and its citizens can enter into the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism On both the political and economic fronts the postcolonial state enters the cosmopolitan fray when its institutional infrastructure is called upon to conform to the global regulatory mechanisms Characterizations of African states as ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo or ldquocollapsedrdquo or as ldquoquasi-statesrdquo with ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo34 express the conviction that many postcolonial states fail fully to exercise their monopoly of power and to guarantee the human rights of their citizens Such characterizations indicate deviance and pathology asserting these statesrsquo need to be ldquobuiltrdquo or ldquorehabilitatedrdquo with external help in order to ldquodeveloprdquo or ldquomodernizerdquo Clearly elements derived from the Kantian political modernization and from colonial discourse remain active in current political narratives that stress the ldquoevolutionrdquo of states from lower to higher forms In the economic realm the postcolonial state and its citizens enter global economic structures as ldquothe Southrdquo subordinates at the mercy of unequal distribution of economic benefits in the neo-liberal order35 At the cultural level the postcolonial state and its citizens are perceived by the North mainly as rebelstraitors to their cultural traditions andor as migrants or refugees who have chosen or been forced into a non-volitional mobility in search of a better life and security In this vein the political and legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron describes Salman Rushdiersquos life as cosmopolitan because it typifies the celebration of ldquohybridity impurity intermingling the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings cultures ideas politics movies songsrdquo36 The writerrsquos cosmopolitanism is emblematic of the perception of its postcolonial forms precisely because his peripatetic ways are to a great degree not of his choosing since the fatwa placed on his life by Islamist clerics in 1988 At the ethical level the postcolonial state and its citizens enter into the cosmopolitan imagination as victims in need of help For example Martha Nussbaum sees cosmopolitanism as a defense against the jingoistic dangers posed by many Americansrsquo revalorization of patriotism as a value for envisioning American identity37 Nussbaum echoes the best Kantian principles when she suggests a cosmopolitan education whose thrust is the recognition of all humanity ldquoWe should recognise humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients reason and moral capacity our first allegiance and respectrdquo38 Even in Nussbaumrsquos enlightened formulation however appears the positional superiority of the Global North cosmopolitanism which requires a boundary-

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 13 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

broadening resource-intensive education becomes a means to the rescue of a victimized South by an enlightened North

The prisms of cosmopolitanism identified above seem to follow faithfully the Kantian schema by defining the cosmopolitan as one who is either conveniently located in the metropolis or is a cultural rebel who hails from the South and assimilates to the cultural life of the metropolis The belief in the metropolis as the training ground for cosmopolitanism can be seen in Kantrsquos own description of his city Koumlnigsberg which he describes as

A large city which is the centre of a kingdom a city which by way of rivers has the advantage of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening onersquos knowledge of human beings as well as of the world where this knowledge can be acquired without travelling39

But is Kant right in isolating the metropolis as the locus of the cosmopolitan I have my doubts and suggest instead that the travel and mobility Kant so offhandedly abjures can produce a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo40 of cosmopolitanism in the enclaves of rural life By choosing rural settings for the narratives I use I am not suggesting that the urban area in the postcolonial state does not deliver some cosmopolitan experiences I simply suggest that rural areas can be the staging grounds for practices and habits of thought that most of the discourses of cosmopolitanism have not seriously considered as cosmopolitan Rural spaces merit a place in the debates surrounding cosmopolitanism which have up to now been dominated by narratives of urban experiences in the metropolises of the South and North It is to the two stories that I now turn

Searching for a ldquoPostcolonial Momentrdquo of Cosmopolitanism

The mobility of ideas and knowledge is crucial for the constitution of the cosmopolitan subject and cosmopolitanism as both discourse and experience I seek to quarry and identify a ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo and a cosmopolitan subject in the hidden enclaves of the postcolonial world by relating Senegalese Ousmane Sembegravenersquos film Moolaade41 and the story of the Malawian autodidact engineer William Kamkwamba I seek to argue that the seemingly ordinary stories of daily struggle actually depict salient cosmopolitan experiences which need to be deciphered as central for the postcolonial world

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

14 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

(i) Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Moolaade

In 2004 Senegalese novelist screenwriter and director Ousmane Sembegravene released Moolaade Set in Djerisso a small rural village in Burkina Faso Moolaade forcefully condemns the traditional custom of female genital mutilation The film opens with the escape of six girls from a ldquopurificationrdquo (circumcision) ceremony Two of them disappear while four flee to the village woman Colleacute the co-wife of Cireacute A few years earlier Colleacute and Cireacute had not allowed the circumcision of Amastou their only surviving child after they had lost two of their daughters through the effects of this practice Further Amastou had been delivered Caesarean which was itself an effect of the genital mutilation experienced by Colleacute

Colleacute resolves to break from tradition and offers her home as refuge to the young girls seeking to protect them from the physical and emotional trauma at the behest of old customary practices When the Salindana the red-robed priestesses who preside over the ceremonial rite and the mothers of the escapees come to demand the girls back Colleacute declares the moolaade an ancient practice of granting refuge to whoever needs it The spell is cast by erecting some colored strands of yarn across the enclosure of the homestead serving to warn ritual attendants not to step inside the homestead to take the girls and also to admonish the escapees not to leave the homestead which now signifies a realm of freedom42 To the girls escaping means returning to cultural subjugation but once the moolaade is invoked nobody else can revoke it Thus despite the outrage of the village elders at what they perceive to be Colleacutersquos defiance and stealth usurpation of patriarchal power the moolaade is a binding act which no one dares to transgress for fear of spiritual retribution and death

There is need to stress two implications of the act of casting a moolaade First the act subverts the traditional authority of the Islamic community Second through the act Colleacute homestead is transformed into something very akin to Jacques Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo a key concept in his proposal of a ldquonew cosmopoliticsrdquo43 Derridarsquos proposal stems from what he sees as the failure of the Kantian formulation of ldquothe right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone elsersquos territoryrdquo First while this right protects the traveler it leaves the residentrsquos rights at the mercy of political sovereignties More often the state is either the author of the violence or cannot guarantee ldquoagainst the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibirdquo44 Second Derrida chides Kantian hospitality as conditional as it is premised on the international law that gives sovereignty to the state Derridarsquos ldquocity of refugerdquo invokes the city as a sovereign hence his call for ldquocities of refuge to reorient the politics

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 15

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

of the staterdquo and ldquoto transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (citeacute) belongs to the staterdquo45 So it is prudent to say that by invoking the ancient practice Colleacute approximates Derridarsquos call for unconditional hospitality ldquounconditional but without sovereigntyrdquo46

Colleacutersquos offer of asylum to the girls entailed what Derrida described as the ldquointerruption of the selfrdquo47 This is because absolute hospitality requires ldquothat I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner but to the absolute unknown anonymous other and that I give place to them that I let them come that I let them arrive and take place in the place I offer them without asking them either reciprocity hellip or even their namesrdquo48 This is not to suggest that Colleacute did not know the girls but that by offering them refuge she had underwritten the risk they faced and she became them by sharing the danger of being ostracized by the community Absolute hospitality is an act of ldquointerruptionrdquo because it transforms the host into the guest49

Further the film underscores the role of broadcast media as a transmitter of cosmopolitan ideas Colleacutersquos insolence precipitates unprecedented confusion and opposition from village elders When the male-dominated village council meets to deliberate they accuse the radio stations of promoting ldquodangerous freedomsrdquo50 they order all women to surrender their radios to be burnt Ibrahima the son of the village chief and recent graduate from Paris protests against this idea by refusing to hand over his television He remarks ldquoToday everywhere in the world radios and televisions are parts of life We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the worldrdquo Womenrsquos protests are in vain leading one woman Samata to declare that ldquoOur men want to lock up our mindsrdquo ldquoBut howrdquo retorts another woman ldquodo you lock up something invisiblerdquo Despite the confiscation of the radios one of Colleacutersquos co-wives offers her old dusty one enabling her mind to remain open and defiant to patriarchal power The elders order Cireacute to publicly beat his renegade wife until she revokes the spell an act that also serves to prove Cireacutersquos manhood The whole congregation is divided between the elders and the Salindana who urge Cireacute to ldquotame her break herrdquo and Colleacutersquos women supporters who defiantly urge her to stoically endure and remain silent in the face of their threats ldquoDonrsquot say a wordrdquo The village itinerant trader Mercanaire who could not bear the violence intervenes by grabbing the whip off Cireacutersquos hands For this act he pays with his life During the public flogging of Colleacute the Salindana transgress the moolaade by sneaking into the sanctuary and abducting one of the refugees Diattou and circumcising her She dies due to bleeding Upon learning of Diattoursquos death all women rally before the council to declare ldquoNot one more girl will be cutrdquo Colleacute also chastises the elders as fearful ldquoYou are scared of radios Fear also led you to murder Mercenairerdquo She also hands over the Salindanarsquos ritual tools which are

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

16 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

ironically thrown to burn together with the radios Colleacute seals the fate of the ritual when she states ldquoPurification is not required by Islam The Grand Imam said it on the radio Each year millions of women go for pilgrimage to Mecca All have not been cutrdquo An idea made mobile via radio waves has mobilized Colleacute and her community against oppressive practices

(ii) William Kamkwambarsquos Windmill Story

In October 2009 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) featured the story of William Kamkwamba a man from the rural village of Masitala in central Malawi At the age of fourteen William dropped out of school due to drought and poverty One day in the local library he saw a picture of a windmill in the Using Energy science book Following the diagrams in the book he figured out how to design a windmill He gleaned in the junkyards and collected scrap metal and then proceeded to make a water pump and generate electricity for the family house The windmill he built consisted of a tower made of bamboo branches a tractor fan PVC blades and a dynamo attached to a bicycle frame To prevent against the possibility of a fire he devised a circuit breaker using a magnet and wires that were wrapped around two nails With the help of supporters he later upgraded the windmill and installed solar-powered mechanical pump and added some water storage tanks from which fellow villagers drew clean water In 2008 William built a new ldquoGreen Machinerdquo by which to draw water to irrigate his family farm In 2007 he was invited by the organization Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) to a conference in Arusha Tanzania to showcase his extra-ordinary scientific ingenuity According to William the motivation for his technological innovation was fighting hunger

Williamrsquos Chewa community cleaves to strong beliefs in magic and superstition They accord the singrsquoanga a morally ambiguous figure for whom the terms ldquowitchrdquo ldquosorcererrdquo ldquohealerrdquo or ldquomagicianrdquo are all applicable51 a very prominent role in their daily lives It is the role of the singrsquoanga to heal predict future events and also to punish ldquo[M]agic had been with us from the beginningrdquo Williamrsquos father had explained to his children

In a land of poor farmers there were too many troubles for God and man alone To compensate for this imbalance [hellip] magic existed as a third and powerful force Magic wasnrsquot something you could see like a tree or a woman carrying water Instead it was a force invisible and strong like the wind or a spiderrsquos web spun across the trail Magic existed in story hellip52

To highlight just how prominent the issues of witchcraft and superstition are to the village life William vividly describes in his book how on one occasion he ate bubble gum that had dropped off the bicycle carrier of

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 17

a village trader The trader issued an unsettling threat ldquoIrsquove gone to see the singrsquoanga and whoever ate that gum will soon be sorryrdquo53 In fear William underwent a self-cleansing process ldquoI spat and hocked shoved my finger into my throat anything to rid my body of the curserdquo54 That night in his sleep he was haunted by witches who came for him to ldquotake me aboard their planes and force me to fight leaving me for dead among the battlefieldsrdquo55 His salvation came when he told his father that he had eaten the bubble gum His father paid the trader to save his son

I seek to highlight that the two forms of life in the Moolaade and Williamrsquos story would not be described as cosmopolitan if we follow Robert Fine and Robin Cohenrsquos ldquofour momentsrdquo of cosmopolitanism that have informed some of the common paradigms of cosmopolitanism56 Most discourses of cosmopolitanism would remain skeptical about the emergence of cosmopolitans from such rural enclaves Rather both Williamrsquos life and narrative of Moolaade would fit only as stereotypical examples of the parochial and provincial Yet both cases capture what is to my mind the key ldquomomentrdquo of the cosmopolitan the attempt to break from the epistemic enclosures that are set by cultural and geographical contingencies In the specific narratives described above these attempts were instantiated by notions of travel and mobility

Cosmopolitanism as Ideas and Identities ldquoOn the Moverdquo

ldquoNowadaysrdquo Zygmunt Bauman has observed ldquowe are all on the moverdquo57 Tim Cresswell echoes by describing the age as one of ubiquitous mobility it is an age in which culture ldquono longer sits in places but is hybrid dynamicmdashmore about routes than rootsrdquo58 Cresswellrsquos contrasts ldquonomadic metaphysicsrdquo and ldquosedentarist metaphysicsrdquo as modes of understanding the coevality of place and identity A sedentarist metaphysics gives place and roots a ldquovivid moral and ethical resonance over and above more mobile states of existence and forms of identityrdquo while a nomadic metaphysics promotes a ldquofascination with all things mobilerdquo because it ldquovalues the lsquoroutesrsquo of the traveler and the nomad above the lsquorootsrsquo of placerdquo59 By highlighting the nature of this dichotomy Cresswell calls for a new theorization of a politics of mobility to restore the material and historical contexts of mobility practices in a bid to grasp their complex and multifarious manifestations From Cresswellrsquos contention what can be deciphered is that mobility does not have a single form This inability to isolate a single mobility finds support in John Urryrsquos ldquomobilities paradigmrdquo60 or Aharon Kellermanrsquos ldquomobilities in the plural formrdquo61 In his analyses of why people and objects travel Urry elaborates different kinds of travel physical movement of objects imaginative travel through images of places and peoples encountered on

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

18 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

radio and TV (one might also add written texts) virtual travel in real time on the Internet and also corporeal travel of people62 By elaborating these Urry urges us both to conceive mobility in plural and also to place it at the core of our understanding of society

As we have seen imaginative and virtual travel have a great deal of resonance for both Moolade and the life of William Kamkwamba In both cases travelling through texts and communications technologies was instrumental in generating cosmopolitan subjectivities Indeed one could say that such travel had the same effect on Immanuel Kant who textually ldquotravelledrdquo the globe even as he remained in Koumlnigsberg This understanding of multiply situated and multiply situating mobilities coincides with Peter Adeyrsquos idea of ldquothe inescapable truth of mobilityrdquo that ldquoit is a lived relation an orientation to oneself to others and to the worldrdquo63 William and the characters in Moolade are experiencing fully this relation hence we can affirm their status as cosmopolitan This broader understanding of travel helps us circumvent the ordinary depictions of the local localism and locality as antithetical to cosmopolitanism64

Theorist Paul Viriliorsquos concept of dromology or ldquothe logicscience of speedrdquo might help us further elaborate this relation With its roots in the Greek word dromos (literally ldquothe riderdquo ldquothe journeyrdquo or ldquothe driverdquo) dromology seeks to establish how speed is imbued in questions of power Virilio asserts that ldquothe history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches that is wealth money capital but also the political economy of speed If time is money as they say then speed is powerrdquo65 Communications transport and information technologies alter our experiences and as speed accelerates space and time are compressed Speedrsquos wide-ranging effects include the war machine the permanent state of emergency the negation of space the inability to escape surveillance and so on Thus Virilio perceived speed as a threat to democracy because the faster we go the more threatened we are

The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geographical servitude but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints on the railway airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases the faster freedom decreases66

William Connolly warns that Viriliorsquos preoccupation with the military and political paradigms of speed entails that Virilio ldquoremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speedrdquo and by so doing he ldquounderplays the positive role speed can play in desanctifying closed and dogmatic identities in the domains of religion sensuality ethnicity gender and nationalityrdquo67 Thus Connolly points to ldquothe ambiguity of speedrdquo by acknowledging both the dangers of speed and

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 19

its positive possibilities ldquoto disrupt closed models of nature truth and morality into which people so readily become encapsulatedrdquo68 This leads me to the question of how ldquospeedrdquo is important for the storyline in the film Moolaade and in Williamrsquos story

In Moolaade the radio is the gadget that shrinks space and time It opens up a wider participatory space for women and allows them to challenge the patriarchal order In Sembegravenersquos own description Moolaade is a film undergirded by an underground struggle for ldquoheroism in daily liferdquo a struggle in which technology plays a distinct role69 In a similar vein the film reveals how the travel and mobility of ideas people and identities are implicated in the Africansrsquo struggles against oppression and the engendering of day-to-day cosmopolitan experiences The film provides an interface between two old practices on one hand the tradition of female genital excision instituted to perpetuate the subjugation of women and on the other the sacred right to protect those weaker than oneself As a technological innovation the radio allows what Heidegger characterizes as the peak of the ldquoabolition of every possibility of remotenessrdquo70 The abolition of remoteness allowed the village women to see hear and act in response to the existential realities with which their cultural milieu presented them Thus while the radios gave them alternative viewpoints they also provided justification to uphold traditional practices in defense of vulnerable children Colleacutersquos invocation of the moolaade brought about an acceleration of a different sort namely the dramatic community-driven change in practices due to increased awareness of the dangers posed by genital mutilation

There was also a simultaneous wave of deceleration whereby an ancient practice of moolaade that predated Islam was invoked to usher in a new social order That social order despite the threat it posed to the entrenched patriarchal dominance generated social stability insofar as it guaranteed the safety of not only the young refugee girls but also the bilakoromdashwomen considered ldquouncleanrdquo or ldquounpurifiedrdquo and therefore cast out of society The new order illustrated what Rosa and Scheuerman identify as the distinction between ldquoacceleration of societyrdquo and ldquoacceleration within societyrdquo71 Similarly Williamrsquos imaginative travel was an epistemological quest for solutions to the endemic problem of hunger The travel entailed venturing outside his epistemic community which was a tapestry of magic and other forms of knowing exploring what ldquoother shoresrdquo offered Roxanne Euben uses the notion of ldquotravel to other shoresrdquo as ldquoa term of translationrdquo which ldquomakes visible the extent to which we desire knowledge the capacity for critical distance [and] curiosity about what is strangerdquo72 William did not openly rebel against the cultural beliefs of his hidebound community as in Waldronrsquos portrait of Rushdie If William had done that then he would have headed for Lilongwe Malawirsquos polyglot

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

20 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

city and perhaps become a ldquostreet kidrdquo there The act of reading and interpreting a book was a process of cultural contestation that provoked in him uneasiness and a sense of incompleteness with the present This simultaneous curiosity and dissatisfaction are signs of what the sociologist Gerard Delanty calls a cosmopolitan imagination which occurs ldquowhen and wherever new relations between self other and world develop in moments of opennessrdquo73 The multiple forms of mobility are indispensable in cultivating such an imagination

Both narratives confirm Stuart Hallrsquos conception of cosmopolitanism as ldquothe ability to stand outside of having onersquos life written and scripted by any one communityrdquo74 In Sembegravenersquos film Colleacutersquos casting of a moolaade questions an oppressive custom it is an act of stretching human imagination in order to think beyond the confines of her communityrsquos cultural practices Williamrsquos effort to utilize knowledge based on universalist appeal affirms how humanityrsquos search for a better world can be made possible by knowledge The insight that motivated William was that there is knowledge applicable to all and that what counts as cosmopolitan is the ldquodetermination to maximize species-consciousness to fashion tools for understanding and acting upon problems of global scale to diminish suffering regardless of color and class and religion and sex and triberdquo75

By using the Western text Using Energy to benefit his community William drew upon an imaginative and virtual cosmopolitan community of knowledge For him the horizons of knowledge needed to go beyond the parochialism of the ethnos a sensibility that David Hollinger has termed ldquoa suspicion of enclosuresrdquo76 This sensibility also by its very nature lends way to being receptive to the Other In both narratives discussed in this essay imaginative or virtual travel informs us how ldquoinvasive counter-movementsrdquo77 are formed The radio and the science book multiplied the sites through which new identities could be refashioned to confront social problems Ideas acquired through the media enable ordinary people to envision ldquopossibilities of democratic action and citizenshiprdquo78 a transformational process that begins with the epistemic

Becoming cosmopolitan requires an imaginative experience or what Arjun Appadurai terms ldquothe work of the imaginationrdquo79 which is a constitutive feature of a cosmopolitan subjectivity An imaginative experience enhances a cosmopolitan experience by allowing one to transcend the local and to form a ldquocommunity of sentimentrdquo80 with that which lies beyond onersquos community For that reason the imaginative is the launch pad for both individual and collective agency The imaginative experience in both Moolaade and Williamrsquos story has allowed the subjects to mobilize both individual and group identities to allow for action

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

bull 21 copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Conclusion

I will close by revisiting Cresswellrsquos distinction between ldquosedentaristrdquo and ldquonomadicrdquo metaphysics to suggest that these distinctions may not in fact be so distinct Moolaade invokes a form of mobility not yet mentioned a temporal mobility into the past Moolaade was a prehistoric practice designed to protect the vulnerable Its efficacy in curtailing genital mutilation in the present works in tandem with or even supersedes legal instruments that enforce human rights The women and girls in the film invoke a traditional custom to circumvent the modern configurations of patriarchal power that draw strength from the beliefs and practices of Islamic faith Through the custom the women and girls affirm their social and political agency and precipitate change The use of the ancient moolade in the service of rights-based social and political modernity leaves us with not a little irony Casting the moolaade can be interpreted in terms of sedentarist metaphysics insofar as it gives prominence to traditional ldquorootsrdquo However the practice offers new ldquoroutesrdquo that enhance social mobility and democratic action

Mobility it must be reiterated is a most powerful set of practices containing multiple forms As we have seen in Moolade the mobility of the escaping girls interacted with the mobility of ideas through the radio which led to social mobility whereby the authority of the patriarchs and the ritual attendants was shaken to the core thus restructuring society anew and repositioning each agent in ways that redefined their power Similarly in Williamrsquos story William adapted ideas that had travelled from afar and developed technologies of motion to improve his rural community Both narratives confirm the emergence of ldquonew representational strategiesrdquo which show how the constitution of the postcolonial subject defies or challenges traditional ethnographyrsquos assumption that conceives the native as local or sedentary81

These two narratives thus serve as pathways for reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in postcolonial societies Moolaade depicts the centrality of both modern technological gadgets that speedily relay ideas and also the importance of a selective appropriation of tradition to ameliorate human suffering Further Moolaade highlights how cosmopolitanism can draw upon traditional and pre-colonial practices and combine them with newer sensibilities to confront modern challenges This conception of cosmopolitanism poses a serious challenge to the binary ways of describing modern societies because the so-called South displays its own cosmopolitan resources to resolve the tensions inherent in its own societies On the whole both narratives offer hope and agency rural villagers challenge cultural grotesque practices and use technology to alleviate poverty and hunger using mobile ideas to cultivate more fulfilling

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

22 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

lives Whereas William appropriates Western scientific knowledge to find ways of ameliorating hunger and poverty Colleacute withdraws into tradition to save the girls from a dangerous practice These two ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo82 inform us how it is possible to think and feel beyond the local and to confirm our common humanity

It is hard to conceive a cosmopolitan sensibility that does not feature some form of travelmobility which are essential to transcending the given The political scientist Roxanne Euben uses the notion of travel as both a metaphor for and the practice of seeking knowledge of what is unfamiliar or unrecognized83 Travel in search of knowledge opens up spheres of comparative investigation allowing the traveler to gain critical distance on his local practices and modes of knowing By arguing for a more expansive or broader understanding of travel than merely physical movement of human bodies we may also enrich our understanding of cosmopolitanism to include the postcolonial subjects the discourse has heretofore rendered peripheral The image of the cosmopolitan that I seek here is one that privileges the centrality of imaginative and virtual travel and their epistemological effects This image highlights how humanity is tied together in concentric circles of communication and affiliation

By exploring how agents in two narratives broke free from the epistemic enclosuresmdashone by invoking an ancient traditional practice and another by appropriating modern scientific knowledgemdashthis paper highlights how the importance of a broader notion of mobility experiences for both resolving tensions and for the search for knowledge should be accorded a central place in discourses of cosmopolitanism in order to capture the narratives of those postcolonial subjects largely ignored in mainstream analyses

Notes

1 The author is grateful to Prof Nikolas Kompridis of the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney for according him the chance to audit his ldquoNew Cosmopolitanismsrdquo postgraduate class from August to November 2010 The original ideas that inform this paper developed from the authorrsquos engagements in the exciting readings and stimulating in-class debates Further the author has also benefited from some helpful comments and suggestions of six anonymous reviewers of the Transfers journal Needless to say full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings rests solely with the author

2 John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730ndash1840 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972) 63

3 Barrell The Idea of Landscape 63 4 Boaventura de Sousa Santos ldquoOppositional Postmodernism and Globalizationsrdquo

Law and Social Inquiry 23 no 1 (1998) 121ndash39 here 130 5 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo Boundary 2 20 no 3 (Autumn

1993) 65ndash76 here 65

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 23

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

6 Enrique Dussel ldquoEurope Modernity and Eurocentrismrdquo Nepantla Views from South 1 no 3 (2000) 465ndash78 here 471

7 Dussel ldquoEurocentrism and Modernityrdquo 66 8 Antoacutenio Sousa Ribeiro Translocal Modernisms International Perspectives (Bern

Peter Lang 2008) 15 9 Aniacutebal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein ldquoAmericanity as a Concept or the

Americas in the Modern World-systemrdquo International Social Sciences Journal 134 (1992) 549ndash57

10 Sandra G Harding Sciences from Below Feminisms Postcolonialities and Modernities (Durham NC Duke University Press 2008) 157

11 More recently the concept has been rearticulated by the Argentinean literary theorist Walter Mignolo For the elaboration of the concept see Aniacutebal Quijanorsquos ldquoColoniality of Power Eurocentrism and Social Classificationrdquo in Coloniality at Large Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate ed Mabel Morantildea Enrique D Dussel Carlos A Jaacuteuregui (Durham NC Duke University Press 2008) 181ndash224 and Walter Mignolorsquos ldquoThe Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Differencerdquo The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 no 1 (Winter 2002) 57ndash96

12 Homi K Bhabha The Location of Culture (London Routledge 1974) 17113 Couze Venn The Postcolonial Challenge Towards Alternative Worlds (London

Sage Publishers 2006) 314 Rita Abrahamsen ldquoAfrican Studies and the Postcolonial Challengerdquo African

Affairs 102 (2003) 189ndash210 here 19015 Ramoacuten Grosfoguel ldquoColonial Difference Geopolitics of Knowledge and Global

Coloniality in the ModernColonial Capitalist World-Systemrdquo Review 25 no 3 (2002) 203ndash24 here 208

16 Grosfoguel ldquoColonial Differencerdquo 20817 As I endeavor to show in this paper there are multiple experiences of travel

and mobility that justify the call for multiple versions of cosmopolitanism The recent proliferation of hyphenations inflections and use of other descriptors to qualify what cosmopolitanism means or should mean attests to the multiple nature of cosmopolitan experiences Bruce Robbins describes this proliferation of versions of cosmopolitanism as ldquoa pluralizing tide of smaller subuniversal cosmopolitanismsrdquo (ldquoCosmopolitanism New and Newerrdquo Boundary 2 34 no 3 (2007) 47ndash60 here 48) The various versions that have emerged emanate from perceived narrowness of some of the debates Pnina Werbner uses the broad term of ldquovernacular cosmopolitanismrdquo to refer to the inflections and hyphenations and she describes the term as belonging to ldquoa family of concepts all of which combine in similar fashion apparently contradictory opposites cosmopolitan patriotism rooted cosmopolitanism cosmopolitan ethnicity working class discrepant cosmopolitanismrdquo conjunctions which ldquoattempt to come to terms with the conjectural elements of postcolonial and precolonial forms of cosmopolitanism and travel while probing the conceptual boundaries of cosmopolitanism and its usefulness as an analytic conceptrdquo Pnina Werbner ldquoVernacular Cosmopolitanismrdquo Theory Society and Culture 23 nos 2ndash3 (May 2006) 496ndash8 here 496ndash7

18 Vinay Dharwadker ldquoIntroduction Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Placerdquo in Cosmopolitan Geographies New Locations in Literature and Culture ed Vinay Dharwadker (London Routledge 2001) 1ndash14 here 2

24 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

19 Garrett Brown and David Held ldquoKant and Contemporary Cosmopolitanismrdquo in The Cosmopolitan Reader ed Garrett W Brown and David Held (Cambridge MA Polity Press 2010) 16ndash7 here 16

20 Kant adopted the phrase ldquoperpetual peacerdquo from a Dutch innkeeper who had written it on a signboard and appended an image of a graveyard For Kant perhaps the innkeeperrsquos message was meant to be a whimsical warning that the philosophersrsquo predilection for a utopian world of perfect peace as anticipated by the Westphalian Treaty remained a far cry

21 Immanuel Kant ldquoPerpetual Peacerdquo in Kantrsquos Political Writings ed Hans Reiss (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1971) 106

22 Kant ldquoPerpetual Peacerdquo 105ndash6 (It needs to be emphasized here that Kantrsquos notion of hospitality guarantees the right of the stranger but not the right of the resident The right of the latter is guaranteed by and between political sovereignties)

23 Kant ldquoIdea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purposerdquo in Kantrsquos Political Writings ed Hans Reiss (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1971) 41ndash53

24 Kant ldquoPerpetual Peacerdquo 10725 Immanuel Kant Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of View tr Robert Louden

(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2006) 22226 Kant ldquoPhysical Geographyrdquo in Race and the Enlightenment A Reader ed

Emmanuel C Eze (Malden MA Blackwell Publishers 1997) 58ndash62 here 6427 Kant Critique of Practical Reason tr Lewis White Beck (New York Bobb-Merrill

1956) 4828 Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference (Princeton Princeton University Press 2000) 829 Geographer David Harvey characterized this disparity by arguing that Kantrsquos

geography is ldquonothing short of an intellectual and political embarrassmentrdquo and ldquohis remarks on ldquomanrdquo within the system of nature are deeply troublingrdquo See David Harvey ldquoCosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evilsrdquo Public Culture 12 no 2 (Spring 2000) 538ndash41 here 533

30 Peter van der Veer ldquoColonial Cosmopolitanismrdquo in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism Theory Context and Practice ed Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford Oxford University Press 2002) 165ndash79 here 165

31 Van der Veer ldquoColonial Cosmopolitanismrdquo 16632 I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal who pointed out this distinction33 Sankar Muthu Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton Princeton University

Press 2003) The philosopher Thomas McCarthy has also analyzed the racist and imperialist consequences of the discourses and politics of Kantrsquos liberal universalism and human development For him imperialism and liberalism have long and entangled histories and the way of escaping this quandary is by stripping away the racist dimensions of Kant so that his liberalism has a place in the current discourses and politics of development See McCarthy Race Empire and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2009)

34 For the analysis of these distinctions ldquoweakrdquo ldquofailedrdquo and ldquocollapsedrdquo see When States Fail Causes and Consequences ed Robert Rotberg (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2004) for the notions of ldquoquasi-statesrdquorsquo and ldquoquasi-sovereigntyrdquo see Robert Jackson Quasi-states Sovereignty International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1990)

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 25

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

35 Stefan Giljum and Nina Eisenmenger ldquoNorth-South Trade and the Distribution of Environmental Goods and Burdens A Biophysical Perspectiverdquo The Journal of Environment Development 13 no 1 (March 2004) 73ndash100

36 Jeremy Waldron ldquoMinority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternativerdquo University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 no 3 (1992) 751ndash93 here 751

37 Martha Nussbaum ldquoPatriotism and Cosmopolitanismrdquo in For Love of Country Debating the Limits of Patriotism ed Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (Boston MA Beacon Press 1996) 2ndash17 here 7 Specifically Nussbaum reacts to Richard Rortyrsquos accusation of the American academic left as ldquounpatrioticrdquo because of its support for multiculturalism and its celebration of politics of difference Rorty argues that the ldquounpatriotic left has never achieved anythingrdquo and its refusal ldquoto take pride in its country will have no impact on that countryrsquos politics and will eventually become an object of contemptrdquo Richard Rorty ldquoThe Unpatriotic Academyrdquo The New York Times (13 February 1994) httpwwwnytimescom19940213opinionthe-unpatriotic-academyhtml (accessed 1 June 2010)

38 Nussbaum ldquoPatriotism and Cosmopolitanismrdquo 739 Kant Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of View 440 I have used the term ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo following what Robert Fine and

Robin Cohen identify as the ldquofour moments of cosmopolitanismrdquo which are chronologically ordered to show how cosmopolitanism has historically ldquosurfaced from time to time only to become submerged againrdquo See Robert Fine and Robin Cohen ldquoFour Cosmopolitan Momentsrdquo in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism Theory Context Practice ed Steven Vertovec and Robert Cohen (Oxford Oxford University Press 2002) 137ndash62 here 137 They present the moments as follows Zenorsquos moment (in the ancient world) Kantrsquos moment (in the Enlightenment) Arendtrsquos moment (in the post-totalitarian thought) and Nussbaumrsquos moment (in the late North-American thought) My contention is that these are inadequate because they do not capture the experiences of the postcolonial world Hence I coin my own version the ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo which while it chronologically follows these four moments is spatially located in the South or Third World and in particular found in the specificity of the rural areas

41 I owe a debt of gratitude to Nikolas Kompridis who in one of my debates with him drew my attention to this film production

42 In Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Wolof language the word moolaade means a sacred protection or sanctuary

43 Jacques Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness trans Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (New York Routledge 2005)

44 Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 645 Ibid 446 Ibid 59 47 Derridarsquos question ldquoIs not hospitality an interruption of the selfrdquo (Derrida Adieu

to Emmanuel Levinas trans Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Stanford Stanford University Press 1999] 51) attests to how his deconstructive approach to the notion of hospitality seeks to highlight the inadequacies of laws of conditional hospitality bound up with the contemporary sovereign state

48 Jacques Derrida Of Hospitality trans Rachel Bowlby (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 25

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 25

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

35 Stefan Giljum and Nina Eisenmenger ldquoNorth-South Trade and the Distribution of Environmental Goods and Burdens A Biophysical Perspectiverdquo The Journal of Environment Development 13 no 1 (March 2004) 73ndash100

36 Jeremy Waldron ldquoMinority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternativerdquo University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 no 3 (1992) 751ndash93 here 751

37 Martha Nussbaum ldquoPatriotism and Cosmopolitanismrdquo in For Love of Country Debating the Limits of Patriotism ed Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (Boston MA Beacon Press 1996) 2ndash17 here 7 Specifically Nussbaum reacts to Richard Rortyrsquos accusation of the American academic left as ldquounpatrioticrdquo because of its support for multiculturalism and its celebration of politics of difference Rorty argues that the ldquounpatriotic left has never achieved anythingrdquo and its refusal ldquoto take pride in its country will have no impact on that countryrsquos politics and will eventually become an object of contemptrdquo Richard Rorty ldquoThe Unpatriotic Academyrdquo The New York Times (13 February 1994) httpwwwnytimescom19940213opinionthe-unpatriotic-academyhtml (accessed 1 June 2010)

38 Nussbaum ldquoPatriotism and Cosmopolitanismrdquo 739 Kant Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of View 440 I have used the term ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo following what Robert Fine and

Robin Cohen identify as the ldquofour moments of cosmopolitanismrdquo which are chronologically ordered to show how cosmopolitanism has historically ldquosurfaced from time to time only to become submerged againrdquo See Robert Fine and Robin Cohen ldquoFour Cosmopolitan Momentsrdquo in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism Theory Context Practice ed Steven Vertovec and Robert Cohen (Oxford Oxford University Press 2002) 137ndash62 here 137 They present the moments as follows Zenorsquos moment (in the ancient world) Kantrsquos moment (in the Enlightenment) Arendtrsquos moment (in the post-totalitarian thought) and Nussbaumrsquos moment (in the late North-American thought) My contention is that these are inadequate because they do not capture the experiences of the postcolonial world Hence I coin my own version the ldquopostcolonial momentrdquo which while it chronologically follows these four moments is spatially located in the South or Third World and in particular found in the specificity of the rural areas

41 I owe a debt of gratitude to Nikolas Kompridis who in one of my debates with him drew my attention to this film production

42 In Ousmane Sembegravenersquos Wolof language the word moolaade means a sacred protection or sanctuary

43 Jacques Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness trans Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (New York Routledge 2005)

44 Derrida On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 645 Ibid 446 Ibid 59 47 Derridarsquos question ldquoIs not hospitality an interruption of the selfrdquo (Derrida Adieu

to Emmanuel Levinas trans Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Stanford Stanford University Press 1999] 51) attests to how his deconstructive approach to the notion of hospitality seeks to highlight the inadequacies of laws of conditional hospitality bound up with the contemporary sovereign state

48 Jacques Derrida Of Hospitality trans Rachel Bowlby (Stanford Stanford University Press 2000) 25

26 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

49 Derrida argues that the formula of welcoming the host transforms both the guest and host ldquoThe master of the house is at home but nonetheless he comes to enter his home through the guestmdashwho comes from outside The master thus enters from the inside as if he came from the outside He enters the home thanks to the visitor by the grace of the visitorrdquo (Derrida Of Hospitality 125)

50 Roger Ebert The Great Movies III (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2010) 262

51 For the reason that the singrsquoanga can perform both benevolent and malevolent acts the term has no specific designation as its meaning can vary according to context

52 William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (New York Harper and Collins 2009) 6

53 Ibid 454 Ibid55 Ibid56 Fine and Cohen ldquoFour Cosmopolitan Momentsrdquo 137ndash6257 Zygmunt Bauman Globalization The Human Consequences (Cambridge Polity

Press 1998) 7758 Tim Cresswell On the Move Mobility in the Modern Western World (London

Routledge 2006) 159 Tim Cresswell ldquoIntroduction Theorizing Placerdquo in Mobilizing Place Placing

Mobility The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World ed Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell (Amsterdam Rodopi 2002) 11

60 John Urry Mobilities (Cambridge Polity Press 2007)61 Aharon Kellerman ldquoMobility or Mobilities Terrestrial Virtual and Aerial

Categories or Entitiesrdquo Journal of Transport Geography 30 (September 2010) 1ndash9 here 1

62 John Urry Sociology Beyond Societies (London Routledge 2000)63 Peter Adey Mobility (New York Routledge 2010) xvii 64 In his analysis of ldquotravelling culturesrdquo James Clifford concedes that it is a mistake

to insist on ldquoliteral travelrdquo as it ldquooverly restricts the important issue of how subjects are culturally lsquolocatedrsquordquo See Clifford ldquoTravelling Culturesrdquo in Cultural Studies ed Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York Routledge 1992) 96ndash116 here 103 It is Cliffordrsquos concession to the limitations of ldquotravel as discourse and genrerdquo (107) that invigorates the need for a broader conception of travel and mobility

65 John Armitage ldquoFrom Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond An Interview with Paul Viriliordquo in Paul Virilio From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond ed John Armitage (London Sage 2000) 25ndash57 here 35

66 Paul Virilio Speed and Politics An Essay on Dromology (New York Columbia University 1986) 142

67 William E Connolly ldquoSpeed Concentric Cultures and Cosmopolitanismrdquo in Political Theory 28 no 5 (October 2000) 596ndash618 here 596ndash7

68 Connolly ldquoSpeed Concentric Cultures and Cosmopolitanismrdquo 598 This view is also shared by Hartmut Rosa and William Scheuerman who argue that the notion of acceleration needs to be placed at the centre of contemporary social and political analysis because it ldquoholds out the promise of shedding fresh light on a host of political and social pathologies plaguing contemporary societyrdquo Rosa and

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 27

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Scheuerman ldquoIntroductionrdquo in High-speed Society Social Acceleration Power and Modernity ed Rosa and Scheuerman (State College PA The Pennsylvania State University Press 2009) 1ndash29 here 3

69 Samba Gadjigo ldquoInterview with Ousmane Sembegravenerdquo 11 April 2004 httpwwwmarxmailorgINTERVIEW_SEMBENEhtm (accessed 14 January 2011

70 Martin Heidegger Poetry Language Thought trans Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco Harper and Row 1971) 165

71 Rosa and Scheuerman ldquoIntroductionrdquo 272 Roxanne Euben Journeys to the Other Shore Muslim and Western Travelers in

Search of Knowledge (Princeton Princeton University Press 2006) 1973 Gerard Delanty ldquoThe Cosmopolitan Imagination Critical Cosmopolitanism and

Social Theoryrdquo The British Journal of Sociology 57 no 1 (March 2006) 2774 Stuart Hall ldquoPolitical Belonging in a World of Multiple Identitiesrdquo in Conceiving

Cosmopolitanism Theory Context and Practice ed Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford Oxford University Press 2002) 26

75 David A Hollinger ldquoNot Universalists Not Pluralists The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Wayrdquo Constellations 8 no 2 (June 2001) 236ndash48 here 238

76 Hollinger ldquoNot Universalists Not Pluralistsrdquo 239 77 David Campbell and Morton Schoolman ldquoAn Interview with William Connollyrdquo

in The New Pluralism William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition ed Campbell and Schoolman (Durham Duke University Press 2005) 305ndash36 here 317

78 William Connolly Neuropolitics Thinking Culture and Speed (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 2002) 152

79 Arjun Appadurai Modernity at Large Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1996) 3

80 Arjun Appadurai ldquoTopographies of the Self Praise and Emotion in Hindu Indiardquo in Language and the Politics of Emotion ed Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1990) 92ndash112

81 Clifford ldquoTravelling Culturesrdquo 101 Clifford makes this point more clearly by making reference to Arjun Appadurairsquos argument that the term ldquonativerdquo has ambiguous overtones to denote someone who not only comes ldquofrom certain places and belongs to those placesrdquo but is also ldquosomehow incarcerated or confined in those placesrdquo Appadurai ldquoPutting Hierarchy in Its Placerdquo Cultural Anthropology 3 no 1 (February 1988) 36ndash49 here 37 I find Appadurairsquos position very important for understanding postcolonial subjectivity as it permits the entry of hybrid theory as a way of envisaging the hybridity of postcolonial subjects For Pheng Cheah hybridity theory is ldquoa useful test case in accessing new articulations of cosmopolitanismrdquo See Pheng Cheah ldquoGiven Culturerdquo in Cosmopolitics Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation ed Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 290ndash328 here 291 This approach helps us to avoid ldquometonymic freezingrdquo (Appadurai ldquoPutting Hierarchy in Its Placerdquo 36) of the ldquonativerdquo and to essentialize hisher experience as always local and antithetical to what is cosmopolitan

82 Scott Malcomsonrsquos ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo highlights that most academic debates about cosmopolitanism have ldquotended to neglect actually existing cosmopolitanismsrdquo and what is characteristic about all these varieties is that their subjects have limited choices or are thrust into ldquophysical or material compulsionsrdquo they ldquoinvolve individuals with limited choices deciding to enter

copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011 bull 27

Re-imaging ldquoTravelrdquo and ldquoMobilityrdquo

Scheuerman ldquoIntroductionrdquo in High-speed Society Social Acceleration Power and Modernity ed Rosa and Scheuerman (State College PA The Pennsylvania State University Press 2009) 1ndash29 here 3

69 Samba Gadjigo ldquoInterview with Ousmane Sembegravenerdquo 11 April 2004 httpwwwmarxmailorgINTERVIEW_SEMBENEhtm (accessed 14 January 2011

70 Martin Heidegger Poetry Language Thought trans Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco Harper and Row 1971) 165

71 Rosa and Scheuerman ldquoIntroductionrdquo 272 Roxanne Euben Journeys to the Other Shore Muslim and Western Travelers in

Search of Knowledge (Princeton Princeton University Press 2006) 1973 Gerard Delanty ldquoThe Cosmopolitan Imagination Critical Cosmopolitanism and

Social Theoryrdquo The British Journal of Sociology 57 no 1 (March 2006) 2774 Stuart Hall ldquoPolitical Belonging in a World of Multiple Identitiesrdquo in Conceiving

Cosmopolitanism Theory Context and Practice ed Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford Oxford University Press 2002) 26

75 David A Hollinger ldquoNot Universalists Not Pluralists The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Wayrdquo Constellations 8 no 2 (June 2001) 236ndash48 here 238

76 Hollinger ldquoNot Universalists Not Pluralistsrdquo 239 77 David Campbell and Morton Schoolman ldquoAn Interview with William Connollyrdquo

in The New Pluralism William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition ed Campbell and Schoolman (Durham Duke University Press 2005) 305ndash36 here 317

78 William Connolly Neuropolitics Thinking Culture and Speed (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 2002) 152

79 Arjun Appadurai Modernity at Large Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1996) 3

80 Arjun Appadurai ldquoTopographies of the Self Praise and Emotion in Hindu Indiardquo in Language and the Politics of Emotion ed Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1990) 92ndash112

81 Clifford ldquoTravelling Culturesrdquo 101 Clifford makes this point more clearly by making reference to Arjun Appadurairsquos argument that the term ldquonativerdquo has ambiguous overtones to denote someone who not only comes ldquofrom certain places and belongs to those placesrdquo but is also ldquosomehow incarcerated or confined in those placesrdquo Appadurai ldquoPutting Hierarchy in Its Placerdquo Cultural Anthropology 3 no 1 (February 1988) 36ndash49 here 37 I find Appadurairsquos position very important for understanding postcolonial subjectivity as it permits the entry of hybrid theory as a way of envisaging the hybridity of postcolonial subjects For Pheng Cheah hybridity theory is ldquoa useful test case in accessing new articulations of cosmopolitanismrdquo See Pheng Cheah ldquoGiven Culturerdquo in Cosmopolitics Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation ed Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 290ndash328 here 291 This approach helps us to avoid ldquometonymic freezingrdquo (Appadurai ldquoPutting Hierarchy in Its Placerdquo 36) of the ldquonativerdquo and to essentialize hisher experience as always local and antithetical to what is cosmopolitan

82 Scott Malcomsonrsquos ldquovarieties of cosmopolitanismrdquo highlights that most academic debates about cosmopolitanism have ldquotended to neglect actually existing cosmopolitanismsrdquo and what is characteristic about all these varieties is that their subjects have limited choices or are thrust into ldquophysical or material compulsionsrdquo they ldquoinvolve individuals with limited choices deciding to enter

28 bull copy Transfers bull Volume 1 Issue 2 bull Summer 2011

Kudzai P Matereke

into something larger than their immediate culturesrdquo See Malcomson ldquoThe Varieties of Cosmopolitanismrdquo in Cosmopolitics Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation ed Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1998) 233ndash64 here 240

83 Roxanne Euben ldquoThe Comparative Politics of Travelrdquo Parallax 9 no 4 (2003) 18ndash28 here 18

Author Biography

Kudzai P Matereke is completing a PhD in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales Australia His research interests include citizenship cosmopolitanism political pluralism and postcolonial national identity His doctoral thesis on postcolonial citizenship draws out the implications of John Rawlsrsquos political liberalism on Africarsquos postcolonial challenges E-mail kudzaimaterekeyahoocouk or kudzaimaterekeunsweduau