Article,
Cosmopolitanism, translation and the experience of the foreign
Across Languages and Cultures, 11 (2): 161--174 (2010)
DOI: 10.1556/Acr.11.2010.2.2
Abstract
Cosmopolitanism has received in recent years renewed attention in the social
sciences as an important component of the heightening of global consciousness, which
Roland Robertson emphasised as the significant subjective dimension of globalisation
(1992). The term is used not only to describe an empirical reality but also to question established
disciplinary trends and to point to new methodological orientations. Thus, it denotes
both an objectively existing social reality and a methodological approach to describing this
reality. Cosmopolitanism is also viewed in its critical potential as embodying a transformative
vision of an alternative society. This article considers some important theoretical insights
of what has been called the new cosmopolitanism and elaborates on the importance of
translation for any consideration of a cosmopolitan social reality or for methodological
cosmopolitanism, inquiring into the important contribution of translation studies to an illumination
of key aspects of cosmopolitan social theory. A first section sketches out key insights
on cosmopolitanism today, while a second and third section elaborate further on the
relevance of translation for a productive understanding of cosmopolitanism, exploring translation
as the experience of the foreign and relating such an understanding to the notion of
cosmopolitanism as openness to the other.
