AustLit

‘When James Clifford coined the phrase ‘Discrepant cosmopolitanisms,’ he had in mind the ‘cultures of displacement and transplantation that are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” (108). Because these histories of interaction are frequently the same ones that, at least indirectly, underpin the cosmopolitan freedom and prosperity of affluent metropolitan centers, the study of discrepant cosmopolitanism s often involves an understanding of how different sites in the global economy are related to each other. As Michael Davidson puts it, a bit more bluntly than Clifford, ‘the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globe trotting business man or the wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant labourer, sex worker, and political exile’ (735). In this essay I want to think about how contemporary fiction encounters this issue…’ (Author’s introduction p. 135)