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Engaging Politically from the Margin 273
and its expansion into imperialism.
Burnt Shadows
examines extreme patriotism and imperialism as
the main causes of many traumatic events in history, and provides its
critique from Muslim and Asian migrant perspectives. Such
perspectives, I argue, echo the subaltern perspectives that Mignolo
contends could bring forth critical cosmopolitanism. According to
Mignolo, critical cosmopolitanism is distinguished from global designs
and cosmopolitan projects. Global designs
—
“as in Christianity,
nineteenth-century imperialism, or late twentieth-century neoliberal
globalization”
—
are “managerial” (Mignolo, 2000: 722-723), whereas
cosmopolitan projects
—
“as in Vitoria, Kant, or Karl Marx, leaving
aside the differences in each of these projects”
—
are “emancipatory”
(723). Despite significant differences, both are “linked to coloniality
and to the emergence of the modern/colonial world” (722). In contrast,
critical cosmopolitanism negotiates “the coloniality of power and the
colonial difference” (742) and conceives of “diversity as a universal
project” (743). Like Cohen and Appiah, Mignolo underlines diversity
as the ground for political and ethical cosmopolitan projects. His idea
of cosmopolitanism is, to some extent, rooted as well. Yet, instead of
discussing diversity generally and positively as if it were a value shared
equally by all human beings, Mignolo draws attention to the “critical
and dialogic” aspects of cosmopolitanism (743), whose diversity is
achieved through the “tool” of “border thinking” (737). By “border
thinking,” Mignolo means “the recognition and transformation of the
hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern
positions” (736-737). Articulated through “silenced and marginalized
voices” (736), critical cosmopolitanism of diversity counters global
designs, namely “cosmopolitanism managed from above” (741). At the
same time, it is distinguished from emancipatory cosmopolitan projects
in the sense that the silenced and marginalized voices actively “are
bringing themselves into the conversation of cosmopolitan projects,
rather than waiting to be included” (736). Critical cosmopolitanism is
therefore an actively “transformative” project from a subaltern
perspective rather than a passively “reformative” one in alliance with