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Resonating with Cohen’s “plural loyalties,” Appiah’s notion of
“partiality” values particular human lives and acknowledges the
diversity of social relationships (2005: 237). Taking a step further than
Cohen, who simply states that “nations should be conceived as
mediators between the person and humanity” (1992: 480), Appiah
asks if national partiality is possible and how it might help modify
illiberal universalism that, unconcerned with human particularity,
carries “a uniformitarian agenda” (2005: 220). Appiah attempts to
reconcile cosmopolitanism and patriotism by suggesting a model of
“cosmopolitan patriotism” (237). According to Appiah, cosmopolitan
patriotism is tenable because nationalism, as complicated as it can be, is
at once as universal as cosmopolitanism and as local as any human
particularity. Even though it is usually assumed to oppose
cosmopolitanism, “nationalism, too, has been charged with effacing
local partialities and solidarities . . . with being a force for
homogeneity” (Appiah, 2005: 239). Cosmopolitan patriots are
therefore always “
partial
cosmopolitans” (242; emphasis original),
who, as citizens of the world, “can make the world better by making
some local place better, even though that place need not be the place of
[their] literal or original citizenship” (241).
Shamsie could be considered a partial cosmopolitan in the sense
that her
Offence
presents cosmopolitanism as an ideal at the global
level, but, in achieving the goal, she stays attached, in varying degrees,
to different dimensions of the local. My use of the term, “the local,”
broadly includes the nation, culture, and religion, although, as Appiah
has pointed out, “the local” has been interpreted quite narrowly by
some as human particularity and thus seen as the opposite of the
national. In light of the complexity and ambivalence of the local, which
is itself arguably fluid in terms of its scope and definition, Shamsie’s
Offence
shows that the cosmopolitan-local relationship is not a
dichotomy but rather “a continuum” that involves varying degrees of
attachment to the local (Roudometof, 2005: 127). For example,
Pakistan, Muslim culture, and Islam can all be considered local fields,
but, to some Muslims,
ummah
underscores a form of community