Imperfect Cosmopolitans: Representations of Responsibility and Hospitality in Contemporary Middle Eastern Literatures, Film, and Art.

9798607310530

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019

1 online resource (227 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

The fundamental moral framework of cosmopolitanism, or “world citizenship,” encourages us to imagine a shared humanity and to welcome strangers with the same degree of openness and respect with which we would treat our own kin. As the world has been reshaped by war crimes, radical nationalism, mass migration, environmental crises, and global poverty in the past century, cosmopolitanism and its sine qua non, hospitality, have re-entered the lexicon of cultural studies as a domain of contested politics and ethics. Today, the ideas of extending hospitality to strangers and feeling responsible for them are among the most discussed political and ethical subjects in local, national, and international affairs. Our current moment demands a constant switching between different registers of responsibility to realize what the outside world might need from us and how these needs can be met without giving up our local affiliations.Imperfect Cosmopolitans analyzes the limitations of newly emerging theories of cosmopolitanism by examining how the cross-cultural Middle East re-imagines traditional forms of hospitality, tolerance, and openness in aesthetic works that feature unprivileged or disadvantaged cosmopolitans. Drawing on critical studies on cosmopolitanism and hospitality by late twentieth-century philosophers and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Anne Dufourmantelle, Judith Still, and Fuyuki Kurasawa, this dissertation focuses on aesthetic works that place the moral dilemmas of cosmopolitanism at the center of their representations of interpersonal relations. These works include Yasar Kemal’s 1955 novel Memed, My Hawk, Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), Zafer Senocak’s post-1989 novel Perilous Kinship, Fatih Akin’s 2007 film The Edge of Heaven, and artwork by the Eurasian art collective Slavs and Tatars. Investigating the politics of representing responsibility and hospitality in these works, this dissertation argues that the most productive way to think about cosmopolitanism is to look at transformative encounters between strangers who try to negotiate the political, social, and moral tensions of multiple belongings. In addition to analyzing exchanges of hospitality in fictional domestic spaces, this study compares liminal and semi-private spaces where decisions about hospitality and hostility towards strangers take place: nomadic tents, car interiors, museum galleries, bookstores, etc. It also addresses the popular appropriations of cosmopolitanism with respect to characters, authors, directors, and artists, provoking further discussions of the uses and the misuses of the term in contemporary critical parlance. Together, these inquiries propose an account of how literary and artistic representations of overlapping responsibilities, especially in the context of the late twentieth century’s renewed attention to cosmopolitanism(s), can foster textual and effective solidarities among humans who struggle with moral conundrums of cosmopolitanism across time and space.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 15, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Comparative Literature.