The problematic non-Western cosmopolitanism in Africa today

This chapter dwells on the fact that the debate on cosmopolitanism has long focused on the expansion of Western hegemony around the world, particularly through the pretext of universalism. Very little critical attention has been paid to what this cosmopolitanism was really made of, or to how far such cosmopolitanism could wear a local face. Chan rejects this stance in favour of other potential paradigms of cosmopolitanism. He argues that the emergence of postcolonial thought sounded the death-knell for the conventional approach to cosmopolitanism, as this thought relies on both a critique of Western hegemony and the defence of difference and cultural pluralism. Chan deals with the challenges posed by new forms of cosmopolitanism arising through the relationship between China and Africa. Being of Chinese origin and having lived in Africa for several years, Chan has first-hand experience of both local and global cosmopolitanisms. He thinks that local cosmopolitanism emerges when the global is appropriated and refracted in local terms that not only make the global sympathetically operational, but does so desirably with such local richness that, in its refraction, the global is itself changed. As a result, a kind of equity, or at least equal exchange, is expected to emerge from such a process. Chan describes various contexts illustrating this postulate including, for example, the incidence of kung fu movies in African slums, the ambiguities of the “Rhodes Must Fall” South African student movement, the impact of Confucian philosophy (guanxi concept) in China’s diplomacy towards Africa, and the plurality of African cultures and their mutual interactions, to mention but a few. According to Chan, speaking or writing about cosmopolitanism requires a full understanding of the places (China or African countries) to which we refer. In any event, we should speak at least of equality. Such a postulate implies not imposing our romanticism, our desiderata as elements that deny equality between ‘them’ and ‘us’

Cosmopolitanism · Political science · Politics · African history and culture studies · History · Law

• Kasanda, A. and Hrubec, M

  Jan Svoboda•Human Affairs•2024

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