Grassroots cosmopolitics

Critical notes on a ‘cosmopolitan Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID7559558
AuthorsThomas Fouquet (0000-0002-6383-7858, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Institute of African Worlds (IMAF), Paris, France, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume16
Issue2
Pages219-230
Publication date2018-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1472-5843 • E-ISSN: 1472-5851
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14725843.2018.1452139
OpenAlexW2803221651
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited46

What is really at stake when talking about a 'cosmopolitan Africa'? How does such a questioning articulate with the meta-narratives that, over history, have depicted this continent as en entity locked on itself and mainly characterized by stagnation rather than motion? Finally, how to engage with the political dimensions resorting to cosmopolitan aspirations and expressions in Africa, among everyday people rather than elites, and in contrast with the Eurocentric 'abstract universalism' that frequently impregnates narratives on cosmopolitanism? Drawing on 15 years of anthropological research among young Senegalese women who frequent daily the Dakar by Night, this paper aims at raising issues resorting to such grassroots cosmopolitics. In this view, I stress the need to focus on cosmopolitanism as a social practice that carries inherent critical if not political dimensions, in line with the harshness of local living conditions but also with the distortion of power balance at a global level, that is, describing a critical cosmopolitanism by contrast. In a same line, cosmopolitanism is introduced first as a posture, and more broadly as a specific field of experiences from which nobody is to be excluded a priori, irrespective of economical, social, political and symbolical power

Cosmopolitanism · Grassroots · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Universalism · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · African Studies and Ethnography · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy

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