Cosmopolitan Modernisms / Global Modernities

Catalog description

This course studies cosmopolitanism, diaspora, displacement, and cultural hybridity in the context of the postcolonial and globalized 20th and 21st centuries. The displaced, and often dissident protagonist leaves home in search of cultural, political, or racial freedom abroad. This encounter often produces a deep contradiction in the identity and experience of the emigrant (Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga). In the second part of the 20th century, the time of global flows, the cosmopolitan aspirations of the traveling modernist will change into the search for the survival of the contemporary migrant and the refugee, as authors Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid among others, portray in their work.