At home in the world : cosmopolitanism now / Timothy Brennan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Claims to Global Culture: America Abroad. Du Bois's Color and Democracy. The Public Face of the "Third-World" Writer. States of Theory and the Absence of States -- 2. Cosmopolitanism and Method. Explaining the Obvious: Paul Nizan. Cultural Studies and Colonial Progress. Anna Deveare Smith, or Authenticity -- 3. The Culture of the Transnational Corporation. If the Nation Is Dead, Why Doesn't Henry Kissinger Know It? Julia Kristeva as George Orwell: The 1950s in the 1990s. Managerial Training Manuals: Transnational Nationalism -- 4. Cosmopolitanism and the Explorer's Eye. The Sublimation of Poverty: New York's Lower East Side. GATT Poetics and the Traveling Critic. The Literary in the Light of the Nobel Prize. A Few Thoughts on What the Postcolonial Leaves Out -- 5. Cosmopolitanism's American Base: C. L. R. James in New York, 1950. Socialist Desire: Ernst Bloch in America. Cosmopolitanism, America, and the Cold War. The Struggle for Happiness. James's Art.

Exceptional Americanism -- 6. The World Cuban: Alejo Carpentier and Cuban Popular Music. From Paris to Havana. Ethnographic Surrealism: The Red and the Black. Salsa and the Cuban Image. Reading Mass Culture through Youth. The Indigenous and the In-Between.

From every quarter we hear of a new global culture, postcolonial, hybrid, announcing the death of nationalism, the arrival of cosmopolitanism. But under the drumbeat attending this trend, Timothy Brennan detects another, altogether different sound. Polemical, passionate, certain to provoke, his book exposes the drama being played out under the guise of globalism.

A bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism, it also takes note of the many countervailing forces acting against globalism in its facile, homogenizing sense. A critical call to arms, At Home in the World summons intellectuals and scholars to reinvigorate critical cultural studies. In stripping the false and headless from the new cosmopolitanism, Brennan revitalizes the idea.