Racial Violence and the Cosmopolitan City

In this paper I argue that cosmopolitanisms, as visions of living with difference, and race and racisms, as political regimes of subjection and subjectification, are mutually constitutive. Although scholars have made similar claims regarding earlier versions of cosmopolitanisms, developed largely from the work of Immanuel Kant, recent proponents have conceptualized their renewed formulations, detached from Eurocentric histories and newly expanded to include the migrant, refugee, and subaltern, as promissory visions of conviviality and often as an antidote to racisms. Despite efforts to expand cosmopolitanisms to include racial subjects previously excluded, these visions may be productive of new, renewed, and changing forms of racial subjection. Specifically, I argue that racisms are an immanent and organizing logic manifest in the production of racial heterogeneities and differentiations upon which cosmopolitical visions depend and also generative of the cosmopolitan outlook these encounters are thought to require. To situate and develop these claims, I open with a 1907 sketch published in the Illustrated London News which depicts Vancouver, Canada both as “the most cosmopolitan city in the world” (Begg, 1907, page 476) and as a site of anti-Asian violence. Approaching this image both as a historical example and as an opening for critical inquiry, I untangle the constitutive relations between racisms and cosmopolitanisms through the labor demands of global capitalism and in the cultivated indifference that is frequently identified as the hallmark of a cosmopolitan disposition. While the conjoined forces of colonialism and capitalism effectuated the historico-material basis of ethnoracial difference, what some have termed an ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’, these conditions did not lead to conviviality alone. Rather, in racially charged colonial Vancouver, the indifference that Europeans putatively expressed in their encounters with migrants from China, Japan, and later India, commonly erupted into racial enmity and violence. What might this historical example afford to contemporary discussions regarding the present and future of the new cosmopolitanisms?

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