At Home in the World

Timothy Brennan is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

• Acknowledgments Introduction Claims to Global Culture: America Abroad Du Bois's Color and Democracy and the "Red" Color Line The Public face of the "Third-World" Writer States of Theory and the Absence of States The Contradictions of Binary Thinking: Cosmopolitanism and Method Nizan Fights the Watchdogs: The Obvious Must Be Explained Cultural Studies and Colonial Progress Anna Deveare Smith, or Authenticity without Apologoes The Culture of the Transnational Corporation If the Nation Is Dead, Why Doesn't Henry Kissinger Know It? George Orwell as Julia Kristeva: The 1950s in the 1990s Mangerial Training Manuals: What Is National in the Transnational Gatt Poetics and the Traveling Critic: Cosmopolitanism and the Explorer's Eye The Sublimation of Poverty: New York's Lower East Side "Marcos" and Cortazar: Two Alternatives to Contemporary Travel Narrative The Literary in the Light of the Nobel Prize: Morrison and Walcott A Few Thoughts on What the Postcolonial Leaves Out 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-Winning in Desperate Times by Loving What Is James's Art Exceptional Americanism and the U.S. Mass Culture Debate 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 Conclusion Notes Index

Timothy Brennan first contributed to [the] controversies [surrounding cosmopolitanism] in his trenchant study, Salman Rushdie and the Third World. What interested him at the time was how such writers as Derek Walcott became fashionable by virtue of a ‘cosmopolitanism’ which made them ambiguous witnesses… Brennan’s formidable new book, At Home in the World, elaborates this diagnosis, extending the account of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to include the internationally informed academics, journalists, and policy advisors who are (in his view) stifling the message of liberation movements and clearing the way for a globalism, which is American capitalism writ large. The idea that Disney and McDonald’s are taking over the world is not exactly novel, but Brennan gives a nuanced account of globalization and he has fresh, provocative things to say about the role of intellectuals in the New World Order. Most of those engaged in postcolonial criticism would consider themselves radical, but Brennan contends that they advance the interests of Western pluralism when they celebrate ‘hybridity’ or ‘problematize’ situations which are exploitive.