On Monday evening, I’ll speaking at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on a topic that should interest students of New York’s literary, cultural, social, and political histories.
I’m part of a panel that includes the intellectual historian David Hollinger (UC Berkeley), whom I quoted in Wednesday’s opening Writing New York lecture, and the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago). The panel is called “Cosmopolitanism or Multiculturalism” and its part of an ongoing series called “The Cosmopolitan Idea.”
David Hollinger is the author of Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, which has been important influence of my recent work on emergent U.S. literatures. His recent articles include:
“Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism, Universities Amid the Force Fields of Capital.” from Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (Madison, 2006), 77-105, 202-204.
“Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future” Callaloo 31.4 (2008), 1033-1037.“Religious Ideas: Should They be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?” Representations #101 (2008), 144-154.
“Separation Anxiety,” London Review of Books, January 24, 2008, 15-18. [Review of Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God].
“Rethinking Diversity,”California Magazine (July/August 2006), 47-49.
“From Identity to Solidarity,”Daedalus (Fall 2006), 23-31.
Walter Benn Michaels is the author of a book that was de rigueur when I was in graduate school, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. His most recent book is The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which argues that multiculturalism has had the effect of reassuring neoliberals of their progressive politics, while masking the deepest problem within U.S. society: economic inequality. He’s written about this subject more recently in a bookforum piece on the failure of the contemporary U.S. novel to tackle the issue of social inequality and a London Review of Books article on a recent study sponsored by the Runnymede Trust called Who Cares About the White Working Class?
The panel takes pace at 19 Washington Square North, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., with a reception to follow. Readers of this blog are warmly invited to attend.
Here’s a description of the session:
“After the “culture wars” of the 1980s, the triumph of multiculturalism had beneficial effects on educational policy and public discourse. In promoting the value of cultural diversity, multiculturalism led to the recovery of neglected histories, artistic traditions, and a greater sense of toleration for various kinds of difference. But along with the gains came costs, including increasingly rigid ideas about identity politics and few critiques that crossed cultural boundaries. Cosmopolitanism may offer an alternative approach to difference, in which difference is viewed as an opportunity, rather than a problem that needs to be solved.”
I suspect, however, given the nature of both Hollinger’s and Michaels’s recent work, that we’ll be talking a lot about class difference and inequality. And I’ll be trying to talk about why class difference is a different kind of difference that demands a different approach.
Meanwhile, you can find information about future “Cosmopolitan Ideal” sessions here.
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