You are on page 1of 20

Article

the International

Aesthetic Communication Gazette


2017, Vol. 79(67) 564583
! The Author(s) 2017
cosmopolitanism: The Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
force of the fold in DOI: 10.1177/1748048517727171
journals.sagepub.com/home/gaz
diasporic intimacy
Nikos Papastergiadis
School of Culture and Communication, The University of
Melbourne, Australia

Daniella Trimboli
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin
University, Australia

Abstract
The contemporary migration experience is mobile, fragmented and mediated, creating a
new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art.
However, studies of transnationalism within media, culture and art scholarship continue
to collapse into binary models, ultimately streamlining the complex cultural translations
that occur in this interface. This essay argues that the notion of aesthetic cosmopolit-
anism allows for a more rigorous account of the diasporic interface, keeping alive the
kinetic element that permeates transnational cultural production.

Keyword
Contemporary art, cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity, cultural theory, diaspora, fold,
migration, transnationalism

Introduction
To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Judith Butler (2006: 21) poses
these questions in order to make her case that bodies matter; more specically, that
bodies come to matter through the performativity of normative discourse that is at
once constraining and compelling. Diasporic art allows us to consider how the
creation of culture is a process of both containment and boundlessness, where
place matters or comes to matter not only in a localised or globalised way,

Corresponding author:
Nikos Papastergiadis, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Level 2, West
Tower, John Medley Building, Parkville Campus, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.
Email: n.papastergiadis@unimelb.edu.au
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 565

but as an ongoing relationship between both local and global concepts of space.
Diasporic artists are tied to normative frameworks of place and culture, but they
are also seized to invert these by the constant interruptions of dierent cultural
signs, exacerbated in an increasingly transnational environment.
The contemporary migration experience is highly mobile, fragmented and
mediated, bringing forth a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads
of media, culture and art. Transnationalism is thus integrated into many recent
studies of these three threads. The new media and cultural studies approach to the
transnational have also examined how global migration transforms the common
practice of the creation of home. For instance, Nikos Papastergiadis in Dialogues
in the Diaspora (1998) and David Morleys Home Territories (2002) examined the
ways in which the home in both its intimate, domestic conceptualisation, and its
broader, political formation as the nation-state, has been destabilised by the emer-
gence of communication technologies. More recently, Mirca Madianou and Daniel
Miller (2012) have examined new forms of familial relationships as a result of migra-
tion and new media, demonstrating that homeliness is now multifaceted, constantly
re-mediated by an evolving polymedia context. Anthropologists have also begun
reassessing the theoretical frameworks for studying culture in this new diasporic
interface. Robin Cohen and Gunvor Jonssons Migration and Culture (2012) brought
together a range of essays seeking to better capture culture in a globalised context;
similarly, George E. Marcus (2015) has argued for new ethnographic methodologies
to map the transnational mobility of cultural forms. This essay draws from the aca-
demic approaches, not simply to illustrate the ways media, culture and art intersect,
but to explore how they enable new forms of cultural meaning that can attend to both
the need for people to express locality and a need for this expression to exist alongside
dierent, even conicting perspectives, in an increasingly inter-connected world.
In particular, this essay uses the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to consider
the folding of place as a creative process, not simply representative or dialogic, and
neither ever fully of the state nor entirely stateless. Folding is an action of bringing
together dierent surfaces. In the fold, dierent lines cross (Deleuze, 2001). The
folds of time and space are what occur in concepts such as diasporic intimacies and
cultural hybridities. However, these articulations of time and space are often pre-
sented without any mediating forces. The 2013 exhibition Safar/Voyage:
Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists, held at Vancouvers
Museum of Anthropology (MOA) helps to elucidate this point. Examining Leuli
Mazyar Lunai Eshraghis 2014 exhibition, Tagiaue,  held at neospace outside
Melbourne, this essay then moves to propose that diasporic art also calls for
new conceptualisations of time. Eshraghis art practice illustrates how time is a
creatively mediated and vacillatory process, involving the folding of past, present
and future into new forms of cultural intimacies. Conceptualising cultural
exchanges in this manner helps to problematise the restrictive binary modalities
that continue to haunt contemporary theorisations of diasporas.
Our article adds to the existing debates on mediated culture in transnational
contexts as it explores the force of the fold. How do ideas that are forged in contexts
566 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

that are distant from each other nd new points of intersection? Why do memories
from remote parts of our lives assume a new form or presence in dierent contexts?
In short, how do things that are incommensurable with each other nd ways to join
together? Concepts such as hybridity and intimacy have taken us closer to the ten-
sion points, as dierent cultural worlds jostle together to form new worldings. These
concepts have generated a productive and armative vision of the process of cul-
tural dierence as well as the benets of mobility in cultural transformation.
However, there is an unresolved problematic in the concept of cultural hybridity.
Even in its most generous and creative articulations, there is always the risk that
hybridity is seen as a mechanism for novelty production. As more hybrids come into
the world, multiples and variations and dierentiations proliferate. This is threaten-
ing to those who also see in this a disruptive dynamic, and in equal measure, thrilling
to those who extol disruption. Hybridity becomes captured by the fears associated
with fragmentation and dispersal. What is missed is how hybridity is also a process
of reconnection, reinvention and regrounding.
Using notions of diasporic intimacy and imagination, this essay argues that the
artistic practice of creating home involves splicing a range of temporal and spatial
cultural experiences together. This practice enables not merely a representation of a
cultural moment, but a kinetic channel through which to consider how other cul-
tural representations and, importantly, other cultural moments, might co-exist.
This argument follows the critical work petitioned by Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2000) and, more recently, Peng Cheah (2016) and Sneja Gunew (2017), who
seek to disrupt the persistent normative frameworks that cultural hybridity and
cosmopolitan philosophy draw on.
What we need to consider in more depth now is a visualisation of the way in
which dierent elements are positioned together. This positioning primarily occurs
in the sphere of the imagination. It is an aective, speculative and creative process
of assembling, stitching and reconguring dierent elements together. However, in
the imagination, there is also a process of folding together, so what appears to be
on the outside interfaces with the inside. Whether this process in the imagination is
represented through the form of a crease, a fan or a helix, it invariably seeks to
demonstrate the bending and splicing of time and space. The bending and splicing
of time and space are therefore the means by which distant elements and dierent
signs are meshed together to produce hybrid subjectivities. The consequences of
this imaginative folding are new perspectives, subjectivities, and symbolic and
material entities. Pathways that are removed from each other in their trajectories
criss-cross together and thereby touch. It is through the fold that both dierences
can coexist and new life sparks.
We thus commence our understanding of the creative forces that arise from
cultural hybridity and diasporic intimacy through the processes of imagination.
It is our contention that such imaginaries yield a worldview that is best evoked
through the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Our task in this article is to go
beyond the binaries and to trace the interconnections between inside and outside,
near and far. The fold will position the imagination at the centre of cosmopolitan
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 567

conceptions. This places us at a new starting point for advancing a post-normative


conception of cosmopolitanism.

Enduring binaries in diaspora studies


Diasporas have traditionally been understood as the forced removal of religious
or ethnic groups from their homelands, and often on the premise that these
groups hope to return to these homelands in the future (Cohen, 1997). Today,
diasporic migration is not as straightforward (Nail, 2015). Some groups of
people move with no intention of returning; some plan to return but then
become settled in their new home, and others become further dispersed
(Papastergiadis, 2000). Many places are thus experiencing what Ien Ang et al.
(2002) and Greg Noble (2009: 47) describe as an evolving hyper-diversity,
whereby diversity itself is diversifying.
The two notions of transnationalism and cultural hybridity are key lenses
through which studies of contemporary diasporas occur. Scholars use these con-
cepts to map the complex translations that take place as a result of new diasporic
ows. However, transnationalism and cultural hybridity studies are persistently
plagued by one or the other modality (Ganguly-Scrase and Lahiri-Dutt, 2013: 3;
Ong, 1999, 2012; Papastergiadis, 2012). Aihwa Ong (1999) illustrates a tendency
within transnationalism studies to position diasporic cultures as either negatively
bound to the state or positively stateless. Her work divides these studies into three
main approaches: (1) United Statescentred migration studies, (2) cultural global-
isation and (3) diaspora studies. Ong argues that the rst highly US-centric cat-
egory has recently shifted its focus from cultural assimilation to the globality of
mobility and border crossings. Of utmost importance to this work are the ways in
which global ows aect the nation-state, particularly in terms of economic the-
ories of labour. As such, the work relies on a world-systems theory of a central
power and periphery cultures, and is comparable to the macro-structuralist model
of migration discussed by Papastergiadis (2000, 2012) and binary migration models
discussed by others (Nail, 2015). The second category, cultural globalisation, is less
interested in economic and political systems as it is with the new forms of cultural
exchanges and imaginaries created by transnationalism. This largely anthropo-
logical work illustrates that the eects of globalisation have not been as detrimental
or homogenising as often claimed, mostly because new cultural characteristics are
always adopted in ways that are place-specic (Ong, 1999: 10). Ongs third cat-
egory, diaspora studies, is inuenced by the work carried out by British cultural
studies scholars Paul Gilroy (1987, 1990, 2000) and Stuart Hall (2000) on African
diasporic cultures. Gilroys and Halls work enables heterogeneous forms of ethnic
culture and identity; however, Ong notes that this approach is less commonly
adopted by Western scholarship, particularly American cultural studies (1999:
12). Instead, this work in diaspora studies often utilises the innocent concept of
the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, cultural border
crossing, and the production of dierence (Ong, 1999: 13). The cultural focus of
568 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

this work thus overlooks the embeddedness of the diasporic subject in power rela-
tions and the interpellation of many migrants as abject.
Former studies have also illustrated the tendency for cultural hybridity studies
to collapse into a similar polarity with state power and restrictive essentialist
claims at one end and cultural uidity and transgression at the other. While cul-
tural exchange involves three levels eects, processes and critical consciousness
theorisations tend to start and stop at the rst level (Papastergiadis, 2012). This
rst level involves the visible eects of dierence within identity as a consequence
of the incorporation of foreign elements (2012: 117). Those carrying out studies of
cultural dierence at this level tend either to celebrate the positive eects that the
new cultural signs have had on a dominant culture, or criticise the way that the
dominant culture has contaminated or subsumed the new cultural signs (2012: 117).
Perhaps by way of tempering the persistent centre/periphery trap created by
thinking diaspora through the nation-state, and in order to better address the issues
created by globalisation, cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important theoretical
framework. Cosmopolitanism is now commonly understood as an idea and an
ideal for embracing the whole of the human community (Delanty, 2009: 20).
Everyone who is committed to it recalls the phrase rst used by Socrates and
then adopted as a motif by the Stoics: I am a citizen of the world. Indeed, the ety-
mology of the word as it derived from cosmos and polites is expressive of the
tension between the part and the whole, aesthetics and politics. In both the
Presocratic and the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, this tension was related to
cosmological explanations of the origin and structure of the universe. In these early
creation stories, the individual comes from the abyss of the void, looks up into the
innite cosmos and seeks to give form to his or her place in the world
(Papastergiadis, 2013). Yet cosmopolitanism is also, in more prosaic terms, a con-
cept for expressing the desire to be able to live with all the other people in this
world. However, the idea has always remained as an ideal, because there is no
unied state of the cosmos that can distribute citizenship to all. Nevertheless, for
many, the ideal does not diminish just because such a cosmos never materialised as
a political institution. They still insist on the necessity and validity of the idea. As a
methodology, cosmopolitanism is usually seen as a state of being that is a product
of moral cultivation (Kant, 1795), a political order that is facilitated by trans-
national institutions (Held, 1995), or a condition that can be extrapolated from
cross-cultural interactions (Werbner, 2006). These perspectives have highlighted
that the process of cosmopolitanisation is not just a utopian fantasy, but is
grounded in social experience (Beck, 2006).
The problems with transnationalism and cultural hybridity studies inevitably
carry over into the eld of cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy (2006) argues that cosmo-
politan discussions tend to oer one of two options: ethnic absolutism (that is, a
rearmation of particular identity and roots) or a radical individualism that makes
collective identity politically irrelevant (2006: 71). The diasporic subject is thus
oered an option of roots or routes (Hall, 2002). The argument for the former
often enters cosmopolitanism via the identity politics work of theorist Charles
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 569

Taylor (1992), who asserts that identities need to be formally delineated in order for
legitimate recognition to occur. This maintains the limitations of the residentialist
model of culture, which maps culture and its particular practices onto a specic
place. This place becomes the ontological site of home and identity, respectively
(Papastergiadis, 2012: 125). Contrastingly, the radical universalism model, or what
Hall (2002: 26) terms hard cosmopolitanism is a post-identity politics position in
which one actively pursues a thorough detachment from his or her cultural roots.
Such a position is taken up by Appiah (2006: 8), who appears to want not only to
shatter the mirror of identity, but smooth over the jagged edges of the shards
(Trimboli, 2015: 483). This desire leads to concerns of an elitist and often highly
Eurocentric view of cosmopolitanism. As Ong (1999: 13) argues, the interest in
exploring how diasporic cultures have shaped the world frequently stems from
scholars who have the social and economic capital required to live a well-travelled,
culturally uid lifestyle. These studies can therefore ignore or, at the least, under-
estimate the nuanced aspects of power and the real and often violent forces that
immobilise so-called mobile subjects.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in Safar/Voyage


There clearly remains a diculty in capturing the fragmentary and uctuating
translations involved in diasporic encounters, despite the many and varied theor-
etical attempts to do so. Artistic interventions can help us to overcome this di-
culty by providing us pathways to horizontal rather than vertical articulations of
knowledge. Culturally hybrid artistic interventions have arguably accelerated since
the onset of globalisation. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) claims that contem-
porary artworks are invariably translating local and global forms, while artists are,
according to Marsha Meskimmon (2011), seen as exemplars of new global selves.
Biennials and festivals are viewed as platforms for bringing ideas from all over the
world into a new critical and interactive framework (Papastergiadis and Martin,
2011). It must be stressed that exploring the force of the fold in aesthetic cosmo-
politanism is not the same as the now-common surveys of the global art world. The
ambitious surveys of artistic developments across the world whether they are
conducted by teams that are distributed across dierent regions (Belting and
Buddensieg, 2009) or directed by a solitary gure who has sought to integrate
emergent trajectories and classify diverse practices into a new hierarchy (Smith,
2011) have stumbled before a fundamental problem: the role of place and trad-
ition in shaping context (Papastergiadis, 2012). To avoid the risk that hybrids are
simply stigmatised by neo-nationalism or co-opted as a novelty producer in neo-
liberal capitalism, it is necessary to frame this approach within an alternative world
view. In this world view, imagination is the starting point for making new worlds.
Cultural hybridity is not a consequence of the moral imperative to love thy neigh-
bour; rather, cultural hybridity is where our imagination begins.
To have a total world view of contemporary art is now impossible. Works are
produced at such a rate and in so many dierent places that no one can ever see
570 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

them as a whole. The events and horizons of contemporary art have also become
resistant to any totalising schema. However, by bringing into closer focus the
elemental terms of globe and cosmos, we can begin an alternative exercise in
imagining the forms of connection and being in the world. A simple distinction
may help. In the most banal uses of globalisation, very little signicance is given to
the key term globe. The world is treated as a at, square surface upon which
everything is brought closer together and governed by a common set of rules.
Globalisation has an integrative dynamic, but a globe without a complex ecology
of practices (Stengers, 2011) would not have a world. A world is more than a
surface upon which human action occurs. Therefore, the process of globalisation is
not simply the closing in of distant forces and coordination between disparate
elements that are dispersed across the territory of the world. As early as the 1950s,
Kostas Axelos made a distinction between mondialisation and globalisation.
He dened mondialisation as an open process of thought through which one
becomes worldly (Elden, 2006). He thereby distinguished between the empirical
or material ways in which the world is integrated by technology and the conceptual
and subjective process of understanding that these ways are inextricably connected
to the formation of a world view. The etymology of cosmos also implies a world-
making activity. In Homer, the term cosmos is used to refer to an aesthetic act of
creating order, as well as referring to the generative sphere of creation that exists
between the Earth and the boundless universe. There is a need to expand our
understanding of art by reconguring the debates on the geopolitics of aesthetics
and to consider the extent to which the local and the global are constantly inter-
penetrating. Cosmos refers to the realm of imaginary possibilities and the systems
by which we make sense of our place in the world. What sorts of worlds are made
in the artistic imaginary?
Let us consider rst of all what the imagination is capable of producing.
We know that imagination is the faculty that produces images. It does not
merely retrieve images. This may sound tautological but as Gaston Bachelard
reminds us, this denition of the nature of imagination has the benet of distin-
guishing it from memory (Bachelard, 1969: xxx). While the function of imagination
is to produce new images and not simply recall the images from the past, never-
theless both the relationship to time and the status of creativity is complicated.
Bachelards useful distinction points to the way that our relationship to images can
make us lean forward and backward in time and can move us across spaces. Yet,
the eect of this imaginary relationship to time and space the status of the image is
also spread across a wide spectrum: a mirror to the world, a critique of reality and a
producer of a cosmos (Papastergiadis, 2016). These three discrete functions refer to
contrasting ideas on what occurs in and through creativity. The mirror function of
creation gives emphasis to the role of mimesis in the representation and transfer-
ence of culture. The role of critique highlights the acts of selection, translation and
transformation, so that the artists attention begins as an identication of some-
thing and through the work of the imagination, there is not just reinstatement but
also a reconguration of its order. Critique is not just a negative dissecting activity,
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 571

or positive correction, but also a metaphoric process of exchange and transform-


ation. Finally, there is the idea of creation as invention ex nihilo. According to the
early work of Cornelius Castoriadis and, again in the more recent writing of Jean-
Luc Nancy, the concept of ex nihilo is distinguished from it theological derivation.
Nancy writes: In creation, a growth grows from nothing and this nothing takes
care of itself, cultivates its growth (2007: 51). The link between art as a world
making activity, and the cosmos of creation is further entwined in this absorbing
passage in which Nancy evokes the function of art (2007: 42) as the most explicit
form of world making activity:

Worldhood . . . is the form of forms that itself demands to be created, that is not only
produced in the absence of any given, but held innitely beyond any possible given: in
a sense, then, it is never inscribed in a representation, and nonetheless always at work
and in circulation in the forms that are being invented. (2007: 52)

The incessant production of worldhood in art is both mysterious in that its appear-
ance is barely perceptible in the work, and banal in that it is through this work that
the appearance of art is recognisable. Nancy stresses that creation is not simply the
representation of a form that is either repressed or overlooked, but rather it arises
from spacing of time. It is exposed in nothing, because it is not made in either a
modality of being, or an operation that secures a specic formation, but only
through the co-constitutive relationship of space and time. Thus, art has the para-
doxical capacity to bring forth the spacing of time, and it is in the taking place of
this creation, that the distinct being of art emerges. In this sense, creation is under-
stood as the originary extroversion of what does not subsist in itself (Nancy, 2006:
199). Nancy thereby postulates that being and even the work of art is not imma-
nent within a process, or even the result of a subjects action, but dependent on a
prior opening of the world to the spacing of time. It is in this sense that creation
comes out of nothing ex nihilo. Creation is neither an essence that originates in
the divine nor is it a consequence of the humans capacity to discover and align
themselves to the external order of the cosmos. Creation is therefore not a process
of mediation, or tapping into an external source of creativity, nor is the process of
opening the world an incorporation of external forces. The emergence of creation
and world are commonly seen as arising ex nihilo, and this force produces a folding
topology in which it constitutes the outside through the inside, and the sense of
presence in the traces of passage. Through this conceptual framework, Nancy
asserts the ubiquity of presence in art. He declares that the production of art is
not driven by a redemptive strategy of recording absence or presence.
Consider the 2013 exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab,
Iranian and Turkish Artists held at the University of British Columbias Museum
of Anthropology (MOA) in Vancouver. MOA houses one of the biggest collections
of First Nations art and cultural artefacts, including those of the Musqueam
people, the traditional owners of the land upon which the museum is situated.
A site of knowledge construction, MOA is an archiving institution that represents
572 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

certain histories ultimately tied to the Canadian nation-state. Unlike many other
museums, however, MOA includes a contemporary art gallery designed to actively
interrogate its own archival practices. As such, the institution engages with the
public about how particular Canadian histories and identities are shaped in local
and global contexts. Safar/Voyage culled contemporary works from Arab, Iranian
and Turkish artists; its aim is to rearticulate the Middle East. The exhibition
provided a space for critical reection on this geographical terrain often neglected
by European art history and institutions. While art from this region is becoming
more globally visible, this visibility still tends to happen in a generalised manner, a
visibility en masse, even though the diaspora from the Middle East comprises many
countries, histories, ethnicities and cultural practices (Daftari, 2013).
In response to questions on the relevance of this exhibition to MOA is the
show about voyeurism or voyage Jill Baird and Anthony Shelton (2013: 2) wrote:

The west coast of Canada may seem worlds apart from the issues, cultures, and artistic
practices of Arab, Iranian, and Turkish artists. Not so. [. . .] The resonances are many,
including the legacy of colonialism, displacement by the state, neo-colonial incursions,
categorization by others, community and conict, beauty and philosophy. For these
reasons Safar/Voyage ts well at the Museum of Anthropology a unique museum
with an interest in engaging in conversations that complicate xed notions of culture,
art, and diversity while also challenging standard exhibition practices.

These aims and practices outlined by Baird and Shelton are not necessarily new.
There is now a growing literature on the way contemporary artists and their
representative organisations act as cultural bridge builders (Meskimmon, 2011).
In this role, they are understood to perform the function of translating the local
into the global, developing ethical standpoints on hybridity, providing examples of
the benets of global mobility and exemplifying an attitude of tolerance and curi-
osity towards the Other. Of course, these positive role models are useful and uplift-
ing. However, we do a disservice to art and thinking if we conne our attention to
these positions and negotiations.
Certainly, these bridging qualities were present in Safar/Voyage, but there was
more to the story. The culture of art and the possibilities in thought are both bigger
and more mercurial. The exhibition unzipped the conventional hierarchy between
local and global in order to better account for the way place matters in cultural
exchanges and types of belonging. MOA took the public on a voyage through and
beyond the Arab diaspora, selecting works that illustrated both the locality of the
diaspora and its displacement and dispersal globally. In the words of the curator,
Fereshteh Daftari (2013: 29), the artists are:

neither xed inside its territories nor permanently diasporic. . .Safar/Voyage wraps
around the globe, scans a map, touches down on cities as varied as Baghdad (Iraq),
Konya (Turkey), and Persepolis (Iran), and moves beyond into private, imaginary
spheres. It creates stages or discursive spaces for questioning identity, reecting on
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 573

modernity, and observing the impact of foreign intrusions and internal turmoil. It
oers glimpses into socio-political issues such as immigration, escape, and diaspora,
and reveals the journey as an ideal for some, an impossibility for others, or as tran-
sient as the idea of life itself when viewed as passage.

An aesthetic cosmopolitanism motivates Daftaris vision. Aesthetic cosmopolitan-


ism involves a series of paradoxical propositions. It is both ephemeral and a recur-
ring feature in the praxis of everyday life. It assumes a form that is both mysterious
and utterly banal. In short, aesthetic cosmopolitanism is a recurring part of the
public imagination that is never articulated in any institutional form. It exists in the
gap between the image and the institutions with which we form the social. Aesthetic
cosmopolitanism can be missed if we assume that it is a product of economic
globalisation or a part of the transnational spheres of political emancipation; it
is in both, but it is not the sum of them, it appears in the joint and transpires
through the force of the fold.
Works featured in Safar/Voyage presented aspects of contradiction and unease,
reecting the aective complexities of transnational mobility. Displacement rests
quietly beside homeliness in Ayman Baalbakis Destination X (2010; re-created for
MOA, 2013). His mixed-media installation centres on an old, run-down car, its
roof piled high with belongings found in and around the home: blankets, chairs, a
pedestal fan, a bike everything but the kitchen sink. In Tarek Al-Ghousseins
untitled self-portrait series (20022003), longing for escape resides within the same
frame as an overwhelming dread of the unknown. A man wearing a keyeh, the
traditional Arab headdress, is photographed walking in front of expansive back-
drops, all of which feature a symbol of mobility: a plane, a cargo ship, a shipping
container, a house in ruins, Jordans vast Dead Sea. This precarious relationship
with movement is also harnessed in Taysir Batnijis Hannoun (19722009), which
uses red pencil shavings to play poetically with the tension between inside and
outside. From a distance, the shavings scattered across the oor of a makeshift
room resemble a eld of poppies, a symbol of Palestinian freedom ghters.
However, this room is raised above the gallery space, preventing people from
going inside. Up close, the shavings come into focus, and the viewers eye is
drawn to the back of the installation, where a photograph of an abandoned
room hangs on the wall. The show notes explained that the photograph depicts
Batnijis studio in Gaza, the artists former home, from which he had been exiled.
The eld of poppies represents a zone he could no longer enter. Viewing the work
creates a visceral conict. As the artist describes on the one hand, viewers are
delighted by the delicacy of these shavings being still and in place; on the other,
they are frustrated by being kept outside, owing to the fragility of the shavings and
the psychological barrier imposed by the platform (Batniji, 2009, cited in Daftari,
2013: 26).
The spaces created in Safar/Voyage were simultaneously accessible and inaccess-
ible, reecting the way diasporic cultures simultaneously experience inclusion and
exclusion within nation-states. Countries such as Canada welcome Arab migrants,
574 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

but this welcome is closely watched and highly precarious any misperformance
will undermine the inclusion. This misperformance need only be carried out by one
or some members of the diaspora for it to aect the entire diasporic population
(Ahmed, 2000; Hage, 1998; Jupp, 2007; Poynting et al., 2004). As such, home is
always both within reach and out of bounds.
The exhibition prompted consideration of the histories and memories contained
within this institutionalised gallery as well as the nation more broadly, but also of
those that could not be contained there. Viewers were constantly moved beyond the
exhibition, not only because of its mobile subject, but also because the artists who
created these pieces carried them beyond their conventional frameworks. At one
level, Batnijis Hannoun represents the artists Gaza-based art practice; but in this
space, it invokes new modalities of cultural translation. His former art practice was
now only accessible through the portal of this new artwork, receding as a space
within a space (Daftari, 2013: 26), becoming the source of a double bind that will
not bind (Spivak, 2012: 335). He reects: Hannoun was thought of [. . .] as an ideal
space, a space of meditation, of dream, an intimate sphere, light, fragile yet impos-
ing at the same time. . .an impenetrable space (cited in Daftari, 2013: 26).
The artists featured in Safar/Voyage clearly transgressed and reconceptualised
national borders out of both desire and necessity. The problem with top-down
models of transnationalism agged by Ong (1999) thus becomes apparent. In
such models, local and global are polarised by universalising capitalist forces.
The globe forms the political economy and the local the site of cultural production,
failing to capture the horizontal and relational nature of the contemporary eco-
nomic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces. . .[and] their embed-
dedness in dierently congured regimes of power (Ong, 1999: 4, original
emphasis). Ong oers a denition of transnationality as an alternative model,
dening it as the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across
space which has been intensied under late capitalism (1999: 4). This denition
emphasises the importance of the prex trans that which moves through space
and across lines and changes their normative nature. Essentially, this is a viewpoint
that stresses the interrelation of state power (or the nation-state) and the cultural
fragmentation and adaptation of diasporic groups.
The trans was beautifully captured by Susan Hefunas Woman Cairo 2011
(2011). When examining this piece in the rst instance, it appeared to be an exem-
plary piece of traditional woodwork. Standing at 2 m  2 m, the work involves
intricately carved patterns and motifs, inspired by the mashrabiya screens of
Cairo. Later, when glancing back at it from the other side of the gallery, the art-
work manifested into something else. From this distance, one could clearly make
out the words: WOMAN 2011 CAIRO. The work cleverly manipulated the audi-
ences viewpoint, so that people could see a dierent formation of the work
depending on where they were standing at the time. Only from particular angles
at a distance, in fact did a linguistic and gendered subject emerge. How might
we think of a local space or subject emerging at a distance, from a global perspec-
tive? What does this spatial repositioning do to our understanding of roots, context
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 575

and connection? Following Alex Kostogriz and Georgina Tsolidis, these questions
allow us to reformulate diaspora

as a socio-spatial formation or a network that binds the local and the global, the
particular and the abstract, us and them, and, in doing so, transcends these binar-
isms through cultural-semiotic innovations that cannot be simply captured within a
bounded space of nation-states and their cultural politics. (2008: 126)

Creating new temporal intimacies: Leuli Eshraghis Tagiaue


An aesthetic cosmopolitanism allows us to renavigate place in a horizontal way, but
it also enables us to rearticulate time in a spatial way, too. This temporal renego-
tiation is experienced in Leuli Mazyar Lunai Eshraghis Tagiaue (Eshraghi, 2014a),
an exhibition held in 2014 in artist-run gallery neospace, located in the Melbourne
suburb of Collingwood. Eshraghi is an emerging Australian contemporary artist,
with both Samoan and Persian cultural ancestry. He writes: My work as a contem-
porary artist means exploring and depicting transnational cultural memories, family
histories, spirituality and connection to place in Oceania and the Middle East. Im
Islander and Persian, but not a Pacic or exotic artist (Eshraghi, 2013: 96). Tagiaue
was Eshraghis tribute to his Persian grandfather and aunt, who were persecuted for
their religious beliefs in 1983. Recently, their graves were desecrated by the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard, prompting Eshraghi to create a temporary resting place, a
liminal space, bearing witness to hidden histories, concealed traumas, and a practice
of inhabiting and honouring silence (Eshraghi, 2014b). The artist blended motifs of
Iranian gabbeh with aspects of Samoan aesthetic forms to create a deeply personal
and hybrid set of works in which past and present Samoan practices were folded into
present-day Melbourne and historical Iran. By drawing on other cultural codes
available to him, Eshraghi was able to enact a transnational form of mourning
and (re)memorialisation, a ritual previously inaccessible to him.
This folding practice resonated with the actual experience of viewing the exhib-
ition, beginning with the act of locating the neospace venue. Like many of
Melbournes artist-run galleries, the space is hidden halfway down a tight, ordinary
laneway, one of many Victorian buildings that resemble the frontage of some-
bodys home. The only distinguishing factor from the surrounding residential
buildings is the small black-and-white sign reading neospace beside its front
door. Next to the sign is a bell with a note to ring it in order to enter. Behind a
heavy door lies a narrow, nondescript space run by a friendly curator (and her
canine companion); a bright, airy room beckons from the other side.
The colour of Eshraghis works, exaggerated by the white walls, was immedi-
ately striking. Moving closer, the pieces had an intricate texture to them, con-
sidered line and brushwork. It was dicult to shake the feeling of witnessing
something underground, on the margins, perhaps even sacred or forbidden. The
location and physical dimensions of neospace instigated this feeling of secrecy, but
576 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

it was further drawn out by Eshraghis artworks within the space. The works
seemed relatively small in relation to the gallery although incredibly vibrant,
they seemed to be almost engulfed by the stark-white walls and concrete oors.
An interesting tension arose: the bold colours and brushstrokes pushed the viewer
towards a strong response, but the comparatively small size of the works stopped
this response from being fully realised. If the works had been bigger, it would have
felt as if one had nowhere to go. Perhaps Eshraghi wanted to make sure we all felt
we had somewhere to go?
What sorts of worlds are forged in the imagination? Can cosmopolitanism start
in the world of aects? The aective impact is set in motion regardless of Eshraghis
intentions, and it is here, in motion, that time becomes something else, moving us
towards what Gayatri Spivak (2012) might view as cultural alterity. The particu-
lar assemblage of cultural signs encountered in Tagiaue created what Svetlana
Boym (1998) denes as diasporic intimacies. Diasporic intimacies are those aects
that sneak into everyday situations and restructure the moment of experience for
migrants and those around them. Boym (1998: 501) describes:

Diasporic intimacy does not promise a comforting recovery of identity through shared
nostalgia for the lost home and homeland. In fact, its the opposite. It might be seen as the
mutual enchantment of two immigrants from dierent parts of the world or as the sense
of the fragile coziness of a foreign home. Just as one learns to live with alienation and
reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the world around and to the strangeness of the
human touch, there comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks
in through the back door, punctuating the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad.

Recently, UK-based performance artist Graeme Miller (2015) pondered what it


would mean to carry out interventionist art anyway; that is, to make an interven-
tion regardless of an audience, frame or reception. Miller is echoing, in many ways,
the common sentiment that art should be removed from, or at least attempt to
escape, the parameters of the institution and associated contemporary art dis-
courses. This escape is not possible. The art is bound to certain norms of address
that it cannot relinquish. No less, and as a rather ironic and delightful residual of
performativity, we nd in the aesthetic encounter unexpected translations.
We might try to contain artistic interventions, carefully selecting certain pieces to
scrupulously manage the performance or the reception, even if, in Millers conjec-
ture, to manage a non-reception. In spite of our best intentions, surprising aspects
always spill over, or carry out anyway, especially in a diasporic context.
This spillage is an aective excess in the manner that Sara Ahmed (2013) and
others have described (see, for example, Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). However,
it is not an excess in the sense that it is entirely beyond discourse and without a
historical trace. Such excesses are spontaneous and slippery, a pang that is both
revealing and concealing. Importantly, they point to an elsewhere a dierent
place and a dierent time, creating a pang seized upon by diasporic artists and
sometimes sneaking into unsuspecting gallery spaces.
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 577

When viewing Eshraghis artworks, one quickly realises that cultural dierence
continues to evolve, that diasporas themselves are becoming diasporic, and that
while the regulative force of the state persists, so, too, does the inclination to resist
its force, to invert its borders, to create new spaces for cultural inclusion. This
inclination begins with the faculty of sensory perception and the process of imagin-
ation. The act of the imagination is a means of creating images that express an
interest in the world and others. Imagination is the means by which the act of
facing the cosmos is given form. Imagination irrespective of the dimensions of the
resulting form is a world-picture-making process. It creates intimacies that push
the boundaries of the normative, of what it means to be this person in this place at
this time.

Conclusion: A fold in the cosmos


The folding motion of the imagination takes us to the matter of the joint the
combinatory and creative capacities of articulation. As the imagination folds
together past and present, near and far, it also creates new conduits for knowledge
formation. Safar/Voyage and Tagiaue spurs the need to move beyond the either/or
modalities that frame diasporic studies, while also oering us ways to navigate such
a shift. Diasporic cultures are both institutionalised and deregulated, global and
local, embedded in state power and also, at times, stateless. The two exhibitions
dier greatly in size, scope and strategy. If neospace hosts the most intimate,
underground exhibition, MOA hosts the most public and nationally symbolic.
Yet, it is impossible to say that any of the featured works are removed from the
nationalistic frameworks that regulate movement and intercultural exchange in
Canada and Australia. Each of the exhibitions illuminates some aspect of macro
mobility management surveillance, control and expulsion. At the same time, we
get a sense of the precariousness and transparency of borders. Large diasporas,
such as the Arab diaspora, quickly fragment and complicate what the West
demarcates as the Middle East. In Safar/Voyage, we glimpse the large scale of
the regions internal movements and its ability to thwart bounded spaces reserved
for the Other. Tagiaue is ultimately linked to this Arab diaspora, and also makes
space for connections with other diasporas, such as the Samoan community in
Australia. The diasporic cultures encountered in Vancouver and Melbourne are
creatively articulated in such a way that transience beyond the local is not only
acceptable, but an everyday process of localisation. We thus see how both place
and time come to matter in ways dependent on the angles at which we approach
them, and dependent on normative qualities that both bind and seize them.
Toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault dened his approach toward the
history of thought by highlighting and exploring the joint articulation of three
elements: forms of possible knowledge, normative frameworks of behaviour, and
potential modes of existence for possible subjects (Foucault, 2011: 3). This pro-
vides a useful way of seeing the interplay between the emergence of particular ways
of seeing the world and the forms of subjectivity that are enabled. It combines both
578 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

a wide lens of the world and a close-up on specic modalities. The aim need not be
to substitute aesthetic cosmopolitanism for normative frameworks, but to consider
how it also arises from the joint articulation of multiple elements. It is now com-
monplace to juxtapose the enlightened cosmopolitan subject against the provincial
subject that is mired in self-enclosed traditions. Such a binary can only further
polarise debate and avoid the more demanding task of seeing how each kind of
subjectivity or mode of knowledge is formed through its own matrix of practices
and possibilities. Hence, to grasp aesthetic cosmopolitanism, it is necessary to go
beyond both an institutional critique that exposes the role played by elites to
restrict the access to power. Similarly, this argument will not proceed by developing
a substitutive agenda whereby models and modes that lurk in the margins are
proposed as the new ideal types. With the example of Foucault before us, we
can shift the emphasis from the formal structures of power, institutional compos-
ition and dominations, to the techniques and procedures by which one sets about
conducting the conduct of others (Foucault, 2011: 4). In this manner, we may also
glimpse the coexistence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism amidst and against the nor-
mative frameworks of behaviour.
Artists develop patterns spatial systems through which each work is consti-
tuted and in each work the order constitutes an emergent worldview. The order in
each work and the system that transpires across the working process can be
described as a cosmos. The term cosmos has multiple meanings that include a
counter-point to the condition of chaos, and an intermediary zone between the
material earth and the boundless space of the universe, a reference to humanity as a
whole, but also as the aesthetic activity of making a space attractive for others. The
act of making a cosmos is welcoming and alluring. It is the kind of strife that
heightens pleasure. In this article, we claim that a cosmos starts in the primal
desire to make a world out of the torsion that comes from facing both the abyss
of the void and the awe that lls our gaze into the eternity of the universe. Second,
it should be obvious that this act of facing is a big bang aesthetic moment, lled
with the horror and delight. It begins in the act of the imagination, which in turn is
the primary means of creating images that express an interest in the world and
others.
If we accept that the imagination irrespective of the dimensions of the resulting
form is a world picture-making process, then we must also turn back to the other
question that we posed at the beginning of this essay: What is the scope of the
cosmos? The cosmos in the Stoic philosophy of cosmopolitanism did not conne
itself to the terrestrial conception of the globe. Thus the idea of the cosmos in
Greek philosophy was not to be confused with the world as earth/geia. It referred
to a celestial circumambient sphere that was between the world and the
unbounded. It was this sphere that was considered to be the source of logos or
creative reason, and it is equally important to note that while the Greeks, in par-
ticular, the Stoics believed that creativity and wisdom came from being attuned to
the cosmos, this source was also represented as a capricious and unpredictable
force. Hence, the dynamic force that sustains the sphere of the cosmos was also
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 579

referred to as artistic re. The cosmos was a fabulation to not only link the
sensory awareness of the innite to the creative exploration of the intimate, but
it was also the most ambitious attempt to deprovincialise human knowledge and
globalise solidarity.
Such an extension and qualication of the idea of the environment can sound
fanciful, but it is also central to the thinking of many contemporary philosophers.
Jacques Ranciere informs us that sensory awareness is always disciplined the gaze
towards the innite may be universal but the way sensation is organised into mean-
ing depends upon the available systems of interpretation. The belief that the mean-
ing and beauty of the cosmos can be found in ordinary objects is, he argues,
a product of the modern period that produced what he calls an aesthetic
regime (Ranciere, 2004). Art, as it is now commonly understood, while resembling
the practices that have existed since the dawn of time, only makes its appearance in
the late 19th century. The aesthetic regime is not just a successive phase, one that
follows from the earlier representative and ethical regimes that placed emphasis on
the function of mimesis and conformity, but it is also a form that both articulates and
nds its own occurrence in the vacillation of the structure and order by which beauty
and truth are constituted. Today art has no prescribed form or style. Its material
existence and institutional context can also be found in dematerialised and o-site
practices. The boundary between production, reception, interpretation and evaluation
are in no way determined along a one-way street. The beautiful and the ugly, the
sacred and the profane are not just placed up and against each other in a competition
for the supreme value and most authentic belief, but rather the squeezing of the space
between the two together announces that the sensorium is no longer directed by xed
rules that dened this hierarchy. Hence, for Ranciere aisthesis is a term that must be
stretched and split as it oscillates between the ideal forms that shape the event of
sensory experience, and the material conditions in which art is encountered.
It is important to stress that this relationship between aisthesis and social con-
text, especially in the folds of diasporic intimacies, is not dened in terms of linear
causality. The relationship between the aesthetic regime and ideality of the
imagination has a complex modality. Artists produce images that come out of
their material conditions, but they are not bound by or the sum of specic historical
forces. It does more than either reect or correct the order of things. Imagination
has a double perspective towards the images in its own historical context, it sim-
ultaneously reassembles the existent elements and also beckons the new. In
Rancieres words: thinking is always rstly thinking the thinkable a thinking
that modies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable (2013: xi).
This production of novelty through an act of hospitality towards that which was
absent or foreign is the point at which the chain of causality is broken and it is the
gap through which surprise, wonder and freedom enters. This extends the function
of imagination beyond an evaluation of political objectives, an expression of ethical
obligations and the veridical realm of normative truth claims. It opens us to the
idea that art creates an order for the world or an alternative mode of being in the
world.
580 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism not only directs our attention to the diasporic con-
tributions, but also develops the understanding of the fold in mediated trans-
national cultures. This approach heightens the redistribution of agency in the
production of meaning and event, and traces the participants capacity to imagine
his or her place in the world as a whole. It combines a critique of the rootlessness
of the cosmopolitan gure, while grounding the jagged forms of cosmopolitanism
that are produced by the displaced and disenfranchised. It allows us to simultan-
eously map the clustering of roots and routes and, while following these connec-
tions, shape-shift between past, present and future, broadening time into a spatial
alterity, full of possibility.

Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

References
Ahmed S (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London:
Routledge.
Ahmed S (2013) Not without ambivalence: An interview with Sara Ahmed on postcolonial
intimacies with P Antwi, S Brophy, H Strauss & Y-D Troeung. Interventions:
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15(1): 110126.
Al-Ghoussein T (20022003) Untitled [photography]. Vancouver: Museum of
Anthropology.
Ang I, Brand J, Noble G, et al. (2002) Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future.
Artarmon NSW: Special Broadcasting Service Corporation.
Appiah KA (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton.
Ayman Baalbakis A (2010) Destination X [medium]. Recreated for Safar Voyage exhibition
2013. Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology.
Bachelard G (1969) The Poetics of Space. Jolas M (Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press.
Baird J and Shelton A (2013) Nomadic aesthetics and the importance of place. In: Daftari F
and Baird J (eds) Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish
Artists. Vancouver, Toronto & Berkeley: D & M Publishers Inc., pp. 27.
Batniji T (19722009) Hannoun [mixed-media installation; colour photography on paper,
pencil shavings]. Recreated for Safar Voyage exhibition 2013. Vancouver: Museum of
Anthropology.
Beck U (2006) The Cosmopolitanism Vision. Cronin C (Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press.
Belting H and Buddensieg A (eds) (2009) The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and
Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Bourriaud N (2009) The Radicant. Gussen J and Porten L (Trans.). New York: Lukas &
Sternberg.
Boym S (1998) On diasporic intimacy: Ilya Kabakovs installations and immigrant homes.
Critical Inquiry 24(2), Intimacy (Winter, 1998): 498524.
Butler J (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London & New York:
Verso.
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 581

Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University


Press.
Cheah P (2016) What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham &
London: Duke University Press.
Cohen R (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Cohen R and Jonsson G (2012) Migration and Culture. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Daftari F (2013) Passport to elsewhere. In: Daftari F and Baird J (eds) Safar/Voyage:
Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists. Vancouver, Toronto &
Berkeley: D & M Publishers Inc., pp. 831.
Delanty G (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deleuze G (2001) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Continuum.
Elden S (2006) Introducing Kostas Axelos and the world. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 24: 639642.
Eshraghi LML (2013) Trueno tropical: Faititili A Motu: Tropical thunder. Conversation

between L Eshraghi & L Quintanilla. Writing from Below 1(2): 91100.
Eshraghi LML (2014a) Tagiaue.  Collingwood, Victoria: neospace gallery.
Eshraghi LML (2014b) Tagiaue.  Available at: http://leulieshraghi.com/tagiaue/ (accessed 4
October 2015).
Foucault M (2011) The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France
19821983. Gros F (ed), Burchell G (Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ganguly-Scrase R and Lahiri-Dutt K (2013) Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific
Perspectives. Farnham, UK: Routledge.
Gilroy P (1987) There Aint No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Nation. London: Unwin Hyman.
Gilroy P (1990) The end of anti-racism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 17(1): 7183.
Gilroy P (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Gilroy P (2006) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. New York: Routledge
University Press.
Gunew S (2017) The World at Home: Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan
Mediators. London: Anthem Press.
Hage G (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.
Sydney: Pluto Press.
Hall S (2000) Conclusion: The Multi-cultural question. In: Hesse B (ed.) Un/settled
Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London: Zed Books,
pp. 209241.
Hall S (2002) Political belonging in a world of multiple identities. In: Vertovec S and Cohen
R (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 2531.
Hefuna S (2011) Woman Cairo 2011 [wood and ink]. Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology.
Held D (1995) Democracy and the new international order. In: Archibugi D and Held D
(eds) Cosmopolitanism Democracy: An Agenda for a New World. Cambridge, UK:
Polity.
Jupp J (2007) The quest for harmony. In: Jupp J and Nieuwenhuysen J (eds) Social
Cohesion in Australia. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 920.
Kant I (1795) Perpetual peace. In: Reiss H (ed) (1991) Political Writings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 116130.
582 the International Communication Gazette 79(67)

Kostogriz A and Tsolidis G (2008) Transcultural literacy: Between the global and the local.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society 16(2): 125136.
Marcus GE (2015) The relevance of ethnography today: Is it still small? Critical? Beautiful?
Possible? RUPC #5. Melbourne: Research Unit in Public Cultures at The University of
Melbourne and Surpllus.
Meskimmon M (2011) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London:
Routledge.
Miller G (2015) Un-called for: Staging place, time and situation. PhD Creative Practice
Seminar, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, Southbank,
Victoria, 24 September.
Nail T (2015) The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy J-L (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Nancy J-L (2007) The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Raffoul F and Pettigrew D
(Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Noble G (2009) Everyday cosmopolitanism and the labour of intercultural community.
In: Wise A and Velayutham S (eds) Everyday Multiculturalism. Hampshire and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 4665.
Ong A (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Ong A (2012) What Marco Polo forgot: Contemporary Chinese art reconfigures the
global. Current Anthropology 53(4) (August 2012): 471494.
Papastergiadis N and Martin M (2011) Art biennales and cities as platforms for global
dialogue. In: Giorgi L, Sassatelli M and Delanty G (eds) Festivals and the Cultural
Public Sphere. London: Routledge, pp. 4562.
Papastergiadis N (1998) Dialogues in the Diaspora. London: Rivers Oram Press.
Papastergiadis N (2000) The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and
Hybridity. Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Papastergiadis N (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Papastergiadis N (2013) The Cosmos in aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Yishu Journal of
Contemporary Chinese Art 12(3): 1025.
Papastergiadis N (2016) Space/time: Matter and motion in on Kawara. Afterall: A Journal
of Art, Context and Enquiry Spring/Summer: 127135.
Poynting S, Noble G, Tabar P, et al. (2004) Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab
Other. Sydney: The Sydney Institute of Criminology.
Ranciere J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics. Rockhill G (Trans.). London: Continuum.
Ranciere J (2013) Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Paul Z (Trans.).
London: Verso.
Museum of Anthropology (MOA, 2013). Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab,
Iranian, and Turkish Artists. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 20 April15
September 2013.
Seigworth GJ and Gregg M (2010) An inventory of shimmers. In: Seigworth GJ and Gregg
M (eds) Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 125.
Smith T (2011) Contemporary Arts: World Currents. London: Laurence King Publishing.
Spivak G (2012) An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Papastergiadis and Trimboli 583

Stengers I (2011) Cosmopolitics II. Bononno R (Trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota University


Press.
Taylor C (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Trimboli D (2015) Memory magic: Cosmopolitanism and the magical life of Long Tack
Sam. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 29(3): 479489.
Werbner P (2006) Understanding vernacular cosmopolitanism. Anthropology News 47(5):
711.

You might also like