Figures of the Cosmopolitan Condition: The Wanderer, the Outcast, the Foreigner

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, I go through a series of figures embodying the cosmopolitan condition seen as a banal, everyday experience of migrants in urban borderlands. Using ethnographic accounts of migrants’ itineraries and social encounters, the chapter explores a series of urban spaces which are social “borderlands” and their inhabitants: neighbourhoods, squats, camps. Through stories and descriptions of connections and exploitation, settlement and displacement, it investigates the existence of an everyday or banal cosmopolitism experienced by Sudanese, Eritrean, Sri Lankan, Afghan or German dwellers of Beirut, Paris, Patras, and New York. It describes the cosmopolitan condition in the sense of a lived experience, an experience of sharing the world, no matter how inegalitarian and violent this may be.