Bananas when he cautions and protest againsts shabby treatment to a fellow immigrant
for whatever drives her from home to Britain is not unconnected with the “nameless
wars” from Britain cannot be exonerated. He therefore cautions:
So, define her separately,
She’s not just another
Castaway washed up your
Rough seas like driftwood (203)If transnationalism espouses a form of simultaneity of multiple nationalities by
demonstrating allegiance to two or more national spaces including the home country of
origin, cosmopolitanism on its part, departs from transnationalism in the way it advocates
discontinuity of thoughts and ties to the nation-state. Put another way, for the often touted
cosmopolitan aesthetic, the allegiance to home is replaced with allegiance to the world. It,
therefore, drives a wedge between what is called “the home” and “the world”. When
conceptual thoughts are further volunteered on cosmopolitanism, the normative
impression is that, of all forms of border-crossing-inflected ways of living in
contemporary times, cosmopolitanism remains the most voluntary. Cosmopolitans are
therefore different from, say, refugees and other similarly identified subjectivities in the
sense that it is a way of life that is adopted out of choice and should not feature in the
context of the coercive forms of migrancy with which the world is typified today.
Nevertheless, we need to interrogate the assumptions of cosmopolitanism as perhaps the
most complex form of migrancy in order to come to terms with the reality it holds
especially for the postcolonial world.
Just as its claims are contentious (Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider 2006:2), the history of
cosmopolitanism remains as contested, which is why each theorist chooses what he
considers a suitable periodization model for the take-off of discussion on the concept. As
I argue in Chapter Three, cosmopolitanism is as old as the history of world civilization
which of course is why we must acknowledge that it must have definitely begun with
Egyptian civilization. Not least because some of the earliest theories and figures of
classical thought originated from Egypt by the virtue of the training of the highly rated
thinkers, professionals and theorists from Egyptian universities (Mathew Ashimolowo