contend that for the subordinated groups of the world the way out is not to pursue the
mandate of liberation from the global structure through “delinked alternatives”:
Any proposition... defined in racial, religious, or regional terms, “delinked” from Empire,
shielded from its powers by fixed boundaries, is destined to end up as a kind of ghetto.
Empire cannot be resisted by a project aimed at a limited, local autonomy. We cannot move
back to any previous social form, nor move forward in isolation. Rather, we must push
through Empire to come out the other side... Empire can be effectively contested only on its
own level of generality and by pushing the processes that it offers past their present
limitations. We have to accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally.
Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire with counter-Empire. (2000:
206-7)Brilliant as this argument sounds, it fails to take into cognizance the fact that the
foundations of Empire which have bred the kind of exilic experience by which the
postcolonial world is hemmed in today have always privileged fixed boundaries by which
privileges accrued to some parts to the detriment of others. It thus renders suspect the
viewpoint that subscribes to the notion of perpetual rootlessness in cosmopolitanism, a
contemporary mantra and smoke screen for exile. Cosmopolitanism is read this way not
least because of the grand design to accept it at its face value, when in actuality its
alignment with globalization is geared towards the consolidation of the already existing
boundaries and the tales of inclusion and exclusion that go with them. It explains why,
for instance, the imperative of return rings through Anyidoho’s EarthChild , and for all its
celebration of migrancy, the question of return remains constant in Ojaide’s When it no
Longer Matters Where You Live. In Mapanje’s The Last of the Sweet Bananas , the
continual insertion of concerns about home also dramatizes this view. The subtext of the
foregoing is that there is more to cosmopolitanism than engaging in endless migrancy.
Therefore, while not rejecting outright the suggestion that resistance to Empire should be
“delinked”, it is nevertheless important for the postcolonial world to redesign the domain
of cosmopolitan practice in a manner that will make it actively involved in the
determination of the over-determined global ethos. In other words, as Gerard Delanty
(2006:27) has argued, because “cosmopolitanism refers (in actuality) to the multiplicity
of ways in which the social world is constructed in different modernity... the very notion
of cosmopolitanism compels the recognition of multiple kinds of cosmopolitanism”. A