Introduction 7Applying some of the key aesthetic precepts of the field, Anderson
examines a range of nineteenth-century novels, including those of
Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bront ë , and argues that
they employ literary strategies of detachment and noncommitment
that assert cosmopolitan individualism. Pursuing this line of argu-
ment, she maintains that through the “cultivation of detachment
[and the.. .] aspiration to a distanced view,” the cosmopolitan can
be liberated from the normative pressures of society that suppress an
independent creative spirit and a sense of individuality.^16
This idea of individua l dista nce facilitating cosmopolita n vision is
not only to be found at the “aesthetic end” of the field. For Bryan S.
Turner, asserting “distance,” or what he also calls “ironic distance,”
from one’s social or cultural context is also an essential step toward
gaining the kind of universal vision that gives cosmopolitanism its
sociopolitical valency. “The principal component of cosmopolitan
virtue,” he argues, “is irony, because the understanding of other cul-
tures is assisted by an intellectual distance from one’s own national
or local culture.”^17 Such ironic distance has significant sociopoliti-
cal bearing because it “produces a human skepticism towards grand
narratives of modern ideologies.”^18 Rebecca Walkowitz echoes
Turner in his contention that aesthetic strategies of perceptual and
attitudinal distance can be of sociopolitical significance. However,
unlike Turner, Walkowitz approaches this matter from a literary
perspective (again, further toward the aesthetic end of the field).
She endorses Anderson’s aesthetic contention that the cosmopolitan
should reserve the choice not to advocate political allegiances; but
she also claims, à la Turner, that a distanced view has the capacity to
be politically engaged.
Describing what she calls “critical cosmopolitanism” (a term also
used by Walter Mignolo in his more sociopolitically oriented inter-
vention),^19 Walkowitz maintains that the field’s aesthetic priorities of
eclecticism and distance can be directly linked to cosmopolitanism’s
sociopolitical preoccupations in that they stem from “an aversion to
heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of episte-
mological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume
a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen.”^20
By connecting cosmopolitanism’s aesthetic (particularly literary)