The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Ira Raja’s class Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism (summer semester 2022), which explored a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective on cosmopolitanism whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.

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Due to globalization, translation as a part of intercultural communication has become a key mediator which has increased exponentially. Furthermore, globalization with its geopolitical inequalities has turned English into a lingua franca, which results in the need of non L1-speakers to constantly translate themselves into English. Until recently, the focus of studies lay on the circulation of goods and information, more than the productive conditions which made such circulation possible. But the assumption that audiences can automatically receive global texts, fails to account for the varying translation strategies that result in very different texts.

Bielsa claims that in a cosmopolitan outlook, translation provides a means of conceptualizing and of empirically analysing types of interaction by increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project like global democracy, social movements, borders and human rights (394). Moreover, cosmopolitan competence forces people to develop bridge-building and translation by broadening their own horizon to different possibilities and capacities, which leads to the opportunity to see oneself from the perspective of people with a culturally different background. In addition to that, translation plays a central role in cosmopolitan imagination, which identifies possible translation and opens up space of discourse (Delanty, “The cosmopolitan imagination” 43). The project of translating cosmopolitanism for non-western cultures is itself questionable given the European origins of what counts as cosmopolitan today. This calls attention “to forms of critical cosmopolitanism through strategies that ‘involve to varying degrees not just conceptual translation, but also cultural translation (Bielsa 395).

There are different definitions of translation given by Beck and Delanty: While Beck claims that translation is “the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others, Delanty defines it as “the possibility of incorporating the perspective of the Other into one’s own culture” (Beck; Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination 13).

Translation can be approached in two different ways by ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ texts. The first one makes texts more familiar by “making a translated text read fluently, as if it was an original, thus rendering translation invisible and transparent”, while the second one exoticizes texts by disrupting “the cultural codes of the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text” (Bielsa 396).

Current notions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism are perceived with significant misunderstandings and confusions. The use of a narrowed down concept of artistic cosmopolitanism teaches us about engagement with and openness to other cultures and broadens imaginary spaces for living with different cultures.

Other than that, issues in periodizing cosmopolitanism can be found. Bielsa defines it as a “problematic distinction between the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of early to high modernity, dominated by an essentialist image of ethno-national uniqueness, and that of late modernity, when more rigid forms of national culture are replaced by fluid conceptions” (397). Furthermore, the views of production and circulation must be taken into account when talking about artistic cosmopolitanism. This leads to an open conversation between the global and the local.

In conclusion, Bielsa offers three implications for social theory of a notion of cosmopolitanism as translation, initiating with the claim that “translation introduces a conception that points towards a genuinely postuniversalist cosmopolitanism”, which contrasts with the perspective centred on human rights (401). Translation does not appeal to a universal language like for instance law does. A ‘third language’ as a neutral basis between originals and translation does not exist. Secondly, “translation offers a perspective centred on the materiality of writing that does not succumb to the dominant emphasis on the global transmission of contents”, which means that the focus of a perspective does not lie on circulation, but on the production of global transmissibility (Bielsa 402). Thirdly, Bielsa argues that “translation can offer an approach to interculturality and to the interaction between different modernities beyond notions of multiculturalism” by providing a model for approaching the dialogue between cultures (402).

Sascha Ebing

Works Cited

Beck, U. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Polity Press, 2006.

Bielsa, Esperanca. “Cosmopolitanism as Translation.” Cultural Sociology, 2014, pp. 392–406.

Delanty, G. “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, 2006, pp. 25–47.

—. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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