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WHEN JAMES CLIFFORD COINED THE PHRASE "DISCREPANT cosmopolitanisms," he had in mind the "cultures of displacement and transplantation that are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction" (108). Because these histories of interaction are frequently the same ones that, at least indirectly, underpin the cosmopolitan freedom and prosperity of affluent metropolitan centers, the study of discrepant cosmopolitanisms often involves an understanding of how different sites in the global economy are related to each other. As Michael Davidson puts it, a bit more bluntly than Clifford, "the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globe trotting business man or wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant laborer, sex worker, and political exile" (735). In this essay I want to think about how contemporary fiction encounters this issue. Recent scholarship on the relationship between literature and globalization has shown us that the novel has never really been securely bound by narrow conceptions of national or regional space. With that in mind it is harder than ever to present terms like "cosmopolitan," "global," or "transnational" as indexes of a break with an older conception of literary culture. Still, the way in which literary studies uses these terms often assumes that they have a normative dimension that has only recently become apparent. What is at stake here are forms of textual practice that, in Shameem Black's words, "foster ethically resonant identifications with others" (9), and thus revise residual forms of representation that hinge on various modes ofobjectification.
This impulse is deeply humanist, and humanizing. And yet, we have known for a long time now that universalizing conceptions of the human also underwrite the processes of colonialism and neo-colonialism that threaten particular life-worlds with violence, exploitation, dislocation, or eradication, all of which we readily describe as instances of inhumanity. As Pheng Cheah has argued, a universal notion of the human and the forces that threaten it - embodiments, in other words, of the inhuman - are the products of the same set of material relations. The inhuman, Cheah explains, is understood as the "finite limit of man, a defective feature of human existence that is not proper to the true end of man but that we have thus far failed...