Samir Dayal

Ewa Barbara Luczak

Anna Pochmara

This anthology sheds new light on cosmopolitanism and culture in the contemporary world. Drawing on postcolonial, ethnic, and critical race studies as well as recent literary and critical theory, it demonstrates that new cosmopolitan thinking can embrace an awareness of ethnic and local differences. It disputes the utopianism of colorblind universalism and argues for the persistence of "race" and racialized thinking in lived experience. The essays collected in this volume valorize minoritarian perspectives and urge readers to rethink cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the underprivileged and marginalized, and highlight the role of culture in mobilizing social empathy and solidarity with the world's precariat. The contributors, who come from over a dozen of different countries and from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, constitute a vibrant cosmopolitan community in itself.

Cultural Perspectives

Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilise what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humour to attack the contemporaneous science of heridity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American Studies.

Ewa Barbara Luczak

About

Books

Join the club