On Geographies of Freedom

Dear Professor Harvey,

Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom is a book I once spent a lot of time with, so when I was asked to write this blog I was both thrilled and excited. That thrill and excitement of publicly engaging with a book that has such a place in my own intellectual history soon jostled with a very real fear about what to say; to you, to whoever else might read this, and to myself. There are things I want to ask you about the book; about its work to both critically interrogate then recuperate cosmopolitanism, about the context in which it was written, but also its salience now in a moment wherein the very liberalism about which so many of us have been so critical seems under threat from a buoyant ‘new far right’. But there are also things I want to tell you; about how it landed, travelled and got me thinking over the years. We’ve never met. We’ve never spoken. (Actually, we have once, but you likely won’t remember!) So, a letter seemed the best way of having a conversation with you about a book that’s sat with me for some time. It’s also a good way of saying happy birthday!

I first read the book soon after its publication in 2009, and it immediately resonated with the things I was trying to think through at the time. I was trying to grapple with what it meant to think geographically about cosmopolitanism in the light of that Derridean identification of the double and contradictory imperative that sits at the heart of such hospitable proclamations. For Derrida of course, if cosmopolitanism is one political mechanism for extending ‘unconditional hospitality’ to the stranger, it is an offer extended by a sovereign host who necessarily remains at liberty to tolerate, or indeed not tolerate, that stranger. But what might it mean to ground that double and contradictory imperative, to think about it geographically? At the time, this was a methodological question for me. I was trying to work through the thorny question of spatial difference in Sri Lanka, where the civil war was coming to a particularly bloody and brutal end in 2009 and the state seemed unwilling to entertain the possibility that alternative geographical imaginations might make for something like a successful post-national polity. Part of that challenge involved trying to develop ways of grasping ‘subaltern geographies’; forms of spatial difference that stretch and disfigure our accepted and at-hand geographical vocabulary. Your book helped me along with that thinking, its creative gesture towards the ‘geographies of freedom’ seeming to reach into the orbit of a similar kind of spatial-methodological challenge for more capacious political imaginations.

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At the time, I was also re-reading the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove’s wonderful book Apollo’s Eye(2001), a rich contextual history of the whole earth thought, seen and imagined as globe, sphere and cosmos, ranging from ancient Greece and Seneca’s Rome right through 20th-century Italian ‘air age’ modernism and the Apollo space photographs. Cosgrove’s book probed the reverie that writes the planet as completion and universality, as ‘cosmos’, and in so doing argued that the Apollonian global projection rhetorically occupies a position of overview or domination through its reclamation of a singular perspective. In not dissimilar ways, the first part of Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom helped me pin down what you frame in that book as the impoverished and quite particular Kantian geography that underpins dominant cosmopolitan yearnings. Mapping those problematic relationships between universal geographical and political visions and the spatial particularities they wittingly or unwittingly universalize was common to both your projects. Thus, from very different disciplinary directions, you both were articulating a concern with political closures that were essentially failures of the geographical imagination. As you so usefully suggest, Kant’s geographical imagination was unlively, uncritical and unnuanced in its formulation of absolute spaces or culture language areas given by nature. Kant’s geography was not just pre-critical, as you elaborated it became a pre-critical given, or propaedeutic, for everything else he would write, including his lasting cosmopolitan ethic and its revival in late modern, liberal cosmopolitical proclamations. 

I’d imagined what a conversation between you and Denis Cosgrove might have turned out like, what might come from your respective and collective reflections on the relationships between the universal and the particular, and what might you together have developed in such an exchange. A good six or seven years before he passed away so prematurely in 2008, Denis was my supervisor. I was trained in cultural geography and have worked geographically at what I’d like to call the intersection of cultural and postcolonial studies. Though the tradition of Marxism in cultural studies has never been far from my intellectual formation, the Marxist geography and urban studies that your work has been so instrumental in shaping, and from which I have learnt so much, never felt like my natural terrain. Cosmopolitanism and Geographies of Freedom felt different, somehow. It is an avowedly geographical book, one that I always felt speaks directly to the promise of a politically engaged cultural geography insofar as it was concerned with ways of seeing, or ways of imagining. But then, so do so many of your other books. I’m reminded that way back in 1973, the first chapter of Social Justice and the City asserted the importance to your project of “the geographical imagination”; of the role that space and place play in an individual’s own biography. You were one of the first to have used that phrase. It has always been about geography. The difference that geography makes. So how different really was On Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom?

Nine years prior to the publication of the book, your article ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Evil’ appeared in Public Culture. It’s a piece that would seem to have sown the seeds for ideas developed in the book. But, of course, the book itself grew out of the Wellek Lectures that you delivered at UC Irvine in 2005. You also published six or seven other books in that whole nine-year period, including The New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). How the ongoing work of the On Cosmopolitanism project intersected with the wider arc of your thinking is also something I’ve long wanted to ask you. It seems somehow central to that concerted geographical critique of the economic orthodoxies and their apparent universalization that inhere in capitalism’s boot print that we have come to appreciate from your work; a kind of honing of the geographical musculature that underpins all you give us. 

The lectures, I think, were originally called, or at least billed as, ‘Geographical Knowledges / Political Powers.’ In the Preface to the book that they became, you wrote how you were surprised as well as honoured to have been invited to deliver the lectures, in part because, being a geographer, you had “long been used to the somewhat lowly status of that discipline in the academic pecking order of prestige.” From one geographer to another, I have long been pleased that our discipline has been represented in that illustrious list of biennial lectures. But I think it’s more than that. I have also been pleased that you took the invitation to assertively show what difference it makes to think geographically, to critically theorize spatially. That was an important point to make in that lecture series.  

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It's funny how you can get nostalgic for periods in your life when the reading you were doing just somehow clicked. When I was knee deep in your book, reading it alongside Derrida and Cosgrove, there were two other books that were also pushing doors open for me at the time. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004) – released as Postcolonial Melancholia in the US (2006) – resonated because of its concerted effort to articulate cosmopolitan hope upward from below. What Gilroy referred to as ‘vulgar’ or ‘demotic cosmopolitanism’ (75) named the convivial potential of grounded and everyday encounters with difference, and the planetary (or demotically cosmopolitical) extensions of the political imagination embedded therein. This seemed to me to speak to your own attempt in Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom to tease out a “critical sociology” of “forms of knowing” (129) that comprise the geographical richness and complexity of everyday life in its manifold iterations. How can an innocent, innocuous, maybe even annoying, encounter with difference open onto geographical imaginations heretofore unscripted? How might they take us into sublime political moments? Gayatri Spivak’s 2003 book Death of a Discipline offered some useful answers here insofar as her suitably awkward trope of ‘planetarity’ (also developed by Gilroy, but differently) posed the challenge to decolonize our knowledge of the world by extending an invitation to know it from outside the categories of western thought. 

There’s much more to say here, but what I wanted to point to, and ask, is perhaps quite trivial: both Gilroy’s and Spivak’s books also began life as the Wellek lectures, in 2002 and 2000 respectively. In that post-9/11 conjuncture when grappling with proclamations about the so-called ‘failure of multiculturalism’ was high on all our agendas, I wonder now whether you were aware of the Wellekian threads that your book was teasing out? You chose the task of recuperating cosmopolitanism by attempting to revivify and enrich the geographical imaginations we might fold into that concept, when you might have turned your back on it in the search for more radical alternatives. In a subsequent reflection, you even seemed somehow regretful at that decision to, in your words, “put humpty dumpty back together again” (2011, p.116). However, looking back at that decision from the dismal prism of now – when far right mobilization and political license for that mobilization is on the rise, and the paranoid anti-immigrant delusions of what Richard Seymour refers to as Disaster Nationalism, seem so trenchant, tangible and terrifying – the charge of On Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom is perhaps more essential than it ever was. (Let us not forget that the subtitle to Seymour’s brilliant but harrowing book is The Downfall of Liberal Civilization.) Thank you for that charge, that challenge to keep looking for creative geographical alternatives to the absolutist spatial propaedeutics that continue to suffocate the political imagination. Geography must indeed lie at the heart of all our concerns.

Oh, and the happiest of birthdays!   

Yours Sincerely,

Tariq Jazeel. A reader.

Filed under: Harvey-at-90