Transversal Cosmopolitanism in the Post-9/11 Novel

Transversal cosmopolitanism resists both the hegemony and homogeneity of globalization by highlighting incommensurable cultural difference, fostering creative appropriation, and promoting alternative systems of belief or idioms. Transnational eclecticism occupies the same cultural pathways as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal, oblique rather than oppositional, offering a potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence. The post-9/11 novel expresses a transversal politics that exposes the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom and whose characters become cosmopolites, or global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization. I read four novels that traverse the fractious relationship between Islam and the West. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling and backlash against Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is naïf (Arabic jahiliyya) in his encounter with the other and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists migrate from the US to become global citizens. The practice of female genital mutilation in majority Muslim countries presents one such differend to cosmopolitanism. As an alternative to the globalist cosmopolitanism, S. A. Hamed Hosseini proposes a transversal cosmopolitanism, or transversalism, that mitigates between global resistance movements and local, grassroots action. Hosseini finds the plural political ideologies of transversal cosmopolitanism “in adaptive voices such as eco-feminists, autonomist Marxists, post-anarchists, horizontalist, and affinity groups, who tend to accommodate new perceptions from other visions”. The effect of transversal cosmopolitanism will be to produce more “Westernized Muslims, Islamized Westerners” who are not “unrepresentative minorities” but the plurality in a post-civilization world. Randolph Bourne holds forth an America made salutary and strong by its transversal cosmopolitanism: America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all si