Cosmopolitanism and China:
Toward a Literary (Re)Construction

Edited by Ning Wang

The essays collected in this issue of Telos address cosmopolitanism primarily from literary and cultural perspectives, and, more importantly, they move beyond the limits of Eurocentric or West-centric ways of thinking and modes of research by dealing exclusively with cosmopolitanism and China: its parallel relations with ancient Chinese philosophy, its impact on modern Chinese literature and intellectual thought, and its recent significance to China’s modernization and globalization.

Introduction
Ning Wang

Chinese Beginnings of Cosmopolitanism: A Genealogical Critique of Tianxia Guan
Shaobo Xie

Cosmopolitanism, Tianxia, and Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”
David Pan

Cosmopolitan Translation and Cross-Cultural Paradigms: A Chinese Perspective
Yifeng Sun

“At Home in the World”: Hong Kong as a Cosmopolitan City in Xu Xi’s The Unwalled City
Melody Yunzi Li

From Shanghai Modern to Shanghai Postmodern: A Cosmopolitan View of China’s Modernization
Ning Wang

Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China
Sheldon Lu

Between Localism and Cosmopolitanism: A Look at Zhou Zuoren’s Early Construction of the Individual
Lisa Chu Shen

Cosmopolitanism in Ordeal: Cultural Reveries and Political Anxieties in Xu Xu’s “Modern Tales of the Strange”
Xiaoping Wang

The Good of Liberalism: Weak Messianism
Aryeh Botwinick

Kant and the Production of the “Island of Truth”: The Event of Modernity
Eduardo Sabrovsky

Notes and Commentary

Hermeneutic Communism as (Weak) Political Phenomenology
Michael Marder