Frictions in Cosmopolitan Mobilities : The Ethics and Social Practices of Movement Across Cultures

This groundbreaking book investigates the clash between a desire for unfettered mobility and the prevalence of inequality, exploring how this generates frictions in everyday life and how it challenges the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. Reading fictional and popular cultural texts against real global contexts, it develops an 'aesthetics of justice' that does not advocate cosmopolitan mobility at the expense of care and hospitality but rather interrogates their divorce in neoliberal contexts. In this timely analysis, Rodanthi Tzanelli discusses questions of social injustice in the context of multiple and intertwined mobilities - business, technology, travel, tourism, popular cultural pilgrimage and social movements - that are at the forefront of early twenty-first century socio-cultural concerns. The book thus creates an interdisciplinary intervention on the politics and poetics of mobility in rapidly globalised lifeworlds and places. Human geography and sociology scholars with a particular interest in mobilities studies, cosmopolitanism, social theory and tourism or pilgrimage studies will find this book an intriguing and insightful read. "This groundbreaking book investigates the clash between a desire for unfettered mobility and the prevalence of inequality, exploring how this generates frictions in everyday life and how it challenges the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. Reading fictional and popular cultural texts against real global contexts, it develops an 'aesthetics of justice' that does not advocate cosmopolitan mobility at the expense of care and hospitality but rather interrogates their divorce in neoliberal contexts. In this timely analysis, Rodanthi Tzanelli discusses questions of social injustice in the context of multiple and intertwined mobilities - business, technology, travel, tourism, popular cultural pilgrimage and social movements - that are at the forefront of early 21st-century socio-cultural concerns. The book thus creates an interdisciplinary intervention on the politics and poetics of mobility in rapidly globalised lifeworlds and places. Human geography and sociology scholars with a particular interest in mobilities studies, cosmopolitanism, social theory and tourism or pilgrimage studies will find this book an intriguing and insightful read"-- Provided by publisher Contents 6 List of images and figures 8 Acknowledgements 9 PART I 10 1. Cosmopolitan irony: pluriversality and perspective 11 2. The poetics of justice: the joker as a modern(ist) character 33 3. The politics of resurgence: the joker as a factual-cinematic hero 52 PART II 73 4. Meta-realist plots: the road to selfdom 74 5. Killing pleasure: heautoscopic performativity facing the neoliberal youlfie 83 6. The terror of image-making: heteroscopies of damaged hospitality 115 PART III 146 7. Conclusion: unlocking certitude 147 Bibliography 153 Index 190