Building global cities

Leerom Medovoi, director of the Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State, has been planning the second annual Trajectories of Cosmopolitanism event series at Portland State University. According to Medovoi, the series brings together a “list of distinguished scholars from a number of different disciplines.”

“[Trajectories of Cosmopolitanism aims to answer the question] what does it mean to be a citizen of the world? And what are the possibilities, challenges and political importance it bears,” Medovoi said.

The series is just one of the ways the Portland Center of Public Humanities fulfills a portion of their mission statement to “promote rigorous humanistic inquiry into the languages, histories, and ideas that shape our ways of life, as well as those that offer a means of positively transforming them.”

What better location to discuss the global city than in a city that may be small, but certainly thinks and relates to other cities on a global scale?

“I think Portland’s identity is in a bit of a flux,” Medovoi said. “It’s something we often talk about in Portland, what extent are we plugged into a more global world?”

Last year, the program brought in two scholarly speakers, one of them being Bruce Robbins, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University.

Robbins discussed his early work, which consisted of several anthologies about bringing cosmopolitanism back into focus intellectually. This notion involves thinking about how people define global cities, and the way that sometimes those cities are more closely related to other cities around the world, than cities in the immediate world around them.

This year, four speakers will come to town: Kenneth Reinhard will visit on Nov. 19, and Srinivas Aravamudan and David Theo Goldberg will visit in winter and spring. All of the scholars will be discussing the notion of cosmopolitanism, and questions regarding how and when we form social relations, loyalties and meanings relevant on the global scale.

Thomas Bender, a professor of humanities and history at New York University and who started his career as an intellectual historian, will discuss topics of cosmopolitanism in America on Thursday. Bender’s work has focused on New York as an international hub in the U.S., as well as trying to put American history into a global context.

Bender asks us to think of American and world history as interrelated and to look at how they impact or influence one another. His goal is to get us thinking about the way cities, nations and other global forces interact in a cosmopolitan world.

Medovoi and the Portland Center of Public Humanities want to integrate scholarly, intellectual ideas into our own perspective of local issues.

“Mostly what our center tends to aim for is to take issues that are urgent in a public way, issues for our citizens to think about,” Mendovi said. “[The series allows] developed scholars that have things to say about those issues, a chance to come and talk about those issues, and find a way to make scholarship socially and politically relevant.”