SUMMARY:

Bruce Grant welcomes Choi Chatterjee’s “Manifesto” for the values it prioritizes, whether environmentalism or the celebration of human diversity. At the same time, he doubts that the concept of transnationalism suits the proclaimed task of conveying human experiences beyond the traditional constraints of territorial, political, and ethnocultural groupness. He does not find that the centripetal forces of globalization necessarily oppose the centrifugal forces of group-boundedness (an assumption central to Chatterjee’s argument). Grant also doubts that a renewed embrace of class consciousness can be productive in the twenty-first century, or that prioritizing the morality, authenticity, and survival of humanity is sufficient to overcome the solipsism of group egoism and the risk of human extinction. Finally, Grant questions the viability of the project of “cosmopolitanism from below,” given that cosmopolitanism is an exclusively elite and deeply normative phenomenon. He suggests other ways to overcome the restraints of nation-centered writing, such as recognizing pluralism and hybridity and rejecting the model of the sovereign individual in favor of “the dividual,” a person who can be constituted only through multiple and competing belongings, allegiances, and interests. He has tried this approach in his own work, first attempting to understand Soviet-era Pacific-rim indigenous peoples as East Asian, and later in studying the region of the Caucasus.