When Immanuel Kant suggested in 1798 that a citizenship of the world could be staged in Konigsberg without physical travel, he illuminated the dense heterogeneity of place. Kant’s insight might be seen to have informed many projects of British cultural studies that situated globality inside locality by focusing on the potential of working-class cultures built through migrancy and racialization in cities like London. US cultural studies, by contrast, underemphasized that local-global dynamic, perhaps because the crossings of daily experience that inspired scholars like Stuart Hall were hard to see through post-1970s America’s balkanization of racial and ethnic identities. And while Hall and others advocated an  interdisciplinarity that took seriously the inextricability of representation and social life, this was not always fully attended to by the literary criticism that assumed the task of translating British cultural studies for the US academy. This cross-cultural talk brings together the earlier approaches of Hall and the Birmingham school with the histories and stories told about Harlem in order to propose working-class cosmopolitanism as a useful conceptual frame for the political present.

Sandhya Shukla is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent work is Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024).  She is also the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007).  Her work has appeared in publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology.

 The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.