1 Stephen A. Mpashi, Cekesoni aingila ubusoja, Cape Town: OUP in association with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland Joint Publication Bureau, 1950.

2 The term is Bakhtin’s, and it is here used in deliberate preference to the more commonly deployed Bildungsroman, for reasons related to its construction of the notions of modernity, masculinity and social change. See M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)”, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, M. M. Bakhtin: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 10-59 and Apollo Amoko, “Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African Literature”, ed. F. Abiola Irele, The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 195-208.

3 My discussion of the novel in this paragraph is informed by the analysis and translations contained in Kalunga S. Lutato, The Influence of Oral Narrative Traditions on the Novels of Stephen A. Mpashi, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980.

4 See Stephen Mpashi, “The Beginnings”, New Writing from Zambia 1, 2 (1965), 4. I am grateful to Malama Katulwende and Mulenga Kapwepwe for conversations about their work in Lusaka, Zambia, in August 2010.

5 And the title of Timothy Brennan’s book-length problematization of the term. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1997.

6 Achille Mbembe,“The New Africans: Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Readings in Modernity in Africa, ed. Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 107-111.

7 For an archived record of the conference programme and abstracts, see http:// www.soton.ac.uk/english/news/events_past_2009.shtml

8 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, London: Penguin, 2006.

9 Stephanie Newell, “‘Paracolonial’ Networks: Some Speculations on Local Readerships in Colonial West Africa”, Interventions 3, 3 (2001), 336-54.

10 Stuart Hall, “Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Pnina Werbner”, Pnina Werbner, ed, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Berg, 2008, p. 349.

11 For a range of discussions of what David Harvey (Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, New York: Columbia UP, 2009, p. 79) calls “countercosmopolitanisms”, see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, and Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

12 See Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,”, in Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Cosmopolitanism, pp. 157-110.

13 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

14 Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World, p. 311.

Editorial: Debating Local Cosmopolitanisms

Abstract