Writing—Through a Critical Cosmopolitan Lens

Anne Surma

In Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, a small group of women run their business out of a bus station, using manual typewriters to produce letters, reports, CVs, and fiction (Kwibuka 2013). The women are valued by their clients because they are knowledgeable and particularly proficient in producing administrative correspondence in ‘crystal clear Kinyarwanda’ (Kwibuka 2013). As part of its nation-building attempts following the genocide of the 1990s, English became the official language in Rwanda. However, while 90 percent of the population speaks Kinyarwanda, 8 percent speak French, and only 4 percent—principally the nation’s ruling elite—speak English (Africa Portal 2012). However, the women’s work is now under threat since a shop offering print and Internet services has opened behind their wooden bench ‘office’; as well, street vending is banned, so the women risk being removed by the city’s officials at any time. This story provides a salutary reminder of how writing practices have been radically transformed by globalization processes. At the same time, it reminds us that writing, for all its potential for dissemination via myriad advanced technologies and media, is still a material, social practice, one motivated by specific purposes and having specific direct and indirect impacts. The Kigali typists and the writing they do represent a local and intimate social practice and a language (spoken by the majority of the population), which assert their interdependence, significance, and value alongside more technologically sophisticated, systematized communications processes, infrastructure, and exchange. However, there is no question that this local practice is dynamically tied to and modified by changes at a global level, and that it is becoming increasingly marginalized as an officially recognized means of communicating with others. As a trope for the focus of this chapter, the context and activities of the Kigali typists can be interpreted from a critical cosmopolitan perspective, where writing in the local language is interpreted as a practice of the ethics of care. This is not intended to be a sentimental vision, however. Rather, it is one situated in a specific material and historical context in dialectical tension with competing interests and relationships, alternative languages, and modes of writing through local and global networks. In a context of globalization, involving the accelerated movements and flows of people, finance, trade, services, ideas, and communications across local, national, and international boundaries, the vernacular language of care, human interdependence, and responsibility may be subdued or even stymied. Thus the writing that the Kigali typists do in Kinyarwanda, the local language, is an expression of how care for others plays an integral part in supporting and enriching local and, even if indirectly, global interactions. That the practice and value of care struggles to survive and risks being subdued in a world where economic, corporate, or political expediencies have gained prominence does not lessen its centrality as a means of connecting us to and enriching our relationships with one another. In this chapter, I argue that writing (regardless of form or mode) calls up or signifies a relationship with and responsibility to the other, even when it explicitly denies it, and I aim to show that writing, as an encounter with the other, also has the potential to resist the dehumanizing and decontextualizing effects of a market economy-driven globalization. I first outline my critical cosmopolitan approach to writing, one developed by drawing together threads from and reweaving the work of key theorists. I then turn to an analysis of recent writing on asylum seekers by the Australian Government. Here the intention is to demonstrate the part writing plays in articulating and shaping the nation’s relationship with asylum seekers in a globalized environment. I explore how an increasingly strident, textual government voice, one that denies the humanity of the (‘foreign’, non-citizen) other, that elides an obligation to vulnerable subjects, and that insists on a parochial and restrictive notion of hospitality and home, is nonetheless insistently shadowed and disrupted by the responsibility to care and to forge caring, cosmopolitan relations with others far and near.

Writing—Through a Critical Cosmopolitan Lens

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