Borders and Cosmopolitanism

RIP Moira Rose, also sometimes known as the great Catherine O'Hara.

We refer to April Carter's The Political Theory of Global Citizenship; James Clifford's "Traveling Cultures" in Cultural Studies; Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture; Walter Mignolo's "The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism"; Jacques Derrida's On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch"; a speech by former Conservative UK prime minister Theresa May; we love Star Trek; a speech by former Conservative UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher; cities of sanctuary, especially currently in the US context; the Leicester 2021 census; Conservative-turned-Reform* politician Robert Jenrick's words about Birmingham; Reform-led councils installing UK and England flags; a survey about how people in the UK interpret the proliferation of flags; Gogglebox's episode that includes commentary on the proliferation of flags; Stuart Hall's "Encoding/decoding"; Steven Vertovec on superdiversity; Canada's official multicultural policy, about which Eva Mackey, Smaro Kamboureli, and Wayde Compton, among others, have written; Toronto's linguistic diversity; an example image of the non-border Zalfa saw; the straight line of much of the Canada-US border; and Wayde Compton again.

*The UK's Reform party is not to be confused with Canada's Reform party (1987-2000), although they share similar right-wing politics. Canada's Reform party was

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…

Gillian Roberts: …and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Hi, everybody. Hi, Gillian. 

Gillian Roberts: Hi, Zalfa. 

Zalfa Feghali: How art thou? How you doin'?

Gillian Roberts: That's amazing. I was going to try and think of a similarly registered response to How Art Thou? And then you came up with Joey Tribbiani.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I mean, I've got to keep you—

Gillian Roberts: The diction shift was phenomenal. 

Zalfa Feghali: I'm a woman of zero talents, but. 

Gillian Roberts: Not true.

Zalfa Feghali: In that moment, I had that skill.

Gillian Roberts: Deftly played. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I hope you are well.

Gillian Roberts: Nevertheless. I am. Thank you very much. I have a mug of green tea and the mug has Moira Rose on it, which is appropriate for sometimes what happens to my voice.

Zalfa Feghali: So we are well prepared. 

Gillian Roberts: We are well prepared. 

Zalfa Feghali: To have a conversation today about borders and cosmopolitanism. So, hardcore listeners will know lots about cosmopolitanism and we should say here that while we probably could have a whole different episode on Cosmopolitan the magazine and Cosmopolitan cocktails—

Gillian Roberts: Cocktails we have known. 

Zalfa Feghali: Indeed, cocktails we have known, and wish we hadn't known. We probably won't be touching on those today and instead thinking about cosmopolitanism in a slightly more intellectual way. But this is an episode, of course, that you suggested. So this is where I very joyously get to say, why did you suggest an episode about borders and cosmopolitanism, Gillian?

Gillian Roberts: Yes, I see it as being connected to discussions about citizenship, and cosmopolitanism has been something I've thought about for a long time going back to my PhD days in the early days of this millennium. This is when I was thinking about Canadian writers who had immigrated to Canada, for the most part, and also the book version, which considered additional writers, but also Yann Martel, who was not an immigrant to Canada, but had lived all over the world, had been born outside of Canada. Yeah, so I was thinking about citizenship, I was about to say, from an early age, from an early scholarly age, shall we say. And I found myself, just by chance, as a PhD student, reading April Carter's book, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship. And I can't quite remember whether I was thinking about hospitality first or global citizenship first, but they sort of eventually would come together. And thinking about models of citizenship beyond the nation-state, or at least thinking about multiple versions of citizenship and indeed multiple citizenships. And that, of course, has a really strong connection with borders and the ability to cross them or transcend them. But I think cosmopolitanism is really interesting, because it's so contested as a term. On the one hand, it's kind of celebrated as a worldview, you know, seeing beyond borders. It's also really denigrated as something that's a bit dilettante-ish. Right? And not just because of cocktails, but, you know, the idea that you could just be rootlessly, joyfully sailing through immigration.

Zalfa Feghali: It's not even idealism. You're right. It's very dilettante-ish.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, exactly. And sailing through immigration, speaking all of the languages or at least a smattering of them. So I'm kind of really coming up with a caricature of a cosmopolitan figure here. 

Zalfa Feghali: How bad is it that I'm like, this sounds nice? 

Gillian Roberts: Well, I mean, because we would wish that for everyone. Of course. This is what we would wish for everyone, but something that's really elite. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes. 

Gillian Roberts: Really very upper-class, very, probably very white. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, white. Worldly, but white.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yes, exactly. This quote unquote “citizen of the world.” So we have a lot of resistance to the idea of cosmopolitanism, especially from the left. But then I think we've also seen attempts to kind of reclaim cosmopolitanism as well for something else and different qualifiers for cosmopolitanism. So just a few bullet points here, like James Clifford talking about discrepant cosmopolitanisms or Homi Bhabha talking about vernacular cosmopolitanisms, Walter Mignolo talking about critical cosmopolitanisms in order to sort of clarify or specify, like, no, not that kind of cosmopolitanism.

Zalfa Feghali: But this one that is doable because or understandable or conceptualizable. Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Kind of the sort of like cosmopolitanisms from below, I guess, as a way of recognizing that there is something valuable about thinking beyond the nation-state. And if we can salvage that concept so that it's not just about some high-flying, privileged, usually white male Western traveller who can come and go as they please with lots of money in their pockets. Can there be something that we can conceptualize in more meaningful ways that would involve solidarity across nation- state borders? And I guess a wider worldview that isn't just thinking about one's own backyard. So there's something, I think, really appealing in that. And I'm also very aware that, you know, when I started reading about this and thinking about this, I was myself, not living in my country of origin, having had my displacement facilitated through different pots of funding. And, you know, I was in the UK at that point to think some deep thoughts and write them down. Right? That's… PhD in a nutshell. So, yeah, for a lot of people, that's extraordinarily dilettantish, especially because I was writing about literature. So I can, you know, you can imagine what right-wing newspapers would say about me if they were to draw up a profile.

Zalfa Feghali: If they want to be hardcore listeners, they can draw up a profile.

Gillian Roberts: Go for it. But at the same time, that passage was really facilitated by the fact that I was a white woman from an English-speaking country, et cetera. So I think that the multiplicity of discourses around cosmopolitanism are fascinating and really pertinent to how we might see the way in which the same border could operate quite differently for different people and how we might take positions on that.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting that a lot of the time in my, as we were thinking about this episode, as I was thinking about cosmopolitanism, what kept coming up is, of course, is this idea of what you've been describing, open borders and the kind of primacy of the nation-state and the continued primacy of state borders. But I'm going to bring in Jacques Derrida, because who doesn't need more Jacques Derrida?

Gillian Roberts: Well, I'm going to see your Derrida, and I'm going to raise you Kant, but go for it.

Zalfa Feghali: We shall see who the loser really is. Spoiler, it's both of us. And we have a podcast broadcasting that fact. I was reading a bit of Derrida, as you do, attempting to skim Derrida's essay on cosmopolitanism. And how that essay comes into being is because he's giving a speech, I think, a presentation.

Gillian Roberts: Aren't loads of his works actually transcribed speeches?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Riffs by Derrida.

Zalfa Feghali: I'm very grateful that I don't, I mean, I think everyone is grateful that my writing isn't just transcribed from things I say. Anyway, he's giving yet another speech, but this time it's to the International Parliament of Writers. So he uses that speech to sort of think about, and this International Parliament of Writers at the time is trying to posit this idea of cities of sanctuary and city of sanctuary for writers who are displaced or for writers who are seeking sanctuary. And so my thinking about cosmopolitanism, more recently at least, and certainly in the work that I'm doing at the moment, is more around sanctuary. And I guess that goes back to hospitality in an important way, but it's more around sanctuary. And I don't necessarily, I think about sanctuary a lot of the time in terms of institutions, but not the institution of the state. And especially in the UK right now, we have mechanisms or language around cities of sanctuary and universities of sanctuary, so places where people are welcome because that idea of sanctuary, which is premised on an idea of cosmopolitanism, is a place where diverse and new and kind of the quote unquote “foreigner,” to go back to a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about hospitality, the foreigner's contributions are welcomed because they are seen as enriching that city of sanctuary or the whatever, what Derrida calls a culture, an ethic of hospitality. And I think that's really important. I think about cosmopolitanism now in terms of having the safe space. And while I would love the idea that we can all, and I really mean, as you do, all navigate borders with ease, in fact, not be thinking about the world in terms of borders. I think cosmopolitanism is a thing that some people want, and some people maybe don't know that they want. Do we not all want to be able, the ability, not the kind of coerced movement, the ability to travel and learn and speak and experience. A lot of people want that, but to do that with ease and to do that in a just way entails a form of cosmopolitanism that currently does not exist. Unless you have, to go back to a couple of episodes ago, a quote unquote “good” passport.

Gillian Roberts: Absolutely. And I think people in the UK, people who were perhaps inclined to travel to European destinations, possibly felt that they had that status up until Brexit.

Zalfa Feghali: Look at you, you're being very diplomatic.

Gillian Roberts: And then, of course, had the experience of, oh, wait, we can't go in that queue that's not really a queue. Now we're in a real queue. Oh, we can't actually do the automated passport gate thing. Well, why not? Because we have the quote unquote “right” passport. And wait, why is this queue so long anyway? And where have these other flights come in from outside the European Union? And then it's like, oh, my. 

Zalfa Feghali: And why am I with them? 

Gillian Roberts: Why am I with them? And then just like, OK, well, this is the reality of travel for people without EU passports. And that has been going on this whole time. I really, really hope that people who voted for Brexit felt that irritation. But I fear that maybe not enough of them put two and two together and realised, ah, this is what I voted for. But what we were describing is, you know, we want that version for everybody, not just a reclamation of the EU passport conditions for people who happen to have a UK passport.

Zalfa Feghali: I'm just going to go back to the city and the state, because I think it's in the word cosmopolitanism, right? People and city and that polis is the city, which at the time was the state and which at the time was the basic unit. Yeah, city states.

Gillian Roberts: As we learned in like middle school or similar.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, indeed. So for those conversations to happen between city states, there needed to be mechanisms by which travel could happen and people to be able to identify, well, I am from this place, you are from the other place. And so you can see how open borders is a paradox because how can a border be there and open? And so in a lot of the thinking around cosmopolitanism, as you've already mentioned, this idea of kind of a global, you know, thinking about the cosmos, not cosmos and people, but cosmos is the place in which we live, the globe. How a global government or a global system is both functionally impossible and undesirable, but yet what we are effectively asking for.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, because to go back to April Carter, without having reread her for this episode, I hasten to add, but, you know, there is no condition for world citizenship. There is no world state. So currently there isn't that possibility. I do remember saying to a student years ago who announced when I was trying to discuss citizenship in a class, who announced that he was a citizen of the world. And I said, no, you're not. Which he was devastated by. 

Zalfa Feghali: And yeah, wasn't it Theresa May who said, if you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere? 

Gillian Roberts: That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there you go. Her kind of pushing back against cosmopolitanism, this sense of like, oh, you worthless, rootless person. I mean, when I said to him, you're not a citizen of the world, I was like, because there is no, I was taking it very literally, there is no world state, therefore you cannot.

Zalfa Feghali: Don't worry, I was not suggesting you and Theresa May have that much in common.

Gillian Roberts: Oh phew. The less I have in common with her, the better.

Zalfa Feghali: But I see what you're going for.

Gillian Roberts: I mean, to me, that's on par with Thatcher saying that there was no such thing as society, right? 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: This taking a wrecking ball to things one might want to hold dear, really. But in a way, I can't really imagine a world state working out very well.

Zalfa Feghali: I kind of feel like there's lots of science fiction that makes it, I mean, and I say this, I've been teaching on a science fiction module, and there are loads of examples of where you're right, where a world state is absolutely not to be desired. But fiction allows us also to imagine better and imagine otherwise. And imagining otherwise demonstrates that world states could, you know, do we need as humanity, do we need an extraterrestrial other against which to suddenly realize that we do have enough in common to create a world state equitably?

Gillian Roberts: For a second I thought you were like literally suggesting that we find an extraterrestrial other. It took me a second to realize you were talking about what happens in science fiction. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, yes, yes, yes. 

Gillian Roberts: But yeah, a bit slow on the uptake. 

Zalfa Feghali: Come on. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Catch up, Gillian. I think in the absence of a world state or, you know, if we were not to develop one, we'd like to see a consensus emerging and, you know, relationships between states or supranational kind of entities.

Zalfa Feghali: Fundamentally, I think you're right. And you'll be shocked to learn that we are in agreement, that we do have the guts of global governance, right? We have some of those structures that we could kind of extrapolate out and it doesn't work. Just last episode, we were talking about small island nations waiting for the bigger nations, for those more responsible for the conditions that they're in. So we could create the conditions where a world state is possible. And given that we've been having a decent go of it, since 1945, since 1948. 

Gillian Roberts: Earth, having a decent government since 1944. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I say decent. I might want to revise that.

Gillian Roberts: We've had time to do better.

Zalfa Feghali: Well put.

Gillian Roberts: Thank you. If only we could make it so. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, I love this. Thank you for the Star Trek reference. Thank you very much. You make my heart warm.

Gillian Roberts: I'm glad to hear that. It's not the warmest of days. So there you have it. If I can cycle back to the city and the city state and the way in which I think cities are increasingly, maybe not increasingly, but we see them as potential sites of exception, the ways in which cities articulate themselves as being perhaps at odds with or opposed to the nation-state in which they're located. We might think about how, you know, Sadiq Khan positioned London under a Tory government, for instance, or Manchester in the UK under Andy Burnham, but also this kind of the status of the city of sanctuary is now and what the city can do and the protections it can provide to the extent that it can and the ways in which in the US context it might be able to piss off Donald Trump for creating a different kind of space or declaring that it is a different kind of space that will operate according to a different set of values, a different set of principles, to circle back to Kant as always. And why not? Thinking of hospitality as a cosmopolitan right.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, well, I mean, doesn't he say, and I'm going to read out what I wrote, “the law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.”

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. I do also want to come back to one of the things you said, which is that people who want to see this kind of world, want to see cities of sanctuary, there are also people who don't want to see that, who aren’t interested in exceeding boundaries and who are just interested in what they consider to be protecting their own patch. I've certainly spoken to relatives who were unhappy with people seeking sanctuary in churches, like it was a local glitch or something, rather than a much wider spread phenomenon. And the larger phenomenon, I think, is really important. And the fact that it's something that exceeds borders gives it, from my perspective, a kind of weight. But from another perspective, they might say, well, oh, well, this is just some notion that doesn't belong to us and doesn't belong to where we live.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, it's really interesting that you bring this up because obviously I live in a city, Leicester, that is, I guess, very explicitly and quite rightly is proud or officially proud of being the UK's first plural city where there is no kind of particular majority. 

Gillian Roberts: You mean in terms of ethnic identity? 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And according, I think this is according to the 2021 census. And it's part of, obviously, there's the kind of, I guess, slightly more cynical way of thinking about it. It's part of Leicester's place-making and place-marketing strategy. Right? And Leicester is [more of] a space of exception than the ones that you were describing, maybe. But nevertheless, definitely a city of exception in that sense, because of patterns of migration that are related to different sort of border relationships for which the UK or for which Britain is responsible historically. It's something that I do, you know, I've lived here for 10 years. I do feel that this is a city that is different. And in fact, I live very near a road which is described as the most diverse road in the country, linguistically, and sort of in terms of representation on this street, which I think is fascinating. And it's why I live near that road, incidentally. But if Leicester does see itself, and again, I think we could interpret what that means, as the country's most plural city, it still is positioning itself within that country, right? It has to be within a country that is not plural. We are the plurality. We have the diversity, we have lots of languages, we have lots of different stories, and these stories are enriching and bringing texture, and they are equally mattering to the story of our city, but only to a certain degree, I suspect.

Gillian Roberts: You mean only to the extent that is useful as a marketing kind of approach.

Zalfa Feghali: I wonder, because I do have the impression that the city is very different from the county.

Gillian Roberts: Would that be reflected in, say, distribution of councillors and their political affiliations? 

Zalfa Feghali: I think that is so up in the air at the moment in this country that it's probably not worth speculating about. 

Gillian Roberts: Only because I think similar things are happening in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.

Zalfa Feghali: Those patterns of voting and elections and the pattern of funding allocation, you know, has to be taken in context over a long period of time. And I think more generally, without getting into this too much more, I think in all sorts of ways, councils are in crisis. 

Gillian Roberts: Yes. 

Zalfa Feghali: The ethnic or otherwise makeup of that city probably doesn't have the singular impact that we might be suggesting.

Gillian Roberts: Yes, although I'm sure it can be weaponized.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. Oh, yes, absolutely. We have seen in the relatively recent news, politicians going to places and saying, you know, “I didn't see another white person in this city.”

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And then turning around and then saying, “Oh, I meant that in a good way,” or some such nonsense.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. But with a massive like fingers behind their back crossed and a wink. Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: But I mean, going back then to cosmopolitanism, it is something that is contested, but also conveniently weaponized and also conveniently used as a strategy of containment. Look, we are a cosmopolitan place, and therefore we don't have to do anything more because we're so cosmopolitan.

Gillian Roberts: And we've said it. We've said it. Yeah. I'm thinking as well about Reform-led councils spending tens of thousands of pounds on flags. 

Zalfa Feghali: I knew that was what you were going to say. 

Gillian Roberts: Sorry. Sorry to have proved you right because it is so grim at a point of councils being genuinely cash strapped that this is how the money's being spent on the most anti-cosmopolitan thing you could think of symbolically, of trying to reassert the space as something exclusive, something that is read, and there have been some really telling surveys as well about who reads the massive proliferation of the England flag and what kind of message it is. Or even recently, one of our hardcore listeners and I were watching an episode of Gogglebox. In that episode they were talking about flags, and I thought the episode handled it better than I feared it might go.

Zalfa Feghali: OK, decently sensitive. OK.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. I mean some people were not opposed to it because they were reading it in a way that sort of fit with their identity and their position. Like, oh, no, I don't I don't think it's meant to be like this. Not because they were hoping that it would be. 

Zalfa Feghali: It needn’t be—

Gillian Roberts: A work of violence. But, you know, there were some really clear, really poignant responses to it, which is like, I remember the 1980s and what that felt like. And this is just like this all over again. So I think we could have a whole episode on Gogglebox.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I think I was going to say a whole episode on flags, but yeah, Gogglebox I could probably talk more about.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, we could do a whole other podcast on Gogglebox. There probably is one. But for listeners not in the UK, Gogglebox is a programme, it's reality TV, but it's about watching TV.

Zalfa Feghali: You watch people as they watch a selection of, quote unquote, “representative” or provocative or whatever television that has been on for the last week. So it's like watching a kind of digest of the news, but about TV. And you watch people's responses sort of as they're watching.

Gillian Roberts: Which are often hilarious. And they're from different parts of the country, different regions of the country.

Zalfa Feghali: And you do get to know different sort of viewers. You form different attachments to them as you would with any reality television.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And you get to learn their sort of quirks and you kind of have expectations of positions that they might take based on what you know. So it's an interesting cross-section, I think, of the British viewing public. And for that reason, I think is quite relevant to thinking about cosmopolitanism and the ways in which people are reading the prevailing political discourses in the country and the way in which they are being positioned. And I've just been teaching about this, so it's on my mind, thinking of Stuart Hall and his positions of decoding: the dominant-hegemonic, the negotiated and the oppositional. And you sort of see that being played out as you're watching them watch television. And I'm quite a new viewer of it, because I kind of didn't know what it was for ages. And then one of our hardcore listeners suggested that we check it out, because he was more familiar with it than I am. But I've been really taken with it, actually. And my sort of knee-jerk revulsion in relation to reality TV has been chastened by the experience. And I think it has to do with actually, to a large extent, there being more of a cosmopolitan outlook than I would have anticipated.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, we can probably have more of a conversation about your time with Gogglebox.

Gillian Roberts: Stay tuned for next time.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes. Well, I do think that it's worth maybe touching on the relationship or what relationships we see between cosmopolitanism and a place, whether that's a city or a state or an individual who identifies as cosmopolitan and what that relationship is with multiculturalism and different approaches to theorizing, I guess, diversity in a place. So in Leicester, just to pick up again, Leicester, where I live and where this idea of the UK's first plural city, Leicester has been described by scholars, including Steve Vertovec, as a place where we can use the term “superdiversity” to kind of learn more about it. And Vertovec's really clear: superdiversity, it's not a theory, it's not a method, it's just a concept that we can use as a tool to understand But that doesn't work for everywhere. This idea of superdiversity that is almost like interlocking identities that are feeding into the identity of a place that may be rooted in migration, but also thinking about all sorts of other identifications, gender and so on. So all that to say, how do you see something like multiculturalism thinking about the Canadian context?

Gillian Roberts: Well, yeah, as soon as you said interlocking, I was thinking of the mosaic. 

Zalfa Feghali: Exactly. 

Gillian Roberts: As this kind of archetypal model to discuss multiculturalism in Canada for those who are not familiar with that country that I'm from. Canada as an official multicultural policy. And it has done since the early 1970s. It was sort of codified in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. There are a lot of different things sort of feeding into that, including, well, the origins of it date back to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s. And what this commission found, much to their surprise, was, oh wait, this country isn't just composed of people of British and French descent. There was also the contribution, literally, quote, of “other ethnic groups,” unquote. 

Zalfa Feghali: How thrilling. 

Gillian Roberts: Book four of the report. And that led to this model of multiculturalism, but in a bilingual framework. And that's been in place, as I said, since the 1970s under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was prime minister at the time. So part of that was that linguistic issue. You know, it was in the late 1960s that Canada became officially bilingual. And Eva Mackey has written about this amongst other people. There was a desire to position Canada differently from the United States. And so having an official multicultural policy was meant to sort of carve out an identity for Canada that would be distinguished from the US. Obviously, the US is multicultural in practice, whatever Donald Trump has to say about it, in the same way that so is Britain, but Britain doesn't have an official multicultural policy either. And there's been lots of critiques. So there are lots of critiques of multiculturalism in Canada from the right, people who, you know, want to do away with it so that Canada will, quote unquote, “go back to a place” it's never been of just being probably just Anglophone. Or, you know, in francophone terms, right-wing terms, just francophone. And also critiques from the left seeing multiculturalism in these government terms as sort of managing diversity and managing its contours. 

Zalfa Feghali: And containing it. 

Gillian Roberts: And containing it, exactly. So Smaro Kamboureli talks about the “sedative politics” of multiculturalism. So there's lots of ways in which I guess it is weaponized from different points on the political spectrum. There are interesting questions around, well, what does it mean to make it into a state policy? And I suppose, can we expect a state policy ever to create the conditions of a sort of genuine cosmopolitanism. As I've got older, I've thought, yeah, maybe not. But then again, to go back, you know, we referred earlier to these different senses of like these qualifications of cosmopolitanism and thinking about more broadly, sort of different versions of cosmopolitanisms from below. Wayde Compton, who we've talked about before, talks about “multiculturalism from below.” Which is more viable, I think, in terms of expecting just versions of multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism to emerge rather than from state structures. Did that do what you wanted it to do? 

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you so much, it did. 

Gillian Roberts: Welcome to my first-year lecture on Canadian multiculturalism.

Zalfa Feghali: I'm sure I sat in on that lecture when I had to teach with you. You mentioned the mosaic, and it's an image that has been contested in different ways as well. Is there anything you wanted to say more about that?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I forgot. Thank you. Woman of a certain age, as I am. This is what started the rabbit hole. The mosaic is placed in opposition to the melting pot of the United States. 

Zalfa Feghali: Right. 

Gillian Roberts: And so, you know, the sense of like, instead of having this like soup or cheese fondue, perhaps, in the US context, here in the context of official multiculturalism, everyone gets to retain their cultural heritage. They're not expected to assimilate, except linguistically, according to the articles of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which makes it very clear that assimilation to English and/or French is expected. But of course, if we think about the structure of an image of mosaic and different mosaic tiles, there's also lots of little borders, micro-borders in that image. And I suppose if we think about that conceptually, this is one of the problems that some people have, especially on the right, with multiculturalism. It's like, oh, it's just too fragmented, you know, where’s the kind of coherent, singular —doesn't exist—sense of the nation?

Zalfa Feghali: And what does the mosaic, what is the picture that the mosaic is presenting? That's, I guess, what the thinking would be.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Or concerns about silos. Yes. Yeah. And rather than having a sort of interculturalism, which might be more of a critique from the left, if it's about lots of communities not—I don't want to say integrate because that can be weaponized—

Zalfa Feghali: Interacting.

Gillian Roberts: Not interacting with each other, which I don't, you know, in practice, I think you see, especially even talking about Leicester and I think of Toronto, which is not a city I've lived in, but I've certainly visited many times. And you do see these really amazing interactions across cultures. And it's, I think, one of the things that is really fantastic about Toronto and also gets used to sell the city as well, you know, how many languages are spoken, etc. It's well over a hundred. So we do see variations of this kind of phenomenon in different places, but with different language to describe it.

Zalfa Feghali: We're talking about scales in a way of cosmopolitanism.

Gillian Roberts: That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: There's another qualifier. Funny. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: And if we just have enough qualifiers we're going to come up with the right kind.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh totally. Totally.

Gillian Roberts: But I think it's worth saying that the ideas of cosmopolitanism have been around since antiquity. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: And so it has been under constant revision since then. And it meant a very different thing in the Enlightenment. And it means a different thing now. And that's why it's worth periodically revisiting for those reasons. 

Zalfa Feghali: I quite agree. 

Gillian Roberts: Now, Zalfa, and I'm so excited about this because this is such a rare occurrence on the podcast, but I believe, drumroll, Zalfa has a border that she has known, that she's prepared to share with us today.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, yes. And this is, as our hardcore listeners will be aware, this is a rare occurrence. And in fact, as I have been sitting here, I thought of a second one that I'm prepared to share on a future episode.

Gillian Roberts: Oh my gosh.

Zalfa Feghali: Anyway, I'll go one at a time because we don't want to—

Gillian Roberts: We don't want to go into overload.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. Okay, so this incident, I suppose, this story happened a couple of years ago when I was on a plane from Phoenix, Arizona to Washington, DC.

Gillian Roberts: This is very cosmopolitan of you.

Zalfa Feghali: Indeed. And had I not been in desperate need for a raw vegetable, which I really struggle sometimes to get when I'm in the US, a fresh raw vegetable, I should say—yes, I would have felt very worldly while doing it because my partner was flying in from another country and meeting me in DC. So it felt very worldly. Anyway, when I travel alone, and when it's not too long a flight, I'm very happy to sit in a window seat. And when you're flying in the US, you're not, I mean, obviously you're high up, but there's stuff to see. So a lot of the other places I fly, we're flying over the sea or whatever. But in the US, it's really nice looking out of the window. So I was in a window seat with my face really glued to the window like a child. And it happened that this was a flight that had free internet. So I was, while staring out the window, I was on my family WhatsApp and I was texting, you know, this is what I am doing now, staring out the window. And while I was staring out the window and on the screen, I could see we just crossed the border, or it looked like—the scale on those maps isn't always great—it looked like we had just crossed the border from Arizona to New Mexico. I saw far below me a huge, long, I can only describe it as a stripe of sort of cleared land, what I recognised to be a border. And it put me immediately in mind of the Canada-US border, which we have images of and we will put on the show notes a link to images of, you know, sort of forest woodland that has been— 

Gillian Roberts: like shaved

Zalfa Feghali: like hewn away so that you can see the distinction between one side and the other. Wayde Compton, who you mentioned earlier, has called a “strait razorous border,” right. And it's sort of the sharpness of that distinction. And so I was looking sort of, obviously, Arizona, New Mexico, this was desert landscape. And, you know, I looked as much as I could. I found it very annoying that I couldn't zoom in manually with my eyes, couldn't see a road, couldn't see it being sort of a waterway, and concluded that it must be the border between Arizona and New Mexico. 

Gillian Roberts: As you do. 

Zalfa Feghali: As one does, and proceeded to take a photograph of it and send it to my family WhatsApp and go, I think that this, I've just seen a border. And knowing that that is not often how borders work, but thinking, you know, how fascinating if it is, but it was very much a sort of stripe. I was in a plane. I could see lots of land and lots of horizon, a stripe kind of across the land. Subsequently, of course, discovered that this probably wasn't a border. 

Gillian Roberts: A border you thought you knew. 

Zalfa Feghali: A border I wanted to know. A border I wanted to share on “Borders I Have Known.” Then it was power lines, which is, you know, differently delineating space, right? So land cleared for power lines so that if there is any sort of accident or whatever, there's no woodland there, nothing to burn, nothing to disrupt the power lines. And there's something to be said around extraction, around the travelling of resources in that way and the movement of resources and what happens to the land when we decide to, you know, well, I'm going to put a power line here. 

Gillian Roberts: And whose territory is it? 

Zalfa Feghali: And in preparing to tell this story, because I have only once, I think, shared a border story in our very first episode, I went and had a look at where it really could have been sort of nearish the border between Arizona and New Mexico. And it may well indeed have been at or near the San Carlos reservation. 

Gillian Roberts: Amazing.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, so I think there is more for me to think about there. But I thought it was something I wanted to share with you, Gillian. And when I messaged to tell you that was the case, your joy was worth it.

Gillian Roberts: Well, the narrative of the border that you have known or thought you knew has also been very much worth it. So thank you very much, on behalf of myself and our listeners for sharing it.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, the reception has been so wonderful, I might just share another.

Gillian Roberts: We will look forward to that happening.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.