Cosmopolitan musicology

This chapter briefly retraces the path that led to the arguments in the development of social justice and a democratic culture. It sets out with a commitment to multiculturalism and cultural relativism, and so an early research in Orientalism, in the sense in which Said and postcolonial theorists used that term. Cosmopolitanism has returned to the agenda in the context of debates about globalization. Beck and Edgar Grande argue not for the 'world citizenship' model of cosmopolitanism; instead, they call for the goodwill felt towards one's own country to be extended to other countries. The global and the local are not the oppositional entities they once were, and a reworked concept of cosmopolitanism could aid in their analysis. Cosmopolitanism has a relationship to diasporic experience: a Diaspora can make great efforts to retain cultural traditions, but can also assimilate other cultural knowledge and practices. The chapter outlines a future direction for musicology.