Fojas's book is a study about the aporia between cosmopolitanism as a sign of justice and cosmopolitanism as the consumption and display of international luxury items and cultural production. Turn of the century Pan-American cosmopolitanism described international aesthetic culture and fashion drawn from major world cities, but it was also implicitly political, it held a promise of justice in the acceptance and coexistence of difference. Being cosmopolitan was an orientation towards the cosmopolis in a search for models of tolerance and openness for different lifestyles, ways of being, and gender and sexual identities. Fojas engages the work of Guatemalan Enrique Gomez Carrillo, the travel writings from the Chicago World's Fair of Cuban Aurelia Castillo de Gonzalez, the Venezuelan journal Cosmopoils, and Rodo's infamous Ariel, all of which share a common principle of the practical application of cosmopolitanism. These figures grapple with cosmopolitanism, sometimes conceptualizing new models of hospitality and sometimes failing, nonetheless keeping the broken promise of utopist spaces and their imagined cities.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cosmopolitanism in the Americas: Becoming Worldly, Becoming Modern
Chapter One: Thresholds of Cosmopolitanism: Prefaces to Modernity and Other-Worldly Readings
Chapter Two: Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac
Chapter Three: Cosmopolitan Decadence: Writing Inversions
Chapter Four: American Cosmopolis: The World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago across the Americas
Chapter Five: Literary Cosmotopias: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Ariel and Cosmópolis
Conclusions (and Querying the “Other” Cosmopolitanism)
Works Cited
Index