Randolph Bourne’s 'Trans-national America': Between Pluralist and Exceptionalist Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

1916 was the year Randolph Bourne published his inspirational essay “Transnational America”. Amidst the fanaticism of xenophobic discourses, intellectual and political persecution, and the call to war, Bourne tenaciously stood up to a liberating and reinvigorating ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship that would redefine the terms of identity, belonging, and the nation itself. This paper will attempt a critique of Bourne’s thesis in light of later arguments for cosmopolitanism (Bhabha, 1996; Appiah, 1996), as a way to shed more light on both the potentials and the limitations of Bourne’s theory. Particular attention will be paid to important to his search for an organic culture linking high and low cultural forms that valued ethnic difference against ‘melting-pot’ homogeneity vis-à-vis the narrative of American exceptionalism that still undergirds his theory, in order to discuss contradictions usually underplayed in the criticism of Bourne’s work.