Post-cosmopolitan Cities by Caroline Humphrey Vera Skvirskaja

Author:Caroline Humphrey, Vera Skvirskaja [Caroline Humphrey, Vera Skvirskaja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857455116
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2012-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

‘A Gate, but Leading Where?’ In Search of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism in Post-Soviet Tbilisi

MARTIN DEMANT FREDERIKSEN

Introduction

In his novel Ali and Nino (2000) Kurban Said paints a vivid picture of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi at the turn of the twentieth century as a culturally varied and multi-religious city. Imagine a bustling city with cobbled streets, wooden houses with wide balconies and intricate carvings, all lying along the Mtkvari River and climbing the surrounding hills, with a blend of a wide variety of churches, synagogues, mosques and a lively bazaar: ‘This town with its eighty different peoples, each with their own language … Armenian peddlers, Kurdish fortune-tellers, Persian cooks, Ossetian priests, Russians, Arabs, Ingush, Indians: all the peoples of Asia meet in the bazaar of Tiflis’ (Said 2000 [1937]: 118). This is a literary evocation of Tbilisi when the city was a melting pot centrally located on the Silk Route connecting Asia with Europe. In his description, however, Kurban Said also touches upon the ambivalence of this location in the middle of the Caucasus: between the Caspian and Black seas, between East and West. As the Muslim protagonist Ali notes upon a visit to Tbilisi: ‘Was this the gate to Europe? No, of course not. This was part of us, and yet so very different from the rest of us. A gate, but leading where?’ (2000: 109).

Today, international guidebooks as well as local tourist information publications continue to highlight the cosmopolitan atmosphere in Tbilisi. As one government sponsored tourist brochure states: ‘a wide variety of nationalities [have], down through the ages, made their home in Tbilisi. The old town still has its Jewish, Azeri and Armenian quarters. The mosque, synagogue, Armenian and Georgian orthodox churches are all within a stones throw’ (Department of Tourism and Resorts 2007). Yet, although it is still a bustling city, seventy years of Soviet rule and almost twenty years of post-independence turmoil and societal changes have in many ways altered Tbilisi. At present, what could actually be seen as cosmopolitan is often taken locally as intrusions rather than natural parts of the city. Further, since the gaining of independence in 1991, nationalism has been an increasing part of political life in Georgia. Interestingly, while promoting Tbilisi as a cosmopolitan city, the current government has at the same time promoted the Rose Revolution, after which it came to power, as a ‘rebirth of the Georgian nation’ (Shatirishvili 2009). Moreover, we see today issues of sharp ethnic and territorial segregation, and wars politically legitimised through ethnic lines of reasoning (van der Zande 2009: iii). In this chapter I follow Bruce Robbins’ notion of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ in order to examine this situation. Cosmopolitanism, Robbins argues, has to be understood as a ‘fundamental devotion to the interest of humanity as a whole’; a detachment from the ordinary commitments and affiliations of the nation (Robbins 1998: 1). Interdependence and acknowledgement, then, between different people(s) seems to be at the root of the cosmopolitan. In order for cosmopolitanism to ‘actually exist’ a sense of coherence between the social actors within a given social world is thus necessary.

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