Poet connects world cultures

Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah drove home the importance of literature in our lives at his lecture Thursday. Photo by: Steven Lawton

Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lecture Thursday at UNLV was a rare opportunity for students to connect with Appiah’s unique ideas.

“He may be working within a world of traditions, but Appiah confronts issues as great as those raised by tragedy,” said UNLV English professor Mustapha Marrouchi.

“His insights to human bodies and his meditation on the vanity of feelings makes him one of the well-known philosophers of all time and his teaching strategies, by far the most engaging.”

Appiah spoke Thursday as the first part in KVBCs and the UNLV English department’s lecture series for this year at Doc Rando Hall, in the Lee and Thomas Beam Music Center.

“I’m very glad I attended,” said Tatianna Menocal, an English major. “He offered a new insight of the world and especially to literature that I had not heard; and I especially enjoyed his revision of humanist ideas in reference to cosmopolitanism.”

In the lecture, Appiah discussed the ideas from his book, “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” explaining the role of literature in our lives and the idea of cosmopolitanism. He used an African novel titled “Nervous Conditions” written by Tsitsi Dangarembga to clarify cosmopolitanism, the idea that all people belong to a single moral community.

According to Appiah, Dangarembga’s book is a good focus to explain his ideas as “a testing ground for distinction between cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on dialogue, and the differences in a different logical form of humanism.”

In “Nervous Conditions,” the protagonist, Tambu, finds herself confused about her place in the world. She attempts to retain her “nativeness,” or what Appiah called her Shona culture, while desiring to know the “otherness,” which in this case is Western culture.

Tambu sees her brother ascertain a Western culture in a convent in Zimbabwe and desires the same for herself, which was denied until her brother’s death. Tambu also sees her cousin come back from London and, after spending her formative years there, return to her country as a singularly different female from that the women of the village. It is with these events and her later Western education that Tambu begins to develop a union of two cultures.

Appiah’s lecture explains that a cosmopolitan is one who is wholly in the world, a person who is not just within his own culture.

In Appiah’s book, “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” he wrote, “Cosmopolitans suppose that all cultures have enough overlap in their vocabulary of values to begin a conversation.”

Despite differences in vocabulary and its meaning and perception in the world, there are still enough similarities in the human condition for one to be not just a citizen of a culture, but a citizen of humanity. 

Appiah explained that ultimately, cosmopolitanism is to have an all-encompassing notion of the world.