I’ve been looking at B. Venkat Mani’s book Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. It’s a critical exploration of the emergence of literature from among the Turkish “guest workers” in Germany.

This story is significant, because Turks in Germany are a large community who, after decades of presence, remain very foreign. One of Mani’s key points is an emerging Turkish literary assertion of belonging in Germany, irrespective of the official German centers of culture. But they are resisting categories thrust upon them by frustrated opinion-makers: they are no longer guests in Germany; they use the German language, but are not necessarily striving toward German-ness as traditionally understood. Rather, they are creating new centers bolstered by cosmopolitan claims.

And this cosmopolitanism is doubly subversive: is subverts the centers of official Germany, and subverts the cultural norms of the global jet-set—those typically granted the title of cosmopolitan, because these Turks are anything but elites. They are meat-and-potatoes workers.

Cosmopolitanism by itself, Mani told me in an office visit, is innocent of the standard charge of being a hobby for the privileged few (although he said this more eloquently and sharply). It’s a way of doing life that untold numbers of quiet transnational migrants and working-class immigrants have discovered in recent decades, of being at once citizens of the world and of their respective places.

Terribly fascinating stuff; and a real joy. I hope I can take Mani’s class this fall, if my first-semester grad calendar allows me to.

I recently read an article about how while everyone wants to know if Islam and democracy are compatible, everybody was asking the same thing about Catholicism a century ago. The implication being, of course, that since Catholicism can obviously be harmonized with democracy, so too can Islam.

But after reading this (German Language) article by Yale philosopher Seyla Benhabib (left), Cosmopolitanism and Democracy, I’m not so sure we’ve made the right conclusions. Not about Islam, or even Catholicism, but Christianity at large. We’ve just assumed Protestant democracy to be coherent.

I’m beginning to wonder if Christian democracy is only possible with a bridled Christianity. Benhabib’s essay barely touches on religion. It’s a talk given on the 80th birthday of Jürgen Habermas, one of the most important theorists of European unity.

Pointing out that democracy has always implied boundaries, while cosmopolitanism has always resisted boundaries, Benhabib concludes:

In an age of globalization, the inclusion of the other becomes a world-citizen’s duty, a duty extending beyond national boundaries. (my translation)

What she’s getting at is that human rights are more important than democracy. This is a fancy way of saying that the mob shouldn’t have the last word.

But as Christians, don’t we believe the same? Don’t we also believe, with the humanists, that majority opinion does not make something right or wrong, but that there’s a higher law? The reason Catholics in the early 20th century found democracy wanting is precisely because democracy puts right and wrong on the line in the interest of electing wisely.

This is not to say that democracy is not the best way of containing tyranny—although history can challenge that one, too. Hamas was elected fair and square, as were the Nazis in the late 20s and early 30s (before they tired of Democracy).

Finally, of course, the Bible presents a decidedly non-democratic version of the future, a monarchical rule by Jesus. So the question becomes: is democracy a value for Christians at all?

Culturally speaking, whose is classical music?

Whenever I go to a symphony, two demographic observations stick out: the crowd is nearly all white; and the performers are white and Asian.

Historically, the music derives from a place and time: Western Europe, in the early modern era. But does that make it European? Here’s a book I’ve read recently—the title says a lot: Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music.

Author Mari Yoshihara is mainly out to argue that classical music is the property of everyone, despite its European origins; and that Asians in classical music nevertheless face obstacles in claiming this universal birthright.

The overarching problem here is that Yoshihara takes Europe’s claims of universal culture at face value. The music was born at a time when Europeans imagined they were moving beyond nation and tribe. But this cosmopolitanism would begin to shatter as folk looked with horror at the excesses of the French revolution. But that's another story.

So what if Yoshihara's historical work is faulty: does the claim of universality make it so? If classical music claims to be universal, is that also an invitation to make it universal? Whose is this classical music?

Pictured: Yo Yo Ma, at the World Economic Forum.

Persepolis works hard to make the Islamic Revolution seem an exotic imposition upon secular Iran (image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

Yesterday I looked at Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous Persepolis graphic novels, which tell the story of a childhood during the Iranian revolution and beyond. The story has also been adapted to film, now out on DVD (check your local library). I've got the trailer embedded below. Don't worry: the DVD has an English-language setting.

I loved the books and the film both. The film is visually far better than the books, but preserves the books’ Spartan feel. The film, however, makes a subtle editorial decision, that significantly changes the feel of the story; that decision is described in the special features—in a question-answer session in which French co-director Vincent Paronnaud speaks.

In order to make Marjane Satrapi’s story more understandable, they worked hard to make Tehran and Iran seem more universal, and less exotic. They wanted Tehran to look like anywhere—like San Francisco, or Cincinnati—those are the two cities Paronnaud mentions—or nowhere. Tehran has no mosques, no bazaars, and no strange music. It has anyplace high-rises, anyplace traffic jams, and so on.

Vienna, on the other hand, is other-worldly and fantastic, with haunting cathedral bells, beer halls (Paronnaud inexplicably calls them “Bavarian”), bourgeois punk anarchists, and coffee-houses. Listen to the opening few seconds of the trailer, below: those are European church bells. Vienna, in other words, is made to be the abnormal place, next to which Satrapi’s Iranian childhood seems normal. The intent is to help “us” better relate to her disorientation in Austria. (See Jesus, You Know, a movie I reviewed recently, for Austrian Catholics at prayer).

All this tells us that the subject of this movie is not Marjane Satrapi, but the European viewer, for whom a city like Vienna—with its high-context urban textures, from church bells to classical music to beer halls and bourgeois anarchists—is under normal circumstances “normal”. Non-Europeans wouldn’t need the touch: Europe is already a strange place. This is reverse orientalism.

Furthermore, by sterilizing Tehran, they’ve made the Islamic revolution come off as a foreign imposition—something certainly un-Persian (hence the title Persepolis, the ancient—pre-Islamic—imperial capital). Islam and Islamic revolution are conflated, and alien to “real Iran,” which is a nominally Muslim, thoroughly modern place.

Sandra Mackey, in her book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, argues that an important sub-plot in Iranian history is the tension between ethnicity (Farsi, or Persian—an Indo-European ethnicity and language) and religion (Islam, a religion with a universal claim, but which originates in Semitic Arabia). Iran, after all, is one of two countries in the world named after the proto-Indo-Europeans, the Aryans.

Persepolis is a story, told by a non-devout Iranian expatriate/exile. It is now a movie intended for a European audience that, noisy multi-ethnic debates aside, is still quite uncritically unaware of its particularity.