« Recursive settler colonial dispossession: Libby Porter, David Kelly, Priya Kunjan, ‘Possessory stratigraphy: land title, dispossession and housing crisis’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2024

Cosmopolitan settlers: Lorenzo Cañás Bottos, ‘Exclusionary Cosmopolitanism in Buenos Aires’, Anthropological Forum, 2024

21Jun24

Abstract: In this article I explore the organisation of practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the city of Buenos Aires. The starting point is a series of festivals and activities organised by the city government to promote and celebrate its cosmopolitanism. I then explore the spaces where they take place, and the monuments built by immigrant communities that populate the urban landscape. I read these in relationship to the ideological making of the Argentine nation and state, showing that the vernacular cosmopolitanism being promoted is exclusionary in character, and Eurocentric in orientation. Furthermore, I suggest that this form of exclusionary cosmopolitanism has an ideological affinity and shared genealogy with the settler colonialism that underpins Argentine nation building and its territorial state consolidation. I also show that in these celebrations of diversity, the government of the city of Buenos Aires strategically uses immigrant institutions and their networks, subsuming their particularity and multiplicity to that of the city and the nation.


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