Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Mobility has long been an aspiration of those who yearn for something beyond their present surroundings—whether cultural, social, economic, or geographical. This is associated with idealistic connotations associated with the concept of cosmopolitanism. Although transnational mobility is commonly regarded as the primary condition of cosmopolitanism, we can also consider mobility in the plural, as “mobilities.” In his book, Mobilities, John Urry uses the term “imaginative travel,” to describe how people “travel elsewhere through memories, texts, guidebooks and brochures, travel writing, photos, postcards, radio and film” (169). I consider those who are cosmopolitan in the imaginary, or online sense, that is, the global citizens who physically remain in their homeland but have access to and come in contact with other places around the globe through various forms of visual media. This paper focuses on these online cosmopolitans to explore how they participate within the discourse and experience of globalization. This is manifested, I contend, via mediated mobilities that simulate cosmopolitan experiences using such visual media as photography and film, often in tandem with each other. This paper begins with a discussion of three documentary films, Born into Brothels (Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, 2004), City of Photos (Nishtha Jain, 2005), and The Salt of the Earth (Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders, 2014). I suggest that one can perform cosmopolitanism by engaging in media practices that deploy various modes of vision and imagination to attain concrete and material forms, which consequently affects one’s sense of identity and of place.