On September 11, 2001, even people who had never figured out what protesters in Seattle had been saying got a lesson in globalization. A basic strategy of U.S. imperialism — fostering violence in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East as well as in U.S. inner cities while excluding it from white, middle-class sectors — suddenly became untenable. As nationalism surged, President George W. Bush responded with a "war on terrorism" that justified military actions against al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq and a global regime of surveillance and intervention. The Patriot and Homeland Security Acts and postwar detentions created spaces where liberty, due process, and the rule of law were excluded, even as the United States claimed the right to impose them elsewhere. Early post-9/11 debates juxtaposed flag-waving nationalism with media reports on Islam, xenophobia, and racism; violence against Muslims and persons of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent (or those who looked as if they might be); and Afghani "tribal culture." Liberal notions of culture were deployed in legitimizing a regime of global governmentality as the empire demanded the right to strike back.

As the possibility of not thinking and feeling beyond the nation becomes increasingly remote, many intellectuals have reexamined old and new cosmopolitanisms in search of footholds for critical engagement. As scholars have scoured their libraries for precedents, Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois have remained on the sidelines. Yet in the patriotic fervor that flourished as the United States moved inexorably toward engagement in World War I, Boas defiantly challenged xenophobia, nationalism, war sentiment, and limits on free speech at the same time that he called for a global conception of citizenship. Du Bois promoted a pan-African movement that linked U.S. racism to colonialism and imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At the same time that both thinkers accorded a crucial place to cosmopolitan imaginaries in their intellectual and political projects, they were also fundamentally concerned with what we can call vernacularisms, perspectives that are tied to local and national perspectives and interests. While Boas focused particularly on cultural vernacularisms, both Du Bois and Boas defined their cosmopolitanisms vis-à-vis racial and racist vernacularisms.

Their cosmopolitan projects have been largely erased. Boas's notion of culture is commonly placed within a liberal program for confronting racism that celebrates autonomous cultural worlds, thereby authorizing a genealogical charter of contemporary multiculturalism for liberal supporters and neoconservative critics alike. A central goal of this essay is to disrupt this genealogy by detailing Boas's anthropological cosmopolitanism and showing how he tied it to his critiques of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism. If anthropology lends itself to (neo)colonial projects, then the problem with Boas's notion of culture lies not in its isolation from a broader critique of state and racial power but in how he positioned "culture" in relation to consciousness, science, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. Du Bois, on the other hand, promoted a pan-African movement. His cosmopolitanism formed part of black internationalism and cosmopolitanism whose diverse political and artistic projects flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Du Bois's cosmopolitanism has sometimes been erased by assimilating him to a Boasian genealogy of cultural relativism and race, sometimes by reducing his politics to an elitism or racial essentialism, and at other times by ignoring him altogether. Yet in seeking to transform cosmopolitanism by linking it to global antiracist and anti-imperalist vernacularisms, Du Bois challenged the ways in which both cosmopolitanism and vernacularism have been constructed since the seventeenth century.

The recuperation of Du Bois's and Boas's cosmopolitanisms, which has recently been undertaken in Du Bois's case by several writers (see Edwards 2003; Gilroy 1993; Posnock 1998), promises more than a historical corrective. Homi Bhabha's notion (1996) of "vernacular cosmopolitanism," Anthony Appiah's call (2001) for "rooted cosmopolitanism," and other efforts have challenged universalist, hegemonic formulations by placing cosmopolitanism in dialogic relationship with vernacularisms. Yet this is exactly what Du Bois attempted a century ago, and one goal of this essay is to give credit where credit is due. More broadly, we need to critically engage the very conditions of possibility for formulating cosmopolitanisms and vernacularisms. I argue here that since the seventeenth century, one of the cornerstones of projects of modernity has been to construct a moral opposition between vernacularism and cosmopolitanism that denigrates the former and valorizes the latter. The nationalist projects during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the other hand, were predicated on opposing vernacularism and cosmopolitanism in such a way as to seemingly privilege the former over the latter, nevertheless maintaining elite control over vernacular subjects. Both projects presented explicit and hidden guidelines for relating cosmopolitanisms and vernacularisms. In the twentieth century, the legacy of Boas's and Du Bois's work — and the problematic way in which it has been represented — continues to shape the possibilities for imagining vernacularisms and cosmopolitanisms, presents and futures. Unraveling these connections is crucial if we are to create more progressive cosmopolitanisms and vernacularisms and enhance their viability as political projects.