Cosmopolitanism and good‐enough cosmopolitanism: Encounter with Robin Denselow and Charlie Gillett

This paper seeks to address the significance of world music through the category of cosmopolitanism, and of what I term good‐enough cosmopolitanism. It does so by way of an encounter with two major mediators of world music based in the UK, Charlie Gillett and Robin Denselow. The intention is to explore ways in which to think about the broader cultural significance of this music, including its continuities with earlier forms of popular music. And its argument is that music provides possibilities to think about cosmopolitan issues in rather distinctive ways—in ways that are different from the lines of thought currently being developed in contemporary mainstream sociology. I am thinking of cosmopolitanism, not in terms of an ideological or identitarian position, but, rather, in terms of a stance or disposition towards the world involving an enlarging imagination and modality of thought. I am interested, then, in the cultural--political potential inherent in the music agenda.