This essays grapples with the Caribbean basin as a multicultural and cosmopolitan geo-political entity. Locating the Caribbean within and against discourses of European Enlightenment modernity, the essay looks to put forth a cosmo-political ethics of reading that troubles contemporary articulations of cosmopolitanism as fundamentally opposed to discourses of multiculturalism. The essay suggests thinking about a cosmopolitanism from below in which the archipelago of poverty, as Sylvia Wynter has called it, becomes a place where new genres of man proliferate. The unique place of the Caribbean—as extension of Europe, Africa, Asia, and other global geographies and histories, as well as a...