Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft provides a theoretical framework to think about politics outside of the domestic and international realms which dominate theorization on cosmopolitanism, establishes W. E. B. Du Bois as a crucial interlocutor in the cosmopolitan literature, and opens dynamic new avenues of research on the political theory of transnationalism.

It starts with an engagement with Kantian and neo-Kantian strands of cosmopolitan political theory to argue for expanded horizons both in terms of the interlocutors and the political formations studied in this literature. These recommendations emerge from a new contextual interpretation of Toward Perpetual Peace, which identifies Kant's preoccupation with intra-European competition for colonies rather than global politics as the driver of his cosmopolitanism. Kant was narrowly interested in the trajectory of Europe toward peace, which—alongside moral objections—motivated the prominent role given to colonial critique in this essay. The narrow problem space motivating Kant means that the script he offers for thinking of an unequal world today, marked by the legacies of centuries of colonialism, is limited.

My integrated analysis departs from the predominant division of labor in the Kantian literature, in which scholars focus either on Kant's racial hierarchy or on the relevance of Kant's essay for present global politics. My interpretive account is methodologically innovative because it distinguishes between readings of historical political thought that are exegetical and those that place the interpretive authority in the present, a distinction that is not always clear in existing work. By placing interpretive authority in the present, theorists rightly privilege the questions that motivate us today to do political theory and make explicit an evaluative reading of historical figures in terms of what they can contribute to this task.

From the initial diagnosis, I show—through a creatively disloyal interpretation —that Kant's notions of complementarity and hospitality can be reimagined to work “horizontally.” The relatively neglected writings of W. E. B. Du Bois on transnationalism allow for a “transfigured” account of hospitality, which allows oppressed subjects who are differently located to envision themselves as a transnational collective and intervene in a public sphere that counters and disrupts mainstream spaces of domestic and international politics. This articulation of transnational politics emerges from a grounded political theory reading of Du Bois's transnational political action alongside his essayistic and fictional writing and editorial work.

My analysis illuminates under-studied currents of world politics, which take place outside and in opposition to domestic and international realms of politics. To analyze these spaces, I put forward notions of transnational identity and solidarity, established among those excluded from mainstream political arenas who find affinities in their experiences. These networks of solidarity constituted a transnational public by creating a common sense of temporality and enacted a public will that contested the imperial consensus that reigned in Western spaces. Ultimately, however, the hope is that my account has the potential to reorient political theory toward the systematic study of transnational political formations and serve as a script for contemporary political imagination.