Allegories of Migration

I'm interested in re-inserting the idea of friction into some of the social formations we looked at earlier in the course, especially the imagined cosmos with its claims to global or globalizing reaches. How might we read cosmopolitanism as a frictive system? Would we come up with anything other than what Appadurai describes as actually-existing cosmopolitanisms? These two models seem inextricably linked to me—the cosmopolitanism if the transnational migrant and immigrant laborer and the friction of the articulation between their local situation and global methods of mobility. Here it is the fact of movement that must be global; could we read the uprooted refugee as a package, unmoored from locality, allegorized and absorbed into the global sense of motion, and finally reterritorialized as an “allegory of the other”?