Domestic cosmopolitanism and structures of feeling: the specificity of London
Abstract
Introduction
A good deal of postcolonial work on migration, national belonging and difference has, for very good historical and political reasons, focused on the complex injuries, provenance and practices of racism and xenophobia. In contrast, this article explores a dialogically related yet more benevolent history of hospitality, sympathy and desire for cultural and racial 'others', which together form a cluster of contextually specific attributes that I am here calling 'domestic cosmopolitanism'. So in part the article will engage with debates on cosmopolitanism. The emotions and imaginaries associated with cosmopolitanism as a structure of feeling have largely been neglected by cultural and social theorists concerned with the topic, who have tended to concentrate on cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity and the maintenance of psychic detachment, or alternatively on human rights discourse (Hannerz, 1990; Urry 1995; see also Vertovec and Cohen 2002 and Skrbis et al., 2004). The specificity of gendered relations to elsewhere and otherness, whether racist or anti-racist, has likewise been paid little attention (Nava 2002, 2007); whilst the idea of a cosmopolitanism rooted in the host country, and played out locally through imaginaries of identification and desire, rather than associated with travel and migration to foreign territories, has barely been explored at all (though see Derrida, 2001).
By expanding these three neglected conceptual zones and drawing on a number of specific historical episodes, this article will make the case, in broad outline, for a viscerally experienced, domestically located and gendered cosmopolitanism in the imagined and geopolitical spaces of contemporary metropolitan England, particularly London. This is intended to expand existing debates, not replace them. A central assertion will be that cosmopolitanism of this kind has a well-established albeit uneven material history which has shifted over the course of the twentieth century from an oppositional culture of modernity to a mainstream aspect of contemporary everyday life and a core element in the identity of London as a (post)modern city, in which national and 'racial' differences have become ordinary.
Cosmopolitanism viewed through this kind of lens must then always be understood as a historically contingent, geopolitically specific formation, as well as one which is to be distinguished conceptually from others with which it overlaps in some respects. These include, for instance, current political economy concerns with global citizenship or patterns of tourism and migration (e.g. Mouffe, 2004). Perhaps more significant politically, and more difficult to unravel conceptually and empirically, is the distinction between 'cosmopolitanism' and twenty-first century urban 'multiculturalism', or co-existence with diversity of all kinds, including religion, in a sometimes diminishing public sphere. In this kind of multiculturalism, unlike cosmopolitanism, the 'other' is held at arm's length and differences often consolidated rather than diffused (Hall, 2002; Hesse, 2002). Finally, it is also important to stress that the kind of cosmopolitanism posited here does not exist to the exclusion of a more traditional British xenophobia. On the contrary, the two moods, or discursive regimes, often co-exist in paradoxical and antagonistic tension with each other.
