Cosmopolitanism and Difference

'Cosmopolitanism', a pliable, interdisciplinary and widely debated concept, seems to be everywhere in academic discourse. Ulf Hannerz, in a much cited essay, defines it as 'an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity', which implies a 'willingness to become involved with the Other'.¹ In her new book, Mica Nava makes innovative use of the concept, proposing to consider it as a 'structure of feeling' (emphasis in the original) that varies with place and time. In contrast to Hannerz's focus on the intellectual and aesthetic, Nava seeks to highlight cosmopolitanism's 'vernacular, everyday' expressions in domestic settings, especially in London (p. 3). She is as interested in cosmopolitanism's emotive elements as its cultural resonances. One of her aims is to 'trace its development from an oppositional culture at the beginning of the twentieth century to the cultural mainstream today' (pp. 3–4).

Visceral Cosmopolitanism provocatively explores why certain people are attracted to other people who are perceived and defined as different. In particular, Nava is interested in why English women seem to be more accepting of difference than men and less likely to deploy racial stereotypes. While acknowledging the persistence of racism, Nava wants to understand anti-racism and to explain how some people, especially some women, have resisted and rejected racist attitudes.

The book is wide ranging and innovative in many respects. Nava guides her reader through the twentieth century, pausing to focus upon people or institutions that fostered cosmopolitanism, going against the grain of English traditionalism and xenophobia. Her purview includes Selfridge's department store, whose marketing strategies exploited the allure of difference; the Ballet Russe, whose London performances of Scheherazade generated huge excitement in the years prior to the First World War; women's dance culture between the wars; philo-semitism in parts of the English upper class; Paul Robeson's popularity and the allure of American culture that shaped the reception of Black G.I.s by English women during the Second World War. She looks in some detail at how women in the 1950s and 1960s engaged with the issue of race in the social sciences and included positive representations of black people (especially men) in their fictions and dramas. She offers a brief analysis of the public response to Princess Diana's relationship with Dodi Fayed as an indicator of a late 1990s shift in the national 'structure of feeling' with regard to difference. The book concludes with an autobiographical essay exploring her own involvement in worlds of difference. As this personal story is meant to illustrate, family stories and experiences can generate opposition to xenophobia and racism, and for some provide the impetus to resist the confines of their immediate social environment.

The relationship between commercial culture and cosmopolitanism – as exemplified by Selfridge's incorporation of a cosmopolitan vision into its marketing schemes – is an important focus of the book. Nava suggests that this commercial cosmopolitanism was a significant aspect of a developing broader modernity stimulated by the dynamism of turn-of-the-century migration. Linking 'the woman to cultural difference', Selfridge's cosmopolitanism became part of a revolt against the conventionalism of Victorian and Edwardian culture, along with Diaghilev's production of Scheherazade, the Tango, and Rudolf Valentino's film the Sheik (pp. 37–9). Like these cultural forays into the exotic, Selfridge's commercial ploys are seen by Nava as a kind of liberating and utopian engagement with cultural difference.

However, this favourable account of commercial cosmopolitanism raises a difficult question that haunts Nava's book, and indeed the concept of cosmopolitanism itself. If cultural difference is meant to be appealing to the cosmopolitan imagination, then for this allure to work, difference itself must be maintained. To the degree that cosmopolitanism signifies a positive attitude to the Other, the Other must remain other for cosmopolitanism to persist. This problem is highlighted by Nava...