Cosmopolitan Modernity
Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of
Difference
Mica Nava
M
UCH OF the recent debate about cosmopolitanism has been con-
cerned with questions of cosmopolitan democracy and global
governance or with travel and migration. The historical trajectory
of the cosmopolitan imagination and vernacular expressions in everyday
local life and culture has, on the whole, been neglected. My project here
will be to trace some of the complex historical detail and identify com-
ponents of the contradictory dynamic which have contributed to the emerg-
ence of an uneven yet popular modern cosmopolitan consciousness. This
will indicate how a more cultural studies and feminist approach can shift
the parameters of the theoretical debate, not only about the cosmopolitan
but also about the overlapping terrain of `difference'. I will argue that the
socio-political conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism need to be expanded
in order to consider a wider range of practices, aspirations and identifi-
cations, among them, in particular, those associated with the specificity of
gender. An exploration of these elements and their contribution to the
historical formation of distinctive western cosmopolitan imaginaries enables
us to make better sense of the past and can also enhance our understand-
ing of the contemporary global conjuncture.
The geo-historical focus of my analysis is England, predominantly
metropolitan London, in the first decades of the 20th century. The cultural
mood I explore is associated with modernity. As a historical-conceptual
framework, modernity has been notoriously contested, particularly in
relation to its periodization and boundaries (see O'Shea, 1996, for a review
of the debate). Nevertheless, despite the looseness of the term, some
versions (e.g. Berman, 1983) provide a useful starting point for a study of
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the modern history of a cosmopolitan structure of feeling insofar as they
emphasize the fluidity and excitement of modern urban life, physical
mobility and encounters with strangers, transformations in culture and
public space, and, above all, the advent of a new modern consciousness: a
psychic, social and visceral readiness to engage with the new, with differ-
ence. This was the broad conceptual frame for my earlier work on the
cultures of commerce and the associated expansion of the social, economic
and imaginative horizons of women (Nava, 1996), which in turn alerted me
to the significance of cosmopolitanism as one aspect of modernity. In this
irregular configuration in English culture, transnational identifications and
an interest in abroad and cultural difference ­ the allure of elsewhere and
others ­ increasingly became part of the way of making sense of and embrac-
ing the modern world (Nava, 1998). Cosmopolitan modernity, as I have
called this network of attitudes in order to emphasize its transactions with
the popular urban worlds of commerce, entertainment and cultural produc-
tion, was also a dialogic psychic formation which, I shall argue, developed
in part out of a revolt against the conservatism and narrow national identifi-
cations of the parental culture. In this respect it was both of and against
mainstream Englishness.
Signs of the Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism as an ideal to be aspired to surfaced unexpectedly for
me in the process of trawling the archive of the London department store
Selfridges for evidence of the culture of Empire in the years before the First
World War.1 The store was emblematic in a number of ways and its archive
offers a useful insight into commercial culture of the period. Founded in
1909, Selfridges was considered a `monument to modernity' and was one of
the most frequented tourist venues in London. It was reputed to have
attracted an astonishing one and a quarter million visitors in the week it
opened.2 A combination of theatrical emporium and leisure garden at which
everybody was welcome, it was the brain child of the self-made American
retailing entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge,3 who was not only a commercial
visionary and path-breaking publicist, but also a prolific writer and, less
predictably, a supporter of women's suffrage, a promoter of equal oppor-
tunities for women shop workers, and most significantly in this context, an
ardent cosmopolitan. So instead of uncovering the expected signs of patri-
otism and a reiteration of pride in Britain's imperial role in the world, what
the archive investigation revealed were continuous eulogies in support of
the cosmopolitan, of what Selfridge in his newspaper columns and adver-
tising campaigns identified as a modern, inclusive, progressive world-view
which quite deliberately challenged the traditional outlooks, insularity and
exclusivity that he so disliked ­ and which, as an American magnate and
public figure, he was so often forced to endure in London society of the time.
`The cosmopolite is a citizen of the world', he wrote `free from national limi-
tations and prejudices.'4 His practical support of the cosmopolitan was
expressed not only in the store's publicity ­ he advertised in 26 languages
82 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
and claimed his store was the most cosmopolitan commercial institution in
the world at which all nationalities and races were welcome ­ but also in
the more general culture and merchandise that it promoted.
It is possible to read Selfridge's cosmopolitanism as part of a global-
izing commercial agenda. No doubt financial gains were made as a result.
However, given the phenomenal business and social success of the store,
his attitude should also be registered as an indication of a substantial strand
of contemporary opinion. The appeal to cosmopolitan ideals will therefore
inevitably have found resonance amongst his customers. The market is a
much more sensitive indicator of popular mood in this respect than, for
example, established literary texts, exhibitions, government records and
school teaching materials, all used frequently by historians and cultural and
political theorists. Commercial culture, precisely because of its respon-
siveness to the market, and to the preferences of women customers in
particular, can yield information about processes and preferences not easily
extracted from more conventional archival sources.
Selfridge's cosmopolitanism, moreover, needs to be seen as part of a
wider structure of attitude, part of a more general embrace of the modern
which placed it definitively at odds with more conservative regimes of belief
of the time. Judith Walkowitz, in her recent work, confirms the association
between cultural modernism and a new consciousness of London as an
increasingly cosmopolitan centre during this period.5 A good example of the
dialogic reactive relationship between what was often a nationalist tra-
ditionalism at one pole and a more transnational modernizing impulse at
the other, and which extended across a number of overlapping cultural
spheres, was a public feud between Gordon Selfridge and G.K. Chesterton
which lasted for over 15 years and reached one of its periodic eruptions in
1912. Chesterton was a well-known and prolific writer of journalism and
fiction, a staunch inventor and defender of English patriotism and tradition
(see Chesterton, 1987 [1904]), an opponent of votes for women, a noted anti-
Semite (as a protagonist in the 1912 Marconi scandal) and a critic of cosmo-
politanism (which for him was associated with Jewishness and decadence)
­ yet, despite all this, he also defined himself as a socialist, because he was
militantly opposed to large-scale capitalist organizations and supported the
small tradesman (Ward, 1944). Chesterton much disliked Selfridge's vulgar
American style, giant commercial enterprise and cosmopolitan aspirations,
and on this occasion published in his weekly Daily News column a corus-
cating attack on ­ as he put it ­ `the unending hell' of the large department
store and its mindless women shop workers, whom he described as automa-
tons, `like dress models without heads', who nevertheless, according to him,
managed to emasculate their male colleagues (Chesterton, 1912). It is not
irrelevant to draw attention to Chesterton's anxieties about the increasing
power of women since they alert us to the coexistence of misogyny and xeno-
phobia in this type of psychosocial viewpoint.6 Chesterton's imagery,
expressed at the highpoint of militant suffrage struggle, invokes a psycho-
analytic reading of fetishism and fear of castration while also falling
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 83
squarely within the cultural convention of the period in which menacing
machine-like qualities are projected onto women (Huyssen, 1986).
Although Chesterton's article was not an explicit attack on Selfridge's store,
there is no doubt from the ensuing correspondence that it was widely inter-
preted as such. Selfridge's response was to defend his staff vigorously. Two
hundred of his women employees also wrote to the press protesting at
Chesterton's insulting `diatribe' and defending the progressive inclusive
policies and conditions of their workplace (Women Workers at Selfridges,
1912).
Selfridge's support for the cosmopolitan ­ for a broader world view ­
was also apparent in the store's promotion of the modern and modernist
cultures and products associated with foreign art and popular entertainment
forms. Among the specific commercial developments of this kind was a new
fashion in clothing and domestic décor which emerged in this same period
before the First World War (Nava, 1998). Its relevance in this context is that
it derived from a complex meshing ­ a condensation ­ of two distinct
`foreign' traditions, which blurred both in the public imagination and the
commercial domain to form a generic popular cosmopolitan style. The new
fashion was inspired both by the brilliantly coloured erotic oriental themes
and imagery introduced to London by the avant-garde Russian Ballet in
1911, and the concurrent globally fashionable and more popular styles,
colours and body postures of the tango with evocations of an exoticized
Hispanic America. These styles of heterogeneous `other' origin, which
combined in the context of the department store, represented both a new
kind of interest in abroad and also ­ significantly ­ a new, more sexually
assertive, femininity.
Among the specific narratives alluded to by these fashions was
Schéhérazade, the most successful and iconic of all the Russian Ballet reper-
toire, which, in addition to being visually and choreographically innovative
and spectacular, was based on the controversial opening chapter of the
Arabian Nights. This is the story of the Shah's wives, who, while the Shah
and his courtiers are away on a hunting trip, order some of the male African
slaves of the household to be smuggled into their compound disguised as
dancing girls in order to seduce them. Rife with sexual anomalies, the ballet
depicts the seduction ­ the day-long sexual `clipping, coupling and carous-
ing' as Richard Burton, the notorious 19th-century translator of the book,
put it ­ and the massacre which occurs when the Shah and his hunters
return unexpectedly. The slaves in this contradictory narrative are not only
dressed as women; in the performances of this period they were also
blacked-up. Leon Bakst's original designs codified the Persian women as
white and their lovers as black.7
The tango was similarly controversial. Established as a flourishing
cultural industry in pre-First World War Europe and America, with tango
teas, tango exhibitions and tango academies as well as tango fashions ­ all
promoted in the commercial sector ­ the dance was frequently taught by
young male teachers from South America, the Caribbean and southern
84 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
Europe known as tangueros, (whence `Latin lovers'). Rudolf Valentino was
one of these before he became a movie star and danced the celebrated tango
scene in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. So, like Schéhérazade, the tango
offered a model of a more wayward femininity and likewise eroticized the
`other' male. The hybrid commercial style deriving from these two cultural
forms, and repeated in the massively popular post-war genre of desert
romance novels and films, like The Sheik (in which Valentino starred)
evoked a narrative of otherness, a kind of `elsewhere' of the imagination,
which had a particularly libidinous investment for women and an appeal
which appears to have transcended class barriers. Widely adopted, the new
styles transformed the visual landscape of London. Shop windows across the
city ­ not only Selfridges ­ blossomed in crimson, purple, jade and orange.
More importantly, however, these foreign fashions transformed the intimate
spheres of the body and penetrated the home. They were incorporated into
the culture, they signalled fusion and identification.
Thus, although close in some respects to the regime of representations
and attitudes identified as orientalism (Said, 1978) (and elaborated in a
range of texts since then), the cosmopolitanism I describe must be distin-
guished from it, both because of the levels of intimacy and merger it
involved and because of the way in which women were positioned. Unlike
the exoticizing narratives identified by critics of orientalism ­ in which
`other' women are cast as objects of sexual desire and the oriental landscape
is represented rhetorically as erotic female ­ in the cosmopolitanism of the
commercial and entertainment spheres, women appropriate the narratives
of difference for themselves in contrary and even polemical ways.
Among the women affected in this way were Violet Keppel and Vita
Sackville-West, whose love affair at the time caused much scandal.8 Violet
redecorated her rooms to look like the set of Schéhérazade, and, after seeing
the ballet twice in one week, Vita browned her face, put on men's clothes
and a turban, and, with lighted cigarette in hand, walked with Violet down
Piccadilly to Charing Cross from where they took a train to Orpington
(Souhami, 1997). They were not alone in connecting fantasies of cultural
difference to a new eroticism for women. Ellen Melville, the young idealis-
tic Scottish feminist heroine of Rebecca West's novel The Judge (first pub-
lished in 1922), believed, during those years, `in absolute racial equality
and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as a propagandist measure' (West,
1980 [1922]: 30).9 These statements must also be seen in the political
context of the moment. The four years before the First World War saw the
highpoint of early 20th-century feminist militancy in which the cultural
aspirations of women from across the social spectrum underwent a change
of seismic proportions.
This connection between a modern outlook, support for women's
political and social freedoms and the idea of an abroad invested with a
sexual allure, which represented at the same time a revolt against the per-
ceived emotional constraints and social prejudices of conservative main-
stream English culture, was an element in much of the literary work of this
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 85
period and flourished particularly in the interwar period. Biographical
accounts of the 1920s and 1930s throw up numerous voices that echo the
sentiments of Ellen Melville, often in a less frivolous way. Among them was
Nancy Cunard, English poet, communist activist and passionately commit-
ted editor of the path-breaking 800-page anthology, Negro (1934) whose
long-term partner was African American Henry Crowder. In a pamphlet
entitled Black Man and White Ladyship (1968, first published in 1931), in
which she launched a personal attack on her aristocratic mother for her
racism and snobbery in attempting to exclude Crowder from England,
Cunard argues that the black man should be valued for his difference, for
his greater humanity and feeling, his musical genius, his artistic creativity
and `the best body amongst all the races' (1968 [1931]: 108).10 These
qualities are posed against the dreariness, decadence and social obtuseness
of the white man, and the morally corrupt privileged and inauthentic world
of her mother. A sense of the difference and humanity of foreign masculin-
ities lies also at the heart of the literary output of E.M. Forster. Represen-
tations of the non-Englishman (for instance the Italian and the Indian) as
more sensate, authentic and ultimately desirable, recur throughout his fiction
and his essays.11 In an enigmatic yet prescient few sentences at the end of
Howards End, Forster, in 1910, comments on the link between imperialism
and cosmopolitanism, on the way apparently polarized social forces influ-
ence each other. He wrote: `The Imperialist is not what he thinks. He is a
destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism' (1979 [1910]: 315).
Theorizing Cosmopolitanism
Controversies of this kind point to the existence of a distinctive albeit
neglected and uneven cosmopolitan strand of political and cultural belief
which existed in English society during the first decades of the 20th century,
and extended across the spheres of commerce, popular entertainment, the
arts and the emotions. In this structure of feeling, cultural difference and
the foreign constituted a source of interest, pleasure and counter-identifi-
cation that existed in tension with more conservative outlooks. Yet this way
of thinking about cosmopolitanism has not figured in existing historical
accounts of the period. Nor has it been taken on board in this way in the
broad theoretical fields of postcolonial criticism, political philosophy or
sociology, as I shall now argue.
Cultural historical work on England and Englishness of the last
decades has been influenced by anti-racist and postcolonial perspectives
and, for good political and intellectual reasons, has been concerned to
reveal Britain's history of colonialism and empire abroad, and the associ-
ated legacy of nationalism and xenophobia at home. Research on the first
half of the century has tended to focus on `the invention of English tradition';
on England's cultural insularity and sense of global superiority; on the per-
vasiveness of racialized thinking; and on the particularities of England's
conservative modernity (see e.g. Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Schwarz,
1987; Light, 1991; Young, 1995). Although Schwarz draws attention to the
86 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
paradoxes inherent within the new `traditions' and Light's work makes
central the contribution of women, these are exceptions. On the whole,
historians have not been particularly concerned to explore the cultural
opposition or disjunctures in England's imperial formations. An overlapping
approach, broadly influenced by the work of Said on orientalism and cultural
imperialism (Said, 1978, 1994; Torgovnick, 1990) has been to explore, criti-
cally, the discursive representations of elsewhere, the orient and the `primi-
tive' as an aspect of the continuing dominance of the metaphorical east and
`other' places by the west. Although immensely influential, the concept of
orientalism has been subjected to criticism (see e.g. Young, 1990; Lowe,
1991) and is, in my view also, despite its evocativeness and apparent
aptness, too monochromatic and monolithic to be able to take into account
the contradictions in the historical popular mood described here (Nava,
1998). It tends to overlook the distinction between the colonizing and exoti-
cizing imagination (Gilman, 1985). It also neglects the difference between
the panoptic controlling gaze of, for instance, government and museums,
and what Anne Friedberg has productively called the `mobile' gaze of
flânerie, spectatorship and consumption, which operates across the spheres
of commerce and cinema and is most often exercised by women. Although
both the panoptic and the mobile gaze are part of the scopic regimes of mod-
ernity, Friedberg argues that these visual practices are antithetical in power
terms (1993). As a result of the dominant critical emphasis on international
networks of power and exclusion, and the political imperative to uncover
the injuries caused by differentiation, little attention has been paid either
to the historical detail of the dissonant ­ albeit contradictory ­ patterns of
resistance and desire (despite Bhabha, 1994) or to the particularity of the
historical contexts from which these oppositional currents emerge. The
cosmopolitan countercultures of modernity have been largely ignored.12
Political philosophers have been more interested in cosmopolitanism
than cultural historians and a lively debate has been taking place over the
last decade or so, in the context of the globalization process, which has taken
as its starting point Kant's notion of a universal polis and has focused on
the possibilities and problems associated with cosmopolitan structures of
governance, issues of transnational citizenship and the environment (e.g.
Held, 1995; Archibugi, 1998). These conceptual and policy questions have
resurfaced over the latter part of the 20th century as the socio-political and
philosophical limitations of the nation state and nationalism have become
increasingly apparent. A good deal of the debate has been concerned to
establish the way visions of cosmopolitan democracy are likely to perpetu-
ate ideas of western liberal humanism or universalism, thereby denying or
overriding the complex structures of local heritage and what are perceived
as the more progressive values of nationhood (Anderson, 1983; Bhabha,
1996; Nussbaum, 1996; Robbins, 1998). Critical views of cosmopolitanism
within this disciplinary framework echo some of the ethical-political
positions taken up by cultural historians in that they too aim to redress the
balance of `West' and `other'. However, in relation to the popular
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 87
cosmopolitan aspirations and identifications among sectors of the English
population during the first part of the 20th century, they offer little. Their
principal contribution to this issue lies in the allusions to the symbolic
meaning of the nation, the local and global, and therefore, by implication
only, to the symbolic attraction of `elsewhere'.
Then there is the notion of the cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world.
This preoccupation, which straddles the domains of political philosophy,
sociology and cultural studies, has opened up more fruitful avenues in
relation to popular, personal and cultural levels. A good deal of the debate
here has been influenced by the work of Ulf Hannerz, who has described
cosmopolitanism as `an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness
towards divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts' (1990: 239).
The cosmopolitan in this framework (who by the way for Hannerz seems
always to be a `he') has reflexive cultural competencies appropriate to the
contemporary world which enable him to manoeuvre within new meaning
systems, while at the same time, however, remaining culturally and emotion-
ally detached. Hannerz thus makes clear who is included in the category of
cosmopolitan and who is not. Ordinary people ­ migrant workers, exiles
from oppression and tourists for instance ­ do not necessarily possess the
intellectual disposition (Robbins, 1998; Tomlinson, 1999). John Urry, in his
Consuming Places (1995), has drawn on the model developed by Hannerz
to elaborate the idea of an aesthetic cosmopolitanism possessed by some
contemporary travellers (who again we must assume are western though
this is not discussed). He refers to the cognitive and semiotic skills, the
linguistic and cultural openness and the willingness to take risks required
in order to traverse and consume international landscapes and cultures.
Although, like Hannerz, Urry can be accused of reinforcing a Eurocentric
narrative of cosmopolitan privilege, the emphasis on the everyday, on a
cultural disposition of openness and the visual, is useful. Nevertheless this
model is ultimately too narrow for my purposes. Its concentration on the
reflexive and the aesthetic ignores the unconscious non-intellectual dialogic
relationship of the cosmopolitan to both the parental culture and abroad. It
overlooks the dynamic interconnection between identification and distanti-
ation ­ between desire and repudiation ­ which are complexly at play in
the production of the cosmopolitan imagination as I perceive it, particularly
during the period I've been looking at. It also fails to address issues raised
by gender difference.
Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, in the context of a different debate,
increasingly refer to the cosmopolitan nature of late modern diasporic
cultures (e.g. Bhabha, 1996; Hall, 2001). In contrast to Hannerz, who sees
cultures as easily differentiated entities through which the cosmopolitan
negotiates a path, Hall and Bhabha use the concept to signal the blurred
undifferentiated elements of contemporary British and global culture, the
post-`multicultural' transformations which are contingent, temporary and
hybrid, which suggest cultural mixing and indeterminacy rather than plu-
rality and coexistence. Cosmopolitans in this model are migrants and
88 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
travellers from all over the world. (Paul Gilroy [2000] uses the designation
to describe African American travellers in Europe between the wars, partly
to make the deliberate link to Jews, as indeed they did themselves.) Within
this broad theoretical framework, the richly textured notion of `vernacular
cosmopolitanism' is used to refer to the phenomenon of the global modern
everyday, the routine barely documented cultural encounters of diasporic
life. On the whole however, these authors have not spent much time ex-
cavating the origins of this vernacular cosmopolitan landscape and struc-
ture of feeling. Also, for good reason, they have not been concerned, on the
whole, with the vernacular cosmopolitanism of the (white) English. Indeed,
one of Stuart Hall's major contributions has been to elaborate the pervasive
often coded ways in which racism works throughout the culture at the level
of representation and fantasy (Hall, 1997). Hall, like Bhabha (1986, 1994),
stresses the ambivalence in racialized regimes of representation and the
frequent coexistence of fascination and repudiation in relation to the `other'.
This general approach is clearly pertinent for an understanding of the
cosmopolitan mood I have described insofar as it illuminates the complex
ways in which subterranean forces are at work in perceptions and emotions
about difference. Yet the emphasis on the production of racism, however
politically imperative, has led inevitably to the marginalization of the
complex and changing nature of everyday cosmopolitanism and the socio-
emotional aspects of anti-racism.
In fact none of the approaches I have referred to have been concerned
to trace a history of popular English cosmopolitanism and transnational
identifications over the course of the 20th century, or to explore the way in
which certain key other places and peoples have at different moments and
in different ways come to represent an `elsewhere' of the imagination associ-
ated with pleasure, freedom and hope. The theoretical literature I've referred
to is mainly schematic and paradigmatic. It is designed to open up debate
and clarify issues but not to substantiate them with the fine detail, the often
contradictory utopian and hedonistic particularities of visual and textual
representations, of memory and fantasy, of origin and context. This lack of
attention to specific experiences and narratives of cosmopolitanism has
meant that certain qualities and shifts have been overlooked, among them,
the location of women; historical variations in the calibration of difference;
and the structure of the allure of difference. Interest in difference needs to
be understood, as I have signalled already through the examples that I have
presented, not only in relation to its historical context, but also as part of a
more subtle emotional and unconscious register. So one element of my
argument is that irrationality ­ the non-rational and affective aspect of our
selves ­ is as important in establishing the dynamic of cosmopolitanism as
Hannerz's (1990) reflexive and intellectual stance of openness.
Cosmopolitan aspirations can be rooted not only in a political and
intellectual critique of nationalism but also in a sense of psychosocial dis-
location and non-belonging. Gordon Selfridge, as already mentioned, was
continuously marginalized by English elite society and, indeed, was refused
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 89
British nationality for 30 years despite his wealth and innovative contri-
bution to British retailing (Honeycombe, 1984). Virginia Woolf speaks from
another place, yet with a similar sensitivity to exclusion, when in her Three
Guineas she identifies with the outsider: `As a woman I have no country. As
a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world'
(2000 [1938]: 234). So what is also being posed here, in addition to not-
belonging, is an imagined inclusivity which transcends the immediate
symbolic family or nation. More recently, Stan Cohen (2001) has drawn
attention to this larger appreciation of a common humanity in his specu-
lations about why some individuals in Europe did help Jews escape from
Nazis despite the extraordinary risk to themselves. Likewise, in the face of
increasing anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (and a fair amount in
Britain), a number of 1930s intellectuals and left-wingers felt, as Labour
MP Richard Crossman did, `"pro-Jew emotionally", as part of [their] anti-
fascism' (Kushner, 1989: 185) and of these, quite a few married Jewish
refugees from Europe. Another example of this mood occurred later during
the Second World War, when many thousands of white English women
formed romantic relationships with black GIs, despite opposition from the
USA army command and physical threats from white soldiers. It is clear
from contemporary accounts that, for many of these women, a wider sense
of inclusivity, both reflexive and emotional, was in part what impelled them
and enabled them to confront the segregationist policies and practices of
the US army, as well as quite widespread prejudice in England (though this
was a good deal less than is often assumed) (Gardiner, 1992; Smith, 1987;
Schwarz, 1996; Nava, 1999a).
Generational revolt and a social and political refusal to accept the con-
ventions of the moment also played a part in the counterculture of cosmo-
politanism during the period under examination. The idea of `abroad' was
indicative in this respect and had a powerful resonance (Fussell, 1980) (as
indeed it continues to have today). Whether associated with Europe, India,
Africa or America, it stood for a variable and mobile cluster of elements
experienced as absent from the national culture: key among them sensual-
ity, authenticity and opportunity. `Home' in this imaginary landscape tended
to be prosaic, class-bound, emotionally and sexually constraining. W.H.
Auden, on his departure for Berlin as a young man in 1928, expressed it
thus: `the real life wish is desire for separation from the family . . . [from]
the immense bat shadow of one's home . . . from all opinions and personal
ties: from pity and shame'.13 Virginia Woolf, according to her biographer
Hermione Lee, married Leonard partly because of his `problematic Jewish-
ness'. `This would have been the opposite of the sort of . . . marriage which
. . . her parents could have countenanced' (Lee, 1996: 308). So cosmo-
politanism was also rooted in a psychic revolt against the parents and the
parental culture ­ not only, therefore, in a sense of not-belonging, of no-
home, no-country, but also in a desire to escape from family, home and
country. Migrants and travellers have always moved from one place to
another both because of the allure of somewhere else and because of the
90 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
insufficiencies and difficulties of their own cultures. So, in this respect as
before, what is at issue is an impulse, an imperative, which lies partially
beyond consciousness, and which, in its opposition to xenophobia and its
desire for difference, may well be as profoundly and complexly fabricated
as racism itself.
But what is interesting is that psychoanalysis, despite its concern with
desire and the unconscious, has had relatively little to say about the attrac-
tion of sociocultural and racial difference or the complex process of identifi-
cation with otherness and the socially ostracized. Its main practice in
relation to race and difference has been to focus on racism and aggression.
Thus Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, originally published in
1930, uses the phrase the `narcissism of minor differences' to describe the
enduring hostility between ethnic and racial neighbours, predominantly
men (1963 [1930]). More recent explanations tend to see racism as pathology
rather than part of the natural order of things, as Freud implied. Although
rooted in diverse approaches, these accounts are broadly united by the idea
that `others' are constructed unconsciously as `bad objects' on whom whites
or indigenous groups project negative shameful feelings about themselves
(e.g. Gilman, 1985; Fanon, 1986 [1952]; Rustin, 1991). Few psychoanalytic
accounts explore the unconscious dynamic involved in the attraction of
difference. Clinically based studies which do touch on the matter can be
broadly divided into those which see interest in others as symptomatic of
unconscious conflict and those for whom such feelings are a sign of psychic
health, fundamental to the constitution of the self. One argument is that
sexual desire for difference ­ the construction of an ideal love object who
is different and from somewhere else ­ arises in part from a prior anxiety
about desire for the parent; it is the outcome therefore of the repression and
displacement of incestuous desire. Conversely, a fascination with the new
and different and a willingness to take risks are interpreted as part of growth
and individuation. This seems to be the view of psychoanalyst Adam
Phillips, who refers in one of his essays to the dull security of sameness:
`absolute sameness' he says `unconsciously kills desire' (2000: 340).
Julia Kristeva uses psychoanalysis to address the socio-historical
questions of nationalism and seems to concur with Phillips about the dull
security of sameness. In her reading of nationalism, the `nation' is rendered
as a transitional object, as something to hang on to in the precarious process
of separation from the mother(land). Attachment to the safety of the local,
the known, is interpreted as a narcissistic impediment to mature transition.
For Kristeva, the cosmopolitan imaginary of the late 20th century and `living
with foreigners' can lead to the recognition that we are all strangers, that
the `other' is within ourselves. In a heterogeneous `paradoxical community'
only strangeness is universal (Kristeva, 1993; Honig, 1998; Davey, 1999).
Jean Walton (1997) is among the few theorists who have addressed the
question of racial difference and desire from a specifically gendered point
of view. As part of a critical evaluation of classic psychoanalytic texts,
Walton offers an innovative re-reading of the famous Joan Riviere essay on
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 91
womanliness as masquerade (written in 1929), in which Riviere's intellec-
tual female patient, who assumes a mask of femininity and compulsively
seeks the attention of men in order to avoid retribution, recounts childhood
fantasies and dreams about a negro (Riviere, 1986 [1929]). Using a broadly
Lacanian approach, Walton provides an insight into this neglected racial
sub-theme in Riviere's essay which seems particularly pertinent for my dis-
cussion of cosmopolitanism. She suggests that:
By shifting the emphasis from penis to phallus, we may be able to see how
Riviere has possibly misread her patient's imagined attacker as a father
figure; it may be more pertinent to see him as occupying a position similar
to that of the woman, insofar as he, too, might have reason to engage in mas-
querade to ward off retaliation by those who fear he has usurped their position
of privilege . . . [his] relation to the phallus, as signifier of white male privi-
lege in a racialised patriarchal society, is as tenuous as her own. (Walton,
1997: 228­9)
Thus what Walton does is to offer a psychoanalytical reading rooted in a
specific cultural history which enables us to distinguish white (or racially
privileged) women's relationship to racial others from that of white men.
White women, in this reading, particularly those who aspire to transgress
the boundaries imposed by the conventions of cultural femininity, identify
with black men, because, like themselves, black men are contingently
denied power.
This reading adds to the sociological and historical observations made
earlier about the particularity of gender difference in relation to cosmo-
politanism. It suggests that the impulse towards cosmopolitanism is related
to women's psychic as well as social formation. Kristeva seems to hint at
something similar when she says that women are more likely to be
`boundary-subjects' than men, and therefore inclined to be either more
nationalist or more `world-oriented' (1993: 35), a view which echoes and
complements Freud's thesis about men's greater predisposition to conflict
with national and racial others.
The more psychoanalytically oriented explanations notwithstanding, a
number of specific social and political conditions and features of early 20th-
century femininity seem to have made women more inclined than men to
be cosmopolitan in the cultural sense I have described. The earlier
comments on Selfridges and the commercial and entertainment sector draw
attention to the ways in which women contributed to the development of a
popular cosmopolitan consciousness through their participation in
consumer culture. In their capacity as shoppers, readers, theatre- and
cinema-goers, they became instigators and mediators of narratives about the
allure of difference and elsewhere. `Other' fashions and cultural products
bought by them increasingly transformed the female body, penetrated the
intimacy of the home, seeped into the imagination. They pervaded urban
culture.14 These developments must be understood in the context of a
heightened consciousness of women's political and social exclusion. The
92 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
suffrage movement and the idea of the new woman were dominant tropes
throughout the period and were associated not only with a greater aware-
ness among women of their own marginalization but also (linking back to
Walton's point) with a more sensitized identification with others, and indeed
with internationalism. Such identification with the socially excluded has a
long, albeit contradictory, history. Women over the course of the 19th and
20th centuries were frequently active in the development of a more inclusive
culture,15 and the ambivalent relationship of some to patriotism, as evi-
denced in Virginia Woolf's statement, was often expressed during the
interwar period in staunch support for international pacifism (Montefiore,
1999). Women's cosmopolitan imagination was also fuelled in part in
reaction to English masculinity, particularly that of the middle and upper
classes, which was constructed in literary and biographical accounts of the
time, by men as well as women, as unemotional, uncommunicative and
sometimes sexually inept.16 And of course, the fact that there were simply
fewer men to go round because of the demographic decimation of the First
World War, provided added impetus to the tendency. It was in this context
that women's fantasies of Arab and Latin lovers flourished, as demonstrated
by hugely successful films like The Sheik and the associated genre of
popular desert romance fiction oriented towards women during the 1920s
(Melman, 1988; Nava, 1998).
The particularity of the gendered pattern of geo-historical migration
to Britain during the 20th century will also have meant that women were
more likely to form the first intimate social relations with people from else-
where, with travellers, sailors, entertainers and migrants, who were all
predominantly men. This occurred both in the case of the black GIs during
the Second World War (Nava, 1999a) and subsequently after the war with
the first wave of immigrants from the Commonwealth. A number of people,
among them the West Indian author Ras Makonnen, have suggested that the
half-conscious processes of identification and the juggling of social and
sexual power in the encounters between white women and black men during
the 1950s, the critical years of post-war settlement, constituted for women
a kind of proto-feminism, while operating at the same time as a challenge
by black men to racist forms of exclusion. As Makonnen put it, `We recog-
nised that the dedication of some of the [white] girls to our cause was an
expression of equal rights for women. One way of rejecting the oppression
of men was to associate with blacks' (quoted in Gilroy, 1987: 163; see also
Selvon, 1979). White women's cosmopolitanism and their more generous
relationship to the culturally repudiated `other' during the earlier decades
of the century can similarly be understood as a form of proto-feminism.
Then, as in the 1950s, these acts constituted a revolt against the constraints
of the dominant culture: against the past, against the conventions of
femininity and family as well as Englishness and neighbourhood. Cosmo-
politanism and feminism occupy a similar space in the discursive regime
of the modern.
Ras Makonnen's voice suggests a more open, less pessimistic,
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 93
understanding of the complexity and delicacy of black man­white woman
relationships than that expressed by Fanon about an analogous moment
(Fanon, 1986 [1952]). It suggests (to go back again to Walton's point about
the similarity of white women and black men vis--vis the phallus) that, what
might be seen as the apparent feminization of the `black' or `other' man in
the exchange with the white woman, should be understood as an outcome
of the overlapping discourses of white and male superiority in which they
are similarly located.17 This degree of ambivalence, this tenuous mascu-
linity, is not something that Fanon could entertain. As Bhabha points out,
`Fanon ignores the question of gender difference' (Bhabha, 1986: xxvi).
Makonnen, in contradistinction, was able to identify and speak of a poten-
tial alliance ­ a mutual recognition ­ which, over the following decades,
was indeed to emerge, particularly in urban Britain. The destabilization of
patterns of national and racial difference, already under way at the begin-
ning of the century, was consolidated, albeit unevenly, in the post-Second
World War period of decolonization and was linked in complex ways to the
synchronic destabilization of gender identifications.18
The outcome of this destabilization was the increasing normalization
of difference, part of the spread of what Ulrich Beck (2002) has called the
`dialogic imagination'. This marks a major shift from the first part of the
20th century. The cosmopolitanism of modernity, as I have described it here,
was not about the erosion or disavowal of difference. On the contrary:
because it was formed in part as a counterpoint to the perceived conserva-
tism of the dominant culture, in the crucible of imperial Britain, differenti-
ation ­ the distinctions between the centre and the margins, between
belonging and not-belonging, between Englishness and foreignness ­ was a
core dynamic. Cosmopolitanism at that time was a flirtation with difference,
with the outside, the elsewhere, the other. But, to paraphrase Kristeva,
strangeness is universal now. Boundaries have been blurred. Miscegenation
is ordinary.19 Mongrelization is part of the new visual landscape of the cities.
Although rooted in the cosmopolitanism that I have described ­ in earlier
cultural imaginaries ­ difference in this new century is no longer very
different.20 In the large conglomerations it is part of mainstream English
metropolitan culture: familiar, there on a daily basis, on the high street, on
our menus, on the television, in the playground and the bedroom; a rou-
tinized part of cultural practice and social interaction: good and bad. This
reconfigured permeable sense of national cultural identity and the ordinar-
iness and domestication of difference are the distinguishing marks of
vernacular cosmopolitanism in urban Britain today.21
Notes
Thanks to Jackie Botterill, Erica Carter, Angela McRobbie, Frank Mort, Orson Nava
and Ash Sharma for helpful comments.
1. The Selfridge Archive, at the time housed in the basement of the store and now
moved to the History of Advertising Trust in Norfolk, contained a substantial collec-
tion of uncatalogued sources which included store souvenir books and advertising
94 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1­2)
campaigns; copies of a daily 500-word syndicated column about issues of cultural
interest inside and outside the store, often written by Gordon Selfridge himself,
published between 1909 and 1939 in the London and national press and the New
York Herald Tribune; and Selfridge's own 420-page book entitled The Romance of
Commerce (1918), in which he spelled out his philosophy about retailing and life
more generally.
2. This figure should be compared with the maximum figure of 30,000 achieved by
the fated London Dome on a bank holiday weekend.
3. His is a rags-to-riches story. He left school at 10 and worked his way from stock
boy to junior partner of Marshall Fields in Chicago, the largest and most magnifi-
cent department store in the world (Pound, 1960; Honeycombe, 1984).
4. For further examples see Nava (1998).
5. Lecture given on `Erotic Dancing in Central London 1911­1919' at the Insti-
tute of Historical Research, London, 22 June 2001.
6. Only months later he was to be a major instigator of the Marconi scandal, often
compared with the Dreyfus case in terms of its anti-Semitism and wider political
importance.
7. This is developed in much greater detail in Nava (1998).
8. Both were writers. Violet was daughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII.
Vita, wife of Harold Nicolson, was a few years later to be the lover of Virginia Woolf
and designer of the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst.
9. West herself seems to have been more ambivalent than her heroine Ellen. Her
unfinished Cousin Rosamund, written at the end of her life, includes a disconcert-
ingly racist representation of Rosamund's Middle Eastern husband.
10. Although essentialist in today's terms, this view was also held by some African
American intellectuals of the period; see for instance Alain Locke, editor of The
New Negro (1968 [1925]), and Paul Robeson, celebrated actor, singer and political
activist (Dyer, 1986; Duberman, 1989). See Davey (1999) for further discussion of
Cunard.
11. E.g. in A Passage to India (1924) and Where Angels Fear to Tread (1966
[1905]).
12. Raymond Williams (1989) draws attention to the link between early 20th-
century European migrants and modernist art, literature and political practice. See
also the valuable and less widely known contribution of Davey (1999).
13. From Auden's journal quoted in Porter (1998).
14. Walkowitz claims that 90 percent of the audience for Maude Allan's erotic
oriental `Vision of Salome' performances at the Palace Theatre in the years before
the war were women (Institute of Historical Research lecture, June 2001).
15. For instance the anti-slavery and philanthropic movements.
16. In addition to E.M. Forster see, for example, D.H. Lawrence, Elisabeth Bowen.
See also Lesley Hall on sexual anxieties of the time (1991).
17. Phyllis Lassner (1998) has suggested that 1920s fictional accounts tended to
feminize the Jewish man.
18. The distinctive pattern and distribution of power in the relationship between
white men and `other' women are not addressed in this article, except implicitly.
For discussion of this see the postcolonial literature on empire and race, for example
Stoler (1996).
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 95
19. For instance 50 percent of British-born men of Afro-Caribbean descent now
have white partners (Modood et al., 1997). This is in marked contrast to the USA
where the estimated figure of comparable black­white relationships is 2 percent.
The proportions of British-born women of Afro-Caribbean descent and men and
women from the different Asian communities with partners of white Anglo descent
are not as high but are growing rapidly.
20. This is not to deny the continuation of xenophobia and conflict, but these views
are no longer as dominant. However, the climate since 11 September 2001 has
changed significantly. This article was written before the event. For further dis-
cussion of the normalization of mixed relationships, see Nava (1999b).
21. In order to underline the historical and geographical specificity of these moods
it is worth pointing out that music videos and many TV commercials made for UK
audiences encourage the presentation of mixed race couples whereas in the USA
this is still taboo.
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Mica Nava is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East
London. She is author of Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Con-
sumerism, and co-editor of Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of
English Modernity and Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Con-
sumption. Articles on her research on the cultures of cosmopolitanism are
listed above. She can be contacted at m.nava@uel.ac.uk.
Nava ­ Cosmopolitan Modernity 99