Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference

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Cultural theorist Mica Nava makes an original and significant contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism by exploring everyday English urban cosmopolitanism and foregrounding the gendered, imaginative and empathetic aspects of positive engagement with cultural and racial difference. By looking at a wide range of texts, events and biographical narratives, she traces cosmopolitanism from its marginal status at the beginning of the 20th century to its relative normalisation today. Case studies include the promotion of cosmopolitanism by Selfridges before the first world war; relationships between white English women and 'other' men Jews and black GIs during the 1930s and 1940s; literary, cinematic and social science representations of migrants in postcolonial Britain; and Diana and Dodi's interracial romance in the 1990s. In the final chapter, the author draws on her own complex family history to illustrate the contemporary cosmopolitan London experience. Scholars have tended to ignore the oppositional cultures of antiracism and social inclusivity. This ground-breaking study redresses this imbalance and offers a sophisticated account of the uneven history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Reviews

'Visceral Cosmopolitanism is highly recommended for students, providing historical specificity, insight and argument. This significant and ethical study offers the reader a real sense of hope in a field notorious for its tricky questions.' Times Higher Education 'Mica Nava's explorations, sustained over many years, of neglected yet mundane features of relations and attitudes regarding the 'other' in Britain, is an important contribution to the analyses which challenge the reduction of the race question to a simple black and white issue. Her focus on the visceral and the vernacular in cosmopolitanism is a timely corrective to the abstract generalisations which today feed a resurgence of the demonisation of the other as part of geopolitical strategies for the securitisation of society.' Couze Venn, Nottingham Trent Univerity 'In this readable and provocative book, Mica Nava traces a persistent expression of domestic cosmopolitanism in London throughout the twentieth century. Visceral Cosmopolitanism significantly revises our assumptions about the 'insular' long weekend of the interwar period and deepens our understanding of the New Britain of the millennium.' Judith R. Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University 'Mica Nava's groundbreaking book expands the theoretical debate about cosmopolitanism. In a clear narrative which combines historical, cultural and contemporary political analysis with biography and autobiography, she makes the case for cosmopolitanism as transforming, rather than negating, everyday racialised boundaries.' Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London

Author Bio

Mica Nava is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London, UK. She is a cultural historian of British modernity and everyday race difference.