Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: the Specificity of London

This chapter draws on a number of specific historical episodes and makes the theoretical case for a viscerally experienced, domestically located and gendered cosmopolitanism in the imagined and geopolitical spaces of contemporary metropolitan England, particularly London. A central assertion is 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.